On the periphery of family life

(Part 2 of a series on The Inevitable Process of Aging)

When I first became a grandmother, I excitedly joined class reunions and compared notes about grandchildren with my high school classmates who also became lolas. Each of us brought out “brag books” filled with photos of our grandchildren. 

Today, my eldest grandchild, Cyrus, is 19 years old, a pharmacy technician, while my youngest is two-year old Domique, who attends toddler class.

Grandparents and grandchildren

There is the observation that grandparents and grandchildren get along more harmoniously than parents and children. Grandchildren look for comfort and unconditional love when they are young, and we can give it to them because we are not responsible for them. 

We can see them for what they are because we are not guilt-ridden by what we think they ought to be. We can savor their growth because we have the perspective to see how fleeting childhood is. When we were parents, living with it day by day, it seemed to go on forever. 

We can befriend their adolescence because of the more relaxed attitude toward conventions and outward demands that we have acquired. We may even find them turning to us for some of our old-fashioned thoughts to guide them. We can provide a “haven of peace and rest” for them, and perhaps for our children too, who are caught up in the responsibilities of middle life.

A marvelous, warm place waits for us on the “periphery of family life.” All that it asks of us is to live along gently into it, aware of its promises and possibilities.

J’aime la Jeunesse (I Love Youth)

For several decades now, I have delighted in the company of our high school and college students, who have suddenly transformed to the peak of their physical beauty. I have known most of them since they started school in kindergarten. Ugly duckling turned to swans.

Like the British governess in Anna and the King of Siam, I cannot help but sing to myself, whenever I see these students pairing with each other – “Hello young lovers, whoever you are, I hope your troubles are few. All my good wishes go with you tonight, I’ve been in love like you…”

Yet youth has plenty of problems to meet and decisions to make, although they have a pervading aura of peace, however temporary. Youth, above all, is full of life, “the precious uncertain fire of life” burning without thought, unselfconscious, and so unconscious of its own beauty.

“J’aime la Jeunesse (I Love Youth),” Olga Lamkert used to say. But, yes it is true. This is a gift that its owners are unaware of, or if they thought about it at all, thought of as part of themselves, not as the temporary loan that it is. “We do not live life, life lives us.” Childhood lives us, maturity lives us, old age lives us. 

“I love youth, particularly when it lives in people who are using it well.”

Bernard Shaw once said that youth is wasted on the young. It is true in more senses than he may have intended. Wasted because misused, wasted because not appreciated as the gift of health, strength, and energy, but also wasted because the young are unaware of the clear beauty that is theirs for the time.

Perhaps it is only the old, looking on, who can see that beauty. Perhaps that is one of the gifts of old age.

Easy-to-visit elders

The chances to enjoy the beauty of youth depend greatly upon whether or not the young enjoy being with the old. Some are eager to treasure and wonder at the old people in their lives. What are the elders like whom they seek out? They are people who seem to feel at home with themselves and with the world around them. They seem to have a life of their own, they are glad to see visitors but seem to have no desperate need of them. They are people who have become complete in themselves in some enviable, hard-to-grasp way.

Mary C. Morrison, author of “Let Evening Come: Reflections on Aging” knew an old woman who gained fame among her younger relatives because they would have to read the New York Times the morning before they went to see her, if they wanted to keep up their end of the conversation. She would want to know what they thought about all the new and interesting things that were happening in the world. She did a crossword puzzle daily, as an athletic person might go to a fitness center. 

These easy-to-visit elders are more interested in the lives of their visitors than in their own. They want to hear what the young are doing and reading and thinking. They would tend to dwell not on problems but on what life offers that is promising and lively. There is a refreshing agility in their thinking. In their opinion, they seem almost to have graduated from morality, and they look at each situation presented to them on its own individual merits – seen on the light of its own integrity and that of the person presenting it. They offer peace and perspective, and a warm welcoming place that the young find restful, and that they come to seek, as one would seek a lost and legendary treasure.   

Our memories – a treasure trove

People often deplore the tendency of the old to live in the past, and sometimes it is deplorable. But it can be very good since this period requires the harvesting of the past in memory, in thought, and in writing. 

Minnie, my high school classmate in St. Scholastica’s College, became a Social Worker and worked in New York where she met her American husband, Martin. I stayed with them in their lovely house where they retired in Sta. Barbara, California. Once a week, they would attend a Writing Class for senior citizens. After a month, a book of 18 memoirs would be compiled by them and their classmates complete with nostalgic photos of past generations. Her husband’s hidden talent for watercolor portraits was also developed in another class.

Each of us has at least one volume of memoirs stored away in our hearts and minds. It is time to look at the whole in perspective and garner wisdom from it. Our memories can be a treasure trove for our children and younger friends. One old man, beginning to write his memoirs, found that “as his short-term memory began to fail his long-term memory was raising up his childhood events he had not thought of since they happened.” In the end he produced, in several chapters of total recall, a priceless documentary of life in a small New England college town between 1880 and the ’90s.

Unless you become like little children

Morrison states, “Do what you are doing… Why do I keep looking ahead, looking back, looking in the mirror – at success, at failure, in short, wanting to be a ME, am I an active ego all the time?”

Surely old age is the time when one can move into the pure happiness of being a nothing, a quiet center, not a ME at all. Freedom from the clamoring ME that wants to be at the center of things, to be successful and admired and popular and very truly run after.

“Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” We ask ourselves what are children really like. It is a big question, because children are lots of things, not all of them necessarily pleasant or “good”. A child’s ego isn’t self-seeking like ours, it is just something he/she goes around with, does things with, and looks at things with – a tool.

As we age, the old driving ego becomes increasingly a bore to others and to ourselves. At this point, we meet another one of old age’s paradoxes: lose yourself; find yourself. Pay attention to what you do so you can find out who you are, and try to say goodbye to the old self that wants to make the world meet its demands. For those who will do this, a new ME, is accessible and available – one that becomes at home in the world, and more and more the old ME of childhood will be lost.

(Reference:  Let Evening Come, Reflections on Aging by Mary C. Morrison)

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