This column is prompted by a recent Pew Research survey that explored aging from the perspective of those 65 and older. This, of course, is of particular interest to Monitor readers who fit in this age group. I was most intrigued by Pew’s finding that while Americans want to live long lives, they don’t want to live too long: three out of four Americans hope to reach their 80th birthday, but less than a third want to live to 100.
I guess by reaching 80, I have hit the jackpot. But it hasn’t been a walk in the park over the last ten years, wrestling with four different cancers, necessitating intensive interventions — surgery, chemotherapy, and two types of radiation — that led to pain and suffering during arduous recoveries that take a toll on body and mind.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m thrilled to be still standing and eternally indebted to the expertise of my doctors. Nevertheless, I dread future pain and suffering that will undoubtedly accompany future maladies that are bound to come. That is, unless, by chance, I die peacefully in my sleep.
I’ve related all this personal stuff, not to complain or be a martyr, but to use myself as a graphic example showing why only three in 10 of us want to live to 100. However, I don’t want you to think I am morose or pessimistic: I’m not.
At the same time, I admit that growing old is indeed a scary time as I become more frail, achy and forgetful, all reminders that death is advancing down the tracks toward me. Why then do I relish getting up each morning?
I couldn’t have given you a straight answer until this week, when I read a passage by the poet Margaret Gibson that stopped me in my tracks: For the first time, I realized that the wellspring of my Octogenarian enthusiasm is my deepening spirituality. For whatever reason, all the disparate pieces of my life came together after reading that passage.
She made me realize for the first time that what I did as a psychotherapist was, first and foremost, to prevent my patients from giving up hope. And it continues on today in why I write: to instill hope in my readers, urging them not to give up, to remind them that multiple possibilities always exist and to tell them we are all in this together.
Not only is my spirituality the foundation of my awakening, but I also believe it holds the key to awakening America. One might wonder why that is, since it’s well established that most Americans already believe that a spiritual life is important.
Answering that question reveals what keeps me writing: my desire to oppose the powerful societal forces that suppress the compassion, caring and religious yearnings we are born with. I’m in agreement with bell hooks that the crisis in America is not a lack of interest in spirituality, but that “this interest is constantly co-opted by the powerful forces of materialism and hedonistic consumerism.”
But that is a story for another time. Without further ado, here’s that passage by Margaret Gibson that I’ve been alluding to that captures so well my feelings and desires at 80:
“Faced with so much that is impossible to understand, standing right at the edge of the mortality of everything that we know and are and may come to be, what else can we do but create, make something, make it with love and clarity. Make it out of desperation that turns into tenderness. Make it out of the deepest part of ourselves present everywhere and nowhere.“
I hope you find it, at least to some degree, as inspiring as I do.
Jean Stimmell, retired stone mason and psychotherapist, lives in Northwood and blogs at jstim.substack.com.