Living the Dream

“I am mature, and wise, and have a lifetime of experience… and I am proud of it.”

It has been said, by older women, “We’re not in a crisis, we’re on a quest!”  We have forgot the root meanings of many words.  The root word of Celebrate (celebratus)  comes from Latin, meaning “to attend in great numbers, to throng, and much talked about, and is related to the Latin word “swift” .  It is a communal event, apparently, and this is the crux of the problem with today’s society.  Society does not ‘celebrate’ the aging process.  Celebration is an antidote for loneliness, isolation, and a feeling of having moved into a place where we are not needed anymore.  Being older is to move to a sad, aloof, place in society.   For women, it is a angst-ridden time to realize we are ‘old’.

As we become Monarchs of our families, we find there seems to be no honor to it anymore.  We are no longer revered and respected.  Our wisdom collected in life is no longer used for healing and we are thought to having weakening minds that are ‘old fashioned’.  Many of us are seen as useless because we did not sell-out to the false youth society would like to promote.  We represent everything the rest are trying to avoid.  We are aging naturally in an unnatural world.  We have not dried up and blown away.  We are active and welcoming our new ways of thinking in old ways.  We are self-sufficient and willing to share.  No one knows what to do with us.

In the early times of our world, an older female was a wise woman.  To reach that stage was an honor and was a welcomed time in our lives.  We do not feel comfortable with the plastic women behind us.  And those that are, or are not, plastic younger women, definitely do not feel comfortable with us.  We represent everything they dread:  Looking, feeling, being ‘Old’.  This fourth cycle of womanhood is a gift we have to relearn to love and take on as a responsibility.  When the plastic walls all fall down, there we will be.  Are we preparing ourselves appropriately?  Have we gone through our physical, intellectual, emotional periods of life and now know how to tap into the spirituality of all the other three components?  Do we know how to be physically spiritual?  Do we know how to think spiritually?  Do we know how to be emotionally spiritual?  Perhaps we have spent our time and money wisely and have figured it out, or are in the midst of figuring it out.  Bless those that already have.

We have decades of experiences and lessons behind us.  When society stopped honoring what we learned, it has fallen into an abyss of addictions, angst and avoidance.  Our young girls are desperately seeking something and do not even know what it is they have lost.  Their own mothers, and some of their grandmothers have slipped the braces of natural aging and are so busy finding and amusing themselves, that the children are lost without normal models that take life as it comes and enjoy what they can and learn the lessons from the rest.  They are vulnerable and therefore fearful.  They are not as resilient as they could have been if they had had coaching and training in the honor of womanhood and aging by those who honored and remembered to live it.

I have often used this quote for almost everything I do:  I (fill in the blank…) _____, “…so others may know, I have not lived this life as if a dream.” - Richard Hooker

Eleanor Roosevelt wrote:  “The purpose of life, after all, is to live it - to taste and experience to the utmost; to reach out eagerly and without fear for new and richer experiences.”  “NEW”….RICHER”!  Our lives can have great meaning if we have been deepened through truly living an authentic life.

Did you think celebration meant to be loud and laughing, and fun, fun, fun?  No, celebrations can be sad as well.  It can be a quite contemplation of a friend’s sorrow.  It can be sitting at the bedside of a dying friend and celebrating friendship.  It can be a wife sitting at her husband’s deathbed and celebrating their combined service to each other through all kinds of life.

Consider these things:

Can you still feel, sing, see, smell?  Do have fairly good health and can work in the garden, paint, read?  Do you have a little cottage, an apartment, an old house on the farm, or any roof over your head?  All things can be gone in a flash.  Do we remember to be grateful for what we have when we have it?

If society does not honor us, let us, at least, honor ourselves and each other. “I am mature, and wise, and have a lifetime of experience… and I am proud of it.”  Live it until you are it.

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“Old age is not an illness, it is a timeless ascent.
As power diminishes, we grow toward the light.”
May Sarton
Last night I watched a documentary on Seniors in Australia that belong to a group of death by choice.  They go to workshops that explain methods to take one’s (Seniors only) life,   They are told where they can get the drugs to do it:  Mexico Veterinary stores.  The documentary stated that the group had secretly made death pills so that they can choose when to end their lives.  It is called “The Peaceful Pill”.  Dr. Philip Nitschke is a right-to-die campaigner.  Each of the group that spoke, were still in good health and ranged in age., one was in his late 90s but has put off his end because his wife had Alzheimer’s and needing him to care take.  “When she goes…..” his voice faded off.  Dr Nitschke speaks of senior’s fears of being trapped in a “medical nightmare” where they might be forced to beg loved ones to help end their lives. One man has a special self-suffocation kit and practices with it to make sure he has it down pat.  They cannot have anyone with them when they do it for fear of legal repercussions.  There is a book published about the Peaceful pill.  Suicide is not a crime in Australia.  What questions are entertained, what thoughts this gives rise to.  Is it an easy way out, a giving up, or is it a way to die with dignity?  How desperate we have become as modern miracles keep us alive longer, can put life on hold, and for whom?  There was a news article on CNN that spoke of findings about God having the power to bring people back from the brink of death.  Such smugness!  I, for one, want no intercession.  I don’t want to come back to a life of pain, forgetfulness, because people can not stand to let me go.  How unfair.  I understand some point to the Peaceful Pill.
Thoughts, last night led me to elders I have met, my parents as they aged, and the gift their agedness was to me.  But, then, I remember a sister-in-law who had brain cancer and her last conscious reaction was screaming…and they hooked her up and kept her alive for months, with that scream frozen on her face.    I know that pain medications just make you unable to react to pain.  The morphine drip, drip, dripped, and the pain was there but I had no way to relate to it until the drug wore off enough hat I could beg.  What is right?  What is good?  What is just?  We can speak of perseverance, fate, karma, determination, and surrender to age.  But that is not speaking to aging that might be torture.  Once we hit that place of being put in hospitals, in nursing homes, in senior’s housing, we are at the mercy of everyone and totally powerless.  This has to be a matter of consternation for the baby boomers who are living longer and those parked in front of the entry in homes and have that look of need to go home in their eyes.
With grace, many of us will live long, productive, healthy lives as our body goes through the stages to its end.  May we be blessed with a quiet ending in the middle of our sleep.  But what if it isn’t that?  What if all dignity, grace, and mind is gone?  What then and WHY?  What is compassionate:  Is it the understanding that we might choose our time and way…or is it that we might suffer so others can choose?
Don’t worry, I do not have any preplanned ideas, nor little stash of pills.  I am one who will let life unfold.  But comes a dawn, when I know, even if others do not, what, then, would be my choice, my regret, my unplanned plan?  As baby boomers, we need to think about what strength we have to bear what we might have to bear.  Do we have it in s?  We can not just let life have its way with us, governments make our choices, and medical professions do as they will.  At some point, we must know, absolutely and for sure, what we are willing to do and have done to us.  It is a huge part of our reality.  What takes more strength, wisdom, and personal volition?  I am grateful for the unsettling stir of this documentary.  It has made me think about my own aging in a different way.

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Our family has lost the Matriarch of my Mother’s side of the family. There is a family reunion in heaven this morning.

“Aunt Berth, my mother’s youngest sister, was my favorite person other than my immediate family and Grandpa Smith. She made me feel special. She loved her sister so much that she adored me and the gift I was to her. When mother died, I felt so alone and said just that. Aunt Berth came over to me and said, “You have me.” It comforted me. To feel loved by her at that moment was one of the most important moments in my life. I was motherless not once, but twice and she seemed to know exactly what I needed to hear.

Aunt Berth remembered my adoption birthday, February 10, as I was growing up. She would bring or send out a gift. The gift was always a beautiful many-yarded, ruffled dress and in the box, scattered in the folds of a Cinderella dress, were cinnamon hearts. She made me feel like a princess. She loved me without any ifs.

… When people tried to find a way to make a connection for me, they would say, “My, she looks like Berth’s kids.” There was such comfort in that connection.” (Shhhhhh: A Creation Story, Carol Desjarlais, p5)

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Richard’s Grand-niece is one years old today.  How to make diapers look like an interesting presetn?  Voila!

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As we live in the present, there comes a Visitor:  The Past Wound that is not healed.

It begs us to respond to it.  We can not close the door, stuffing it back into its dark place again.  To gain authentic Presence in the moment, we have to align personality and soul.

We all have key triggers to our worries, sorrows, sadness, and personality challenges.  Those things are the WHY of how we act and react.  We can not solve anyone else’s WHY.  We must retrace our history until we find the hole in the woodwork that lets the returning of old wounds leak out, like light wanting to be full force.  We need to explore all aspects of WHY we act and react, not just the difficult ones:  Why we love what we love, why we appreciate what we do, why we appreciate what we do, why we like who we do, etc.

We have held onto the hem of happy endings at the price of closing off those things that made our journey difficult.  We disallow the blessings that come for challenges, from barriers to that story-ending.  After all, endings are only another beginning.

Our soul wants things finished.  Our psyche says: Quick, toss it away and give it up, hide it, store it, deal with it later…or never.  We will spend a great deal of energy barring that door where we have those things we have not dealt with.

We do not live in a static world.  It is always changing and challenging.  At the right time and place, the right thing happens.  When the soul knows you are ready to know and learn the lesson of some past incidents, it will reveal them to you.  Sometimes they come as flashbacks, an unsettling feeling, or come crashing down, like a door whose hinges have rusted, on you with a thud.  Endings are required.  Always.  Doors always have a way of falling down or having the walls around it corrode and the light within gets out.  That light is awareness and the need for full examination of it.

Our future depends on going back and housekeeping.  Like houses, things can fall into desperate disrepair.  A new hinge, a new board; we add-on, change walls, fix steps.  So it is with those memories and difficult things we did not deal with until we sorted it.

Our soul needs peace.  Old wounds fester and emits doubt, discord, disharmony and the ego, the bad-house salesman, will try to redirect the complete fulfillment of peace.  We see it all the time; those bad deals that were made.  We know how we, and others, disassociate, grab on to alternate obsessions, to smooth over the want and need.  The want and need exhibits itself in one way or another, though.  It is so apparent.

A friend of mine met a lady who has daily multiple visions.  She says when her body feels cold, she knows evil.  When she meets people, she can tell them all about themselves, and that God appears to her many times through the day.  Later, she explained to my friend that she had been a drug addict and abused alcohol and then Jesus saved her.  She says, Jesus gives her daily visions to keep her strong.  Does this not seem incongruent to anyone else?  This is an alternate obsession in order to block the real need for healing the key triggers that led her to the abuses in the first place.  Her ego is working especially hard to keep things at the door at bay.  It will eventually all fall down; this house of cards.

Sometimes, in fact, most times, we grow the most peace when we are willing to look at problems as they arise…right in the midst of great conflict.  There is no peace until we do.  Seriously.  There is always the fear that something will leak out at the wrong time.  And, there is no wrong time.  There is only the right time.  When you notice a nail is loose, fix it before the whole roof falls in on you.

We say we desire peace in the world, but we do not even know how to accept the challenge to have peace within.  When we go back and know those woundings as the dear children they are, we can nurture and heal those starving waifs we abandoned.  I know about starving waifs.  I was one in real life and I have spawned many more as life went on.  I had to go back and rescue them.   No one could rescue them for me.  I had to open the door and welcome the visitors in as they come or they would have become a raging mob and broken the door down.

©Carol Desjarlais

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