Looking for the Strengths of Elders

What follows is the first of an occasional reflection on the spirituality of aging.

Imagine yourself walking into a class reunion after 30 or 40 years of not seeing your classmates. What do you expect? Almost everyone I know comes away with two reactions. Some of our friends seem very old. They are bent, wrinkled and gray. Others seem very much like the people we knew many years ago. No matter how we try, our first instinct is to look at others and make judgments. Physical aging captures our attention, and while this is natural, it is a mistake if we draw conclusions about them based solely on how they look.

Too many older people are forgotten or invisible because of how they appear and we assume they are less able than they once were. How shortsighted this can be. A piece of clipart might help us understand what often happens.

Almost all the people I know who work with the elderly are very concerned with older people's bodies. Anxious to make the elderly safe, they take many precautions in their care. Health care workers and adult children put bars in older peoples showers, look for chairs and sofas that sit higher off the ground so the elderly can get in and our more easily, and send them catalogues of things that will keep them safe in their own homes. While these actions are intended to be compassionate, they also reflect diminishment thinking by reducing the elderly to their weakened eyesight or ability to walk quickly and surely.

We would serve older people better by asking them how we might access the wisdom they have gained or benefit from their strengths. Helping them only to avoid accidents infantilizes them and reinforces their growing disability, but fails to recognize the great gifts they can be to all of us. If, as the clip art suggests, the strength of our spirit is the foundation of a healthy life, then we need, without ignoring safety concerns, to spend more time celebrating what our elders have learned and practiced, not making decisions for them. In fact, too often the clip art diagram is functionally turned upside down. By paying so much attention to the bodies of older people, we have no time or energy to work with them to strengthen their spirits which ought to be the foundation of healthy living at every stage of life.

How do you look at the elderly/