The “quality of life in older adults”: an exploration
So, what’s it like growing old?
She couldn’t have known, so she had to ask. What are you, I wondered, 20-something? Early 20s? I’m 35, she replied. You age well—it just tripped off my tongue, but was still true.
Another reason she had to ask about aging—it’s her job. She’s the research coordinator in the University of Alberta College of Health Sciences’ School of Public Health, which just now is examining the “quality of life in older adults.” And I’d volunteered to engage in “a one-on-one interview” where I’d be called upon to “share your thoughts” about “the health and well-being of people your age”.
So, there she was, one morning in February, sitting at our dining room table across from me, wondering, in her words, “what ‘quality of life’ means to you”. It took me one-and-a-half hours to tell her. “I truly appreciated,” she’d write later, “both our conversation and the reflections you shared”; she found this “exploration” to have been “rich and thoughtful.” I like to think she meant that.
But the school’s emphasis, it became clear, was on the physical well-being of oldsters. Well, sure. But that’s not what I wanted to assay, to pry into. So I pointed up how that which is, in our lives, intangible, inexplicable, transcendental, spiritual, can and may well add immeasurably to the “quality of life in older adults.”
Theologian and Benedictine nun Joan Chittister says it better in her bighearted book, The Gift of Years—Growing Older Gracefully: “The truth is that we are a great deal more than our bodies…but it can take us most of a lifetime to learn that.” More specifically, “This is the time to begin to…attend to the inner self now. These years are for allowing the interior life—our continuing questions, our lifelong interests—to direct what we do and who we are.”
In an essay in the book that’s pointed up in the accompanying sidebar, the Rev. Dr. Carl Scovel—widely renowned for his preaching, he was for 32 years [1967-1999] the admired minister of King’s Chapel, a Unitarian Universalist Christian church in downtown Boston—says so, too: “[A]nother life abides, a life within, a life from which I look out, take note, reflect, remember, muse, inquire, and pray. …I have time to see and consider as I never had before.”
[Please note that both books are available in your church Library, as is that Featured Book from earlier this year, The Seasoned Soul: Reflections on Growing Older.]
Public Health’s researcher understood: again later she wrote, “I think you’re absolutely right to point out that quality of life cannot be fully understood through physical health alone. …conversations like ours are essential in highlighting what may be missing or underrepresented” in stock questionnaires. “Your insights speak directly to why this kind of research needs to remain attentive to the lived experience behind the measures.”
So, to what, you’re wondering—I hope you’re wondering—did we give voice? “Insights” is too trenchant a word, but still…
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“Now is the time to think it all through again”
“Now is the time to think it all through again,” Chittister avows in her The Gift of Years. “Everything. God, life, work, relationships, behaviours, goals. I am free now to measure all of them against my experience, to reshape them out of my new knowledge, to try things wherever my new spiritual energy leads me, to add new ideas to the old ideas that have controlled my life for so long.”
Ten pages later, she affirms again this mission: “Now, too, I have the quiet time, the solitary time, to think it all through—everywhere I’ve been, everyone I’ve known, everything I’ve done in my life, with all the glories and all the sad mistakes, all the successes and all the personal failures—and to be glad for it all. …they are all me. They are everything I bring to this time now—when the only question yet to answer in life is what I have become.”
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* I pointed out the wooden block nearby my desk, the one that trumpets, “Life is an adventure: Explore”. And how back in the day when I’d drive our car out of the garage to begin another road trip, worrying about what might go wrong, Ellen would beam, “Off on another great adventure!” Life is a journey, destination unknown; we’re along for the ride, to see where it’ll take us. To surprising places, often times.
* As well, there’s the 5-1/2-inch-squared plaque that sits atop Ellen’s bookcase, the one that declares, “Nothing is. Everything is becoming.” When first we moved west from big-city southern Ontario, we’d ventured away many weekends to explore our new surroundings. In one small-town history museum my wife spied a sampler on which some pioneer woman—someone surely ahead of her time—had stitched those five words, and not the customary proverb or romantic saying.
* The two of us talked about how life consists of one change after another, and how little control we mere mortals have over what’ll come next. Like the several old-age disorders that have grabbed hold of me, and won’t let go—all of which came out of the blue. I quoted a favourite line from John Lennon’s “Beautiful Boy”: “Life is what happens as you make other plans.”
* Recently, a woman who I’d mentored during her stint as editor of the student newspaper at Augustana University College—this was many years ago—wrote to say, “I’ve met a handful of people who have shaped the course of my life, and you’re one of them”; nowadays, she carries out PR for her Alberta community. This got me to recall a couple of guiding spirits who’d changed the course of my life: the prof who taught me philosophy of religion [“Ken, live the questions”], and the chaplain who once ditched that Lutheran byword “believe,” in favour of the less steely “dare to hope,” thereby offering me hope.
* I mentioned how, earlier that week, The Globe and Mail had published two articles about aging. In one, a 76-year-old man observed, “Aging well is simply making the most of what you have, as long as you have it, and then accepting the changes as they come….” Both that person and the one who’d written the other piece employed a word, the word that oldsters must learn to live by: acceptance. Then soldier on.
There was more, all of a kind, but by now you get the idea. And after all of that, how could I not but urge that further inquiry into the quality of life of old-timers mustn’t be limited to their physical well-being. There’s more to life than that.
Surely, it is as Chittister wrote, beautifully: “The time is here. We have a chance to become what all the living has enabled us to be. Now we can make sense of it.” After all, “A blessing of these years is that we know at last what really matters.”
Ken Fredrick
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A sidebar
“It’s the stuff of all of life”
“That was fast. I mean life.”
It is with this waggish pronouncement—it’s a famous six-word posey by acclaimed American poet Ron Padgett—that Kay Montgomery opens the 2015 book she edited, Landscapes of Aging and Spirituality. In her preface, she tells how, as she’d entered her 70s, she’d “wanted—not advice, really—but companionship for this latter-part-of-life journey.”
The first woman and first layperson to become executive vice-president of the Unitarian Universalist Association in America [she served in that capacity for 28 years, 1985-2013], Kathleen Montgomery corralled 19 thinkers—almost all of them are UU ministers—who she hoped would “fill that role for me.” She asked each “to write, with as much self-revelation as they felt comfortable, about their experience of aging, and how that experience intersected with their spiritual lives and their sense of meaning.”
What they provided, she compiled into this collection of brief wise essays. These “far exceeded my expectations,” she admits. “Astonished me, really.” Pointing out how her contributers, in their offerings, came to ”bare a bit of their interior life,” she adds, “It’s the stuff of all of life, but perhaps a bit more poignant and keenly felt as the horizon nears.” In this scrimpy sampling—each paragraph comes from a different essay—you’ll see why she was well satisfied:
* “[T]his aging process feels huge. It feels important to do it well. And it feels like it will require all the honesty and as much courage as I can muster to navigate it well.”
* “It’s time to more consistently raise my eyes from the horizon—each time I do, I remember the banner hanging above my desk. …[Now] it’s message touches more deeply: ‘In the end, what matters most is how well did you live, how well did you love, how well did you learn to let go’.”
* “As I experience my eighth decade of existence, I find life all the more amazing, intense, and meaningful, despite my inexorable demise. Or perhaps it is because of that inevitable ending of the human project, which greatly concentrates my mind and soul. Perhaps it is because I know my fate that I find life evermore worthwhile.”
* “I continue to learn that this life we have been given to lead has twists and turns we can never imagine, has joys and sorrows plenty, has disappointments and surprises, has triumphs and tragedies over which we have no control.”
* “I try really hard to live in the present…. I cannot do anything about the past, and I have little control over the future. So I am impelled to make each day count by keeping promises, helping others, finding ways to be generous, being a friend, practicing awe, counting my blessings. […] My aging process is buttressed with gifts and blessings. I try not to sweat the small stuff.”
* “Aging is about decreased ability, increased limitation, reduced independence, increased reliance on others. Aging is about the acceptance of approaching death.”