Editor’s Note: The Spy is pleased to welcome to its masthead, writer, photographer, and retired Episcopal Church priest, George Merrill, for a periodic examination of spirituality in the 21st Century.
I was preparing breakfast recently, soft boiled eggs. I saw writing on two of them. I looked closely. A code was written in red and then next to it the words “Use By” and underneath a date, ‘March 28th.” How in heaven’s name does a hen lay eggs, write on them, and then prognosticate, assigning to her issue the measure of their days. Clairvoyant hens, I guess. Or was it perhaps Dad that signed off on the eggs? Unlikely, as many Dads frequently don’t get that intimately involved with their offspring.
I grew increasingly uneasy as the water boiled. I have never given soft-boiled eggs a second thought. Now I was. Since it was early March, I wondered if I was interfering with destiny, cutting short a chick’s longevity for which its Mom assigned definite duration. The handwriting on the eggs intimidated me, as handwriting on the wall had once intimidated King Belshazzar some twenty-five hundred years before. Shortly after reading the handwriting, Belshazzar was history.
What might the writing on the egg signify to the chick? If, when I was born, instead of being assigned a wristband inscribed “Baby Merrill,” I received a bracelet telling me when I was going to die, how would I feel? Would any of us live differently if we knew when we were going to die? Would we even want to know?
Except where a death is medically indisputable and a reasonably accurate time can be predicted none of us knows when we’re going to die. This may not be the case much longer.
Scientists, writes Dana Dovey, “can now tell us how long [we] will live by simply analyzing [our] DNA.” She says a chemical analysis reveals our biological clock. It’s not as if Obamacare isn’t besieged enough. Imagine the havoc with the health care and insurance industries such predictions would create and all the actuaries it will put on the street looking for jobs. Predictable or no, more of us are living much longer lives than our parents.
In a series of workshops I’ve led for the aging in the last several years, we frequently discussed aging and death. Participants have ranged from roughly sixty to mid-nineties, a group generally healthy, active and conscious of their mortality. We discussed many aspects of aging. It is safe to say we agreed with Sir Thomas Browne’s classic observation: “The long habit of living indisposeth us to dying.”
For any condition in life, there is always someone somewhere who has experienced it and who can tell us about it. First-hand accounts are not available excepting for those reporting near-death experiences but, their return to life suggests that they had not gone the entire way we normally understand death to take us. Whatever we know about death is from our own observations or those of others. In one sense, we remain spectators when it comes to death. When discussing death, it’s dying we’re really talking about.
It’s interesting that in the case of Jesus whom many Christians believe rose bodily from death, he says nothing of the actual experience of death itself other than its promised resurrection. Where then does that leave you and me when, more conscious of our mortality, we want candid explorations of our feeling about our own death or the death of loved ones. Invariably, the conversation turns to life. Birth, death, and impermanence are the three primary constraints that define our lives. To talk about one invariably involves discussing the others.
From my own experience as an octogenarian and in facilitating my workshops is that conversations among aging folk conscious of their mortality take a different turn than younger people for whom mortality is more remote. The preoccupations of the younger are sometimes called the horizontal concerns: job, family, economic security, success, respect in the community, children and the like. They are horizontal in that they require individuals to spread their energies more widely and broadly to achieve their goals. All very legitimate. For many elderly who have finished walking those paths and done their horizontal tasks, what now? The cliché has been, “it’s all downhill from there.”
That has not been my experience or the experience of the many with whom I’ve talked. We learn as elders to spend our energies vertically, that is, by reaching higher to cultivate spiritual awareness that gives meaning to life in our latter years while digging deeper into ourselves to discover what are the things that are ultimately worth our time and concern.
A fascinating and recently deceased rabbi named Zalman Schachter -Shalomi wrote a cutting edge book called From Aging to Sage-ing. In it he reframes the tired stereotype of “old age” as a downhill slide and shapes an exciting vision of what it means to become an ‘Elder.” He sees our latter years as a distinct developmental phase, the same as children, young adults, and middle-aged people mastering skills appropriate to the demands of their stage of life. Among those skills, elders must learn are embracing one’s life experience, understanding it in depth, cultivating wisdom, practicing gratitude, learning forgiveness and giving service.
It ain’t over ‘til it’s over, and since we elder folk have all the time there is, we best get moving.
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Bill Rolle says
Excellent piece. I enjoyed reading it and look forward to future pieces.