The Elders Introduce Themselves
Margaret: “Now I understand why I did certain things, I can accept more.” Reflecting on your life may uncover memories that can reframe your past and help you create a new community for yourself.
Ruth: “Keep on doing what you love to do.”
Redefine your priorities to remain acknowledged and active in your work community.
Robert: “The one big tragedy of my childhood … the tragedy of my life … was being dyslexic.”
To accept the stereotypes defining self-worth, success, and aging is a recipe for lifelong unhappiness.
Mae: “We are made up of the times we are born into.”
Keep old friends and make new ones, no matter your age – human relationships are the nuts and bolts of everyday life.
Mort: “Are you learning something?”
Lifelong learning gives meaning to your past and present and helps you deal with loss and make new connections.
Leo: “With every loss there is a gain, and contrariwise.”
The act of creating may ease the effects of poverty, disability, isolation, and loneliness, help you forge a new community for yourself, and renew your sense of self-worth.
Charles: “Why should there be thoughts? Remembering depends on a moment’s full attention.”
You cannot talk yourself out of sensory experience and memory.
Emma: “Plan ahead – then change won’t come as a shock.”
Dismiss the impossible, accept the inevitable, and take on a new interest to continually redefine your sense of well-being.
Rose: “It’s never too late, I feel myself so differently. I am better now.”
A new focus or interest may give you the desire to make a life you might never have imagined.
Rachel: “The life I had, good or bad, I gave it to myself.”
You may return to family when you become old, but you must stand up for yourself to have a life.
Abe: “Your life can seem over when you retire.”
When work has been all-absorbing, you must transfer work skills to your retirement life to retain your memory, purpose, and social life.
Bethea: “I have to be bolder than I ever was.”
At every age, we need to find ways to make a contribution, someone to care for, and something to look forward to.
Introduction
This book is about aging and memory and what lies ahead for all of us. Aging, though a universal experience, is a difficult topic for many Western readers. We All Become Stories: Make Yours a Good One takes a uniquely welcoming perspective by exploring aging and memory, so integral to the human condition, through the life stories of 12 people whom I met and talked with in seniors’ centres and retirement homes in Toronto, through my own family, and on Maine’s Monhegan Island.
The life stories told by Mort, Ruth, Emma, and the others are distillations of the many conversations we had about adapting to aging as we chatted over tea or fish stew, after a class, in a nursing home, or on companionable walks. As we came to know each other, themes emerged, such as balancing independence with the increasing need for community and the importance of change even as one becomes more frail.
As each story unfolds, the story-teller gently introduces the reader (just as each of them guided me) to deeper questions: an exploration of how our own memory is functioning and the challenges that older friends and family members might be encountering. Each of the 12 stories will, in its own way, be an eye opener for those of us who have always thought (as I had when I first began to wonder about my own aging) that memory is ‘in our heads,’ separate from our bodies, our social relationships, and our environments. At the end of each story is a summary of what I learned from its teller about the experience of being old and the implicit challenge to you of how to make your own story a good one.
The people we meet in these pages are a diverse group: teachers, blue-collar workers, clerks, artists, musicians, a librarian, a housewife, and a furniture maker. None of them is famous, only a few are known outside their own communities, all of them are ordinary people who made extraordinary changes in their lives that enabled them to find a place in societies that seldom welcome or respect old age.
Seven of the story-tellers were people I met on Monhegan, a remote little island off the coast of Maine. I had first visited Monhegan years earlier, in the mid-1970s, to study with Charlotte Selver, a well-known practitioner and teacher of sensory awareness, and her husband, Charles Brooks. I wandered the trails from the high rocky side down through forest to scrub, pebble beaches, and a dirt road with wooden houses weathered grey scattered here and there. I walked the mile and a half from the white clapboard schoolhouse at one end of the island, where we had our classes in the morning, past village, harbour, and fish houses, to an old shipwreck looking out to sea from Lobster Cove at the other end. Villagers, summer people, and visitors watched the sunset from either place, communal witness to the end of day.
The island captured me, a place both wild and peaceful, and I returned many times. Over the years I met summer people and year-round islanders, many of them in their seventies and eighties. As I came to know them I slowly began to realize that something was going on there that flew in the face of what ‘oldness’ was supposed to be – a sort of general physical falling apart and mental deterioration that marginalized the old from the larger community – useful and interesting no more.
But the old people I met on the island were none of these. They were very resilient and persistent in finding different ways to accommodate to old age. Charles, Leo, Mae, Margaret, Mort, Robert, and Ruth were artists, musicians, or teachers who spent their summers there. Each of them had made, or was in the process of making, changes that allowed them to shed ideas of what they were supposed to be like. They risked alienation from peers and community to discover hitherto-neglected parts of themselves – warts and all – and then reconnect to community from their own centre, rather than from the common stereotypes.
Were they unique? Were the island’s atmosphere and its close-knit community particularly conducive to the changes they made? It seemed important to expand the horizon of interest from islanders to mainland and city folks, and I found five more people eager to share their experiences of aging and memory. I talked to my mother’s oldest friend (Bethea), to an older family member (Emma), and to three participants in the memory workshops I offered at several seniors’ centres in Toronto (Abe, Rachel, and Rose). Like my island friends, they talked about the many ways aging affects people, as in poor health, reduced mobility, deafness, and failing eyesight. They too were aware of the ways their various limitations determined what they could do and where they could go and about the very real threat of isolation from both peers and family.
Some of the 12 story-tellers led lives that are eloquent testimony to the impact of poverty on educational possibilities and subsequent career opportunities, both of which determine the resources and supports available in old age. Poverty can be even more disastrous to mental and physical health unless there is a strong will to find “other ways of living,” as Mae said.
Retirement is a mixed bag. Some people, such as Rose, are able to realize dreams put on hold for years or create second careers from lifelong interests. Others, such as Abe, whose lives were completely taken up with work, become lost and, as Emma said, “are given to memory loss and dark days of pessimism.”
All of them speak poignantly of loss – loss of physical functioning and a sense of well-being, the loneliness that grows with the loss of longtime friends, and the importance of keeping in touch with younger people. No matter how tiring, no matter if they share few interests or life concerns, young people can be sources of renewed vitality, companionship, and a sense of belonging. And there’s loss of close connections to family members who, no matter how well intentioned towards their older relatives, are busy with their own careers, child-raising, launching their offspring into adulthood, or even – now that people are living longer than ever – facing the challenges of retirement themselves and those alluring or frightening possibilities.
What makes these losses tolerable is having a continuing passion or some other way to give meaning and value to one’s life. And there are those times when allowing loss to deepen, learning “to let it walk beside you” as Margaret did, can have unexpected outcomes, as several people found to their surprise.
However, their physical problems and the challenges – some welcome, some not – of retirement, loss, and old age paled in comparison to their fears of a decline in intellectual performance, especially memory. A few, such as Rachel and Rose, thought their memories had improved because they’d finally had the chance to “exercise their minds.” Some, such as Emma, Ruth, Bethea, and Mort, didn’t worry too much about memory and when they did forget were confident that if they “just let it go it would come back.”
Others, such as Margaret and Abe, were so apprehensive that they were unable to see, as Charles and Leo did, that their memory often functioned differently, particularly in a more sensory way, than when they were young – and sometimes even better. While none of them suffered from any form of dementia, all worried about that threat. Other than Bethea, who experienced severe physical trauma, they all agreed that memory dysfunction would be far worse than any physical deterioration.
“Would be” is the operative phrase here, because on close examination everyone I talked with had few signs of recent memory loss. It turned out that forgetting names and appointments was usually due to illness, stress, various medications, lifelong habits, or not using the strategies they had followed at work, such as day-timers (or secretaries!). Now, with age, they perceived these physical, mental, and emotional conditions and longtime failings as the inevitable consequence of the aging process itself – even when they were not yet noticing any intellectual difficulties. It was hard for people to dislodge this belief, even though they readily acknowledged that it didn’t stand up to the evidence of their efficient daily practices.
Nevertheless, while the physical and social consequences of aging were ever present for them, their overriding concern – islanders and city folks alike – continued to be intellectual acuity and memory, and so I chose this as the major focus in telling their stories. Because, as Margaret said: “Without memory you do not have a life.” What kind of life did they mean? I wondered.
What kind of memory?
Looking back, I was in my late forties, and they were from 75 to 83, when I first met them and talked with them about their experiences of being old and of memory. As I aged, I looked to them. I learned so much from them. The more I learned – through other conversations over the years, in reading the notes I had taken – the more I realized the pivotal role memory plays in adapting to the changing circumstances and abilities of old age. And the more I wanted to write their stories. As we explored the many different experiences of being old and of memory, our conversations opened up a world of oldness not often spoken about, as well as the much broader and deeper domain of sensory memory, which neither any of them nor I “had ever thought of in that way, as memory,” as Ruth observed after one of our talks.
It is my hope that We All Become Stories: Make Yours a Good One will appeal to your curiosity about aging and about memory as you begin to see that you can truly welcome old age when you learn about it from people you have come to know and value.