The Process Of Dying Is The Cessation Of Living

By gaining awareness of our thoughts and thought patterns, we can better control the desired outcomes. Think for a moment about how you feel about yourself as an aging person. Are you anxious about getting older? What feelings and emotions surface when you realize that you, along with the rest of us, are aging? Practice identifying the thoughts and feelings that arise, but whatever comes up, don’t judge it, just be aware. Saying your thoughts out loud or writing them down in a journal can be enormously helpful in this process. Then start to question the origin of your feelings and thoughts. Where have you learned about aging and growing old? Did you have role models? Reflect on how those models for aging have influenced your thinking. To gain some perspective about aging, take a moment to think about how you have grown and matured over time. What have you overcome that you are proud of? How do you feel in your own skin today as compared with five, ten, or twenty years ago? Recognize that everything you have experienced that brought you to who you are today has been a part of your aging. In just a few minutes, you can rearrange your thinking and rewire your brain. Once we have the ability and the skill needed to disrupt our patterns of ageist limitations, we can take the next step of looking to the future to focus on aging in the context of who we want to become. Once you have practiced slowing down your automatic thinking to gain awareness and insight into your own thought patterns, you can begin the next phase of designing your personalized aging experience. What do I want my elderhood to look like? I would place a wager that nobody has ever asked you this question before.

Drifting Too Far From The Shore

We prepare our children for their future as adults. We ask children to dream about who they want to become, what they want to achieve, and where they want to live. We dream together as young adults about our careers, life partners, travel, and accomplishments. Ageism and ableism keep us locked in and closed off to embodying our future possible selves in later life. Possible selves is a concept that was developed by two scholars, Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, as a mechanism to understand how the cognitive components of our hopes, fears, goals, and threats give meaning to who we would like to become.[1] Possible selves are intimately connected to who we were in the past and who we are today. The derivation of possible selves is bound by our individual sociocultural and historical experiences and influenced by models, images, and symbols in our immediate environment. This means that what we envision for our future self will be inextricably linked to our individual life experiences and challenges. There is no template, or right or wrong way, to approach your vision of your future possible self in elderhood. Structural and cultural ageism and ableism create a contextual environment that limits options for future possible selves in older age. The ageist and ableist world that we currently inhabit provides little hope of purpose, meaning, and contribution in old age. Our vision typically goes as far as a vague and fuzzy view of retirement as a final stage.

An Irrevocable Gesture

We are missing out on so many opportunities to carve our future paths. Ageism binds us to a visceral fear of loss and fear of relevance. Ableism obstructs acceptance of disability, dependency, physical decline, or deterioration. Ageism and ableism have conditioned us to believe that aging is a slow and steady disengagement from society, relationships, productivity, and contribution. As we have learned, aging is living, becoming, growing, and developing. In comparison, the process of dying is the cessation of living. It is a natural and normal part of the human condition to experience fear of death. Fear of death is a nuanced phenomenon encapsulating various constructs like fear of the dying process, fear of the unknown, and fear for those we will be leaving behind. To protect ourselves from the apprehension of death, we instinctively want to separate ourselves from the process of aging and those who remind us of our vulnerable mortality. The coping mechanism propelling us to seek shelter from the angst leads to a cycle of discrimination, first directed toward older people and then pointed at ourselves. We can try to hide from aging and death, but we can’t outrun them. Setting our intentions on accepting vulnerability, a good life during elderhood, and a good death is a far more productive approach, however challenging this may be.

Under The Thumb

Cognitively separating the fear of death and dying from the fear of aging can help us embrace and prepare for both. The beauty of elderhood is that it allows for a fluid and dynamic way to view aging and older age because it provides for all versions of possible selves. It provides the space for us to understand and embrace that we can continue to become who we are with physical illness or cognitive challenges. The illness is yours and it makes you who you are as much as your various achievements do. That alone is a subtle shift in thinking that could have a profound effect. Vulnerability, therefore, is not something that we need to treat or remedy but rather something that can be meaningfully embraced as a natural part of life’s course. Vulnerability, physical, psychological, and spiritual, is an integral part of human existence. It is so much easier to brush the fear of vulnerability under the rug and avoid negative emotion than it is to admit to ourselves that we are always vulnerable. Understanding your aging as a holistic process with interconnected spheres of human development helps to counter the dominant narrative of aging as a singular process of decline. Viewing aging as a biopsychosocial and spiritual phenomenon gives us the tools to understand that aging is transactional. We are the culmination of our experiences and influences in multiple and interacting domains. Biologically our aging is influenced by our genetic inheritance and gene expression, our habits such as eating, sleeping, and level of activity, and exposures to elements in our surroundings.