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Overview
Here is Barbara Crafton at her best—funny, warm, direct, honest, and vulnerable—on aging.
“I think growing older is both funny and sad, but mostly it just makes me grateful to be alive and able to reflect. I have been an Episcopal priest for 33 years and have had extensive experience in ministering with the elderly. Now, I am growing old myself. I hate it when people are ashamed of being old. We should be proud!” she proclaims. Join her in this celebration of life!
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780819229113 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Morehouse Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 162 KB |
About the Author
BARBARA CAWTHORNE CRAFTON is a popular preacher, retreat leader, and writer who teaches at Marble Collegiate Church and at the General Theological Seminary in New York City. Her articles have appeared in the New York Times, Reader's Digest, Episcopal Life, and many other publications. She is the author of many books, including Called, The Courage to Grow Old, The Sewing Room, Living Lent, and many others. She lives in Metuchen, New Jersey.
Read an Excerpt
The Courage to Grow Old
By Barbara Cawthorne Crafton
Church Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2014 Barbara Cawthorne CraftonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2911-3
CHAPTER 1
The O Word
I'll be sixty-five, my friend said, leaning across the table and dropping her voice to a whisper on the last three syllables, as if she'd just told me she had a venereal disease. I remember her face as she said it, her trapped look, a mixture of panic and shame. I was younger than she and much younger than I am now. I stifled a feeling of annoyance and tried to look sympathetic. I did not intend to call the funeral home when I reached my sixties. Now I'm solidly there, and I still don't. Come to think of it, though, prearrangement is a good idea—maybe I will give them a call. But I digress.
What's good about getting old? somebody asked a movie star whose name I cannot recall. Nothing, she snapped. I was sorry to hear it. I could think of many good things about getting old. Again, I was much younger than she. But I'm not now, and I still can.
My friend Frank cries into his beer most evenings about not being young anymore. A song from the fifties, the death of a matinee idol—it doesn't take much to send him into the depths. He longs for his lost youth the way a thirsty man longs for water. Nothing in the present holds any delight for him at all, not that I can see. What future there is looks like a prison sentence. With time served, he wonders, how much longer does he have?
I know a lot more about physical vulnerability than I did when I was young. I know that things can't stay the same, not ever—if your well-being depends on never losing anything you currently have, you're in deep trouble. But I also know that people don't have to be full of despair about the incontrovertible fact of their aging, and that the way to continue in peace for the duration is to accept the reality of what is happening to your body and your brain. Hiding from it makes it larger in your imagination than it really is. It fills you with fear of the future, and prevents you from enjoying the world you actually live in right now.
I'm not old! a beautiful woman at a party tells us all defiantly. By that she means that she is not any of the negative things we think old people are: useless, weak, unlovely, alone. But she is old—she's eighty-one. Why does she accept a stereotype—one which clearly does not fit her—as the only way there is of being old? Why should anyone? Isn't that a little like saying I'm not a woman, when what you mean is I'm not fragile, overly emotional, unintelligent or timid? And why, in accepting such stereotypes, should she deny herself the honor of being esteemed for what she is: beautiful, experienced and wise? She has lived much more of her life on earth than she has yet to live—why should she let the negative categories of aging be the only categories that count?
And I am not talking about the freaks of nature you see in vitamin ads, about old people who look like young people. The physical characteristics of an aging body are not the same as those of a young one: does it follow that the word "beautiful" can only apply to the second, never to the first? I have loved my husband's gnarly hands for many years—now my own hands are getting to be that way, tendons and blue veins standing in high relief against new declivities in the backs of them. My eyelids are pleated now—I think they make me look a little sly, as if I knew something most people don't know. Small wrinkles have appeared around my lips, and two larger ones lead from my nose to the corners of my mouth. When I smile, a dozen lines appear around my eyes and a few more crinkle my cheeks. They remain for a bit after the smile has disappeared, the afterglow of my laugh. Every time I catch sight of them, I see both my present and my future: the lines will multiply and deepen. Soon, they will become a permanent part of my facial topography, whether I am smiling or not! What I do not see is the uneventful landscape of my girlhood face, the face before decades of smiles layered themselves upon it. I have photographs of that young face—it's pretty enough, I suppose. It looks a little blank to me from here, though.
There are other lines. The two vertical ones between my eyebrows that really make me look like I know something, and the horizontal parallels on my forehead. They are from furrowing my brow. From thinking hard. Probably also from yelling at people, or at least from wishing I could yell at someone. From tilting my head and raising my eyebrows inquiringly because of something I have not understood, or from being told something whose veracity I have doubted. You can get this stuff Botoxed out of your life for a few months if you want to, but you must be willing to bet that nothing will come up during that time that will require you to look quizzical or wise, and life is just not like that.
From the folds of my eyelids and the crinkles around their corners, my eyes will continue to look out at the world. Unless I lose my sight. Nearsighted since seventh grade, I am used to changes in my vision, and there will be more. One or more of a few cataclysmic things might happen to my eyes, some fixable and some not. Perhaps I'll have to use an electronic reader to magnify my text many times over. I'll be annoyed that I must do so, but I will also be glad that there are such things. It may be that a time will come when no machine can help me see, and that will be hard to bear. I imagine myself going over memories of faces in my mind, memories of art and buildings, memories of the way trees and flowers and the moon looked when I could see them. I imagine myself needing help to navigate my way arround my own room, and I imagine myself asking for it. Even if I do go blind, those who gaze into my eyes will see the same blue they have always seen. Maybe a bit lighter. In time, probably, a white ring will surround the blue; if it does, it will remain until my eyes close for the last time.
But wait—here's something else to ponder: there may not be anybody gazing into my eyes! I may well be solitary. I will have friends and I will have my children and grandchildren, but it may well be that I will not have sustained intimacy with anyone in my generation. I may have people who are intimate with my body in ways no one is now, ways no one has been since I was a baby, people who help me do the ordinary things I now do myself without thinking twice: people who help me bathe, eat, dress. I may have people who change my diaper so that I can be fresh and clean. Imagining it now, I feel myself wanting them to be people who love me already, but it is likely that at least some of them will just be people whose job it is to provide such care. I am accustomed to nursing homes; I visit lots of them. No, they're not luxury spas. But they are staffed, for the most part, by decent people who do the best they can for their charges. If my children think it's best for me to be cared for in one, I'll go willingly. If they can't face it—and that may be, as they haven't spent as much time in them as I have—I may insist on it myself.
What I will not do is what I have seen too many other people do: extract a promise from my children or my spouse never to put me in one. People do this when they're young and strong and there's nothing wrong with them. They reiterate the demand every now and then throughout their lives so that nobody forgets, trapping their children into years of unworkable arrangements focused around keeping a promise made without a context. Don't bind your children forever to the things you were afraid of when you were forty because of something you saw or heard about when you were ten—trust them to make decisions based on what's really going on when you're eighty-seven. Have a relationship with them that gives you confidence that they will have your best interest at heart. And here you have more reason to be of good cheer than you may think you have: I have seen many adult children rise to the occasion of their parents' final illness, even when the relationship was not at all an easy one. If yours is truly hopeless though—and some relationships just are—find someone else to fill that role. And find that person before you need her. Your own nursing care crisis should not be the first time you've given the matter any thought.
Another thing: whether or not you want to do this cannot be the central question. Of course you don't want to enter a nursing home—you'd rather be strong, healthy and live forever. But that option is not for sale, and "I don't want to" isn't much of an argument in the face of the medical and practical needs you may have. We are not children, and part of being an adult is taking responsibility for yourself. In growing older, that means planning concretely for decisions to be made when I can no longer make them, and placing myself in the setting from which it will be easiest for those I love to implement those decisions. Making someone with a full-time job and teenagers in the house fly back and forth to Florida dozens of times a year because you didn't want to move nearer her when you were strong enough to do so is just selfish. Think ahead, and don't do it—our children don't owe us the sacrifice of their own children's well-being. Honor thy father and thy mother doesn't mean enabling our parents' denial of the facts of their lives.
* * *
And another—why should we live in stubborn and fruitless denial of the facts about ourselves, about the death that lies nearer at hand every day we live? Why won't we even talk about it? Why do we think it's better to look right through the physical challenges of the dying, as if we didn't see them, rather than to acknowledge their existence and simply say we're sorry about them? As hospice chaplains and nurses well know, the ones among us who are near their time don't want to waste precious energy helping their families pretend they're not dying. It may be that I will have things I need to tell the ones I leave behind—that will be easier if we can all admit that I'm leaving.
In order to help those who love me deal with my death, I must come to terms with it myself. It will help to think about death in advance. Trust me, this gets easier to do with practice—those things of which we refuse to think don't disappear meekly in response to our refusal: they go underground. There they grow in apparent size and virulence, becoming larger and more unthinkable than they really are. What will happen to me in my death is that I will join the billions of human beings who have died; everyone who has ever lived has managed to do this. We do not die interminably; we die once, and then it is over. Those left behind are haunted by the memory of losing us, but we are not. We pass through a portal of which we are afraid, but then we are through it. Even if the most committed atheist were right, and there were nothing save the life in which we now live, that life would still be over when we die. Death would not hold us suspended between the worlds. We would be gone from this world and its fears.
It will help us to contemplate the fact that death will happen to us. At the very least, we will be less surprised, and the energy shock which so quickly takes from us will be that much more available to us. We will need it for the journey upon which we embark. Dying people don't have abundant energy, and most of what they do have is focused on their departure from this life.
But they do still love the ones they love. Though they haven't much left to give them, one thing they do have is the capacity to leave this world honestly and in a spirit of trust in the ongoingness of existence, with gratitude for the life they were given and a sense of completion. You and I have this capacity, and can leave those we love this final picture of ourselves, if we will have the courage to prepare for our own decline and death while we can. Sometimes I will need the help of those who love me in the project of doing this, for nobody looks death steadily in the face—from time to time, the bravest among us avert our eyes. Sometimes my energy will be consumed by physical pain or a spasm of sorrow. But at times like those, the witness of people I love to the fact that the whole of my life had meaning will balance the difficulty of my leaving it. It will have to. It will be all I have left.
CHAPTER 2Baby, You Can Drive My Car
The campaign to divest him of the car keys was gently fought, but of long duration. There had been a few accidents. He was known to the local police—one time he rear-ended somebody and left the scene: the man he hit followed him home and cornered him in his driveway. To this day, he does not understand why doing that got everyone so riled. Finally, he totaled the car in a snowy encounter with a telephone pole on the day after Christmas. She remains unconvinced that this was due in any way to senility, though one might reasonably have questioned his decision to drive at all on a day like that one.
There was now no car. They decided not to replace it: she commuted to New York by train, and could reach the airport by train when she had to travel. He could take the senior bus. There were taxis. She had her old Schwinn. They lived within walking distance of the grocery store and everything else they needed.
For a year and more it was fine. But then she changed jobs, and suddenly she needed wheels. They walked into a car dealership and bought the first one they saw. Neither of them enjoys shopping.
There are still buses and trains and taxis, as many as there ever were. But they find that they use the car by default, now that they have one. She drives him places, and then she fetches him home. Sometimes he will catch a lift home, with someone who happens to be going that way.
But sometimes—very rarely and, she has now re-promised her children, never again—she has given in to the demands of her own schedule. She has cut her walking time to the train too close, and has allowed him to drive her there and then drive the half mile back home. She has allowed him to drive home from church a few times, when she knew she would be held there longer than he wanted to stay. She promises she will not do this again. She will allow herself the time she needs to manage the chauffeuring. She won't let her own lack of planning put him or anyone else in danger.
But what about him? I have sat in the living rooms of many families, strategizing with them about how to handle the dilemma of a father whose ability to drive is compromised, in the opinion of everyone but him. He turns to me and speaks angrily of his independence, hoping for my support. His grown children argue, lecture, hide the car keys. His wife sits, paralyzed, caught between warring duties to husband and children, afraid to let him drive and afraid not to.
He remembers his parents' car—it had a running board. He remembers his own first car. He remembers taking his young children out to wash the car in the creek, driving it right into the shallow water and soaping it up, then pouring pot after pot of clean water over it while the kids waded in the water and jumped from the rocks. He remembers the road trips they took, how he used to argue with his wife about reading the roadmap, how they would stop to let the kids pee along the side of the road, remembers the motels, the roadside picnic tables. He remembers turning into his own driveway after another day at work. He remembers his first automatic transmission. He remembers when seat belts first appeared in cars.
The children win the war. He stops driving. The car sits in the garage. He goes out to check the oil sometimes, opens the door, slides into the driver's seat.. He sits there for a while. Just sits—they have the keys, his children. He's not going anywhere.
This man I remember well, his anger, his eventual resignation. But I also remember the man who drove his car through the plate glass window of the convenience store on Main Street, seriously injuring the owner's wife. I remember the elderly priest who drove the wrong way up a highway exit ramp, killing himself and the parents of two young teenagers in an oncoming car. I remember an old lady whom I did not know, upside down and still belted in her flipped car—dead before I got to her with the last rites. An automobile is a complicated and powerful piece of machinery. Driving one cannot be simply a matter of one's right to be autonomous. Sometimes it is a matter of life and death.
It didn't have to be this way. The short-sighted postwar decision, on both federal and state levels, to put all our transportation eggs in the automobile's basket quickly eliminated the majority of our train routes nationwide. Manhattan is the one American place in which owning a car is literally more trouble than it's worth—everywhere else, lacking one is a tremendous handicap, adding hours to the days of low-paid workers who must rely on infrequent buses for their commute. Poor people pay for our love affair with cars, yes, but so do the elderly: where there is adequate public transportation people can still travel independently and inexpensively when they should no longer drive, but that is almost nowhere in the United States.
It would just be so inconvenient, my friend says. I like to be able to go whenever I want to. And taxis are so expensive.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Courage to Grow Old by Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Copyright © 2014 Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface, vii,1 The O Word, 1,
2 Baby, You Can Drive My Car, 11,
3 An Affair to Remember, 18,
4 Old Folks at Home, 25,
5 Most of Pain is Fear, 33,
6 Yellow Leaves, or None, or Few, 37,
7 In the Garden: We Who Are About to Die Salute You, 44,
8 The Sorcerer's Apprentice, 53,
9 Yom Hashoah, 60,
10 All My Pretty Things, 65,
11 Borrowing the Second World War, 71,
12 The Two Baskets, 79,
What People are Saying About This
"Germanium farmers are my heroes. They harvest hope and remind us to tend the gardens we have sown in our lives. Crafton has written with grace about taking our soil and nurturing it to grow a rich spiritual garden full of hope, life, and love. She challenges us to have the courage to prepare for the death that will come to all of us. Like a good priestly farmer, she offers great advice on dealing with the loss of autonomy and spending more and more time alone. She does not presume that there is only one way for each of us to reap the harvest of our lives, but instead offers a series of questions and reflections that can guide our contemplation on these years to come."
—Becca Stevens, founder of Thistle Farms and author of Snake Oil: The Art of Healing and Truth-Telling
"The Courage to Grow Old is a must read for every family caregiver. Barbara Crafton—with wisdom, humor, honesty, and reality—blesses us all by bringing forth the issues we rarely discuss whether in regard to our care recipient or to our projected care planning. Family caregiving . . . you cannot pay it away; pray it away or prescribe it away . . . you need all three . . . but ultimately you need to go through it. . . . This book helps you grow through it."
—Gregory L. Johnson, Creator/Director EmblemHealth’s CARE for the FAMILY Caregiver Initiative, Co-Founder: NYC Family Caregiver Coalition; and NYC Partnership for Family Caregiving Corps
"This is one of the most completely satisfying and rewarding and comfortable books that I can remember ever reading. Like a warm bathrobe in winter, or a loaf of bread hot and fresh from the oven…like a nativity song heard and growing every year more dear and more substantial, so it is with this book. I could settle happily into its covers time and time again. In fact, I plan to."
—Phyllis Tickle