Old age and Young tight Prism

The old woman had drawn the shade in her room - hoping, I imagined, to stop the Miami midday sun penetrating your pain. But the sun still reaches the strength of the entire lighted window and the shadow, like a Chinese lantern.

He sat quietly in a wheelchair, his 93-year-old, hunched on the bathroom light. I went in, took her hand for a moment and introduced myself. "Sit down, doctor," he said kindly.

I asked him why he had come to the nursing home, and described the recent death of her husband after 73 years of marriage. I was overwhelmed by the thought of her loss and wanted to offer some words of comfort. I leaned against the fence and spoke to him.

"Sorry," he said. "What was your lost her husband after so many years of marriage?"

He paused a moment and then replied: "Heaven."

Seeing my astonishment, smiled and went on to describe how he had endured decades in an unhappy marriage with a man rude, verbally abusive.

As he spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely out. In my empathy wrong he had committed what William James called the psychologist's fallacy, assuming erroneously that one knows what anyone else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sorrow and decrepitude is held, and I felt bad about it.

I was wrong. It had fallen into the abyss. He was glad to have finally gained a degree of freedom and was determined to make the best of it. As his life took place in the residence during the next year, embarked on new activities and relationships in a way that was quite unexpected.

All of us fall into such erroneous impressions of aging from time to time. It is due in part to an age-centered perspective, we see our own time as the more normal times, the way life should be. At 18 years old 50 years old may seem, but 50 are inclined to say the same for the 80 years of age.

"So what do you really want to be old?" I often ask my patients, who are mostly in the 80 and 90, and the answers are unexpected.

"I forgot it was so old," a patient 100 years old, told me recently, and then declined to do so in time bingo.

This age-centrism is particularly pervasive in people's attitudes toward nursing homes. Too often we imagine that life seems to end at the door of the nursing home - which is devoid of love and loneliness, with death hovering nearby.

We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs of privacy, even weaker in the elderly. Our youth culture is centered on love as sex, on the contrary, I have seen with my older patients that love can be a flower in bloom endless felt and expressed in hundreds of ways. Mother of a friend who suffers from Alzheimer's in love with another resident on the floor, and they walk hand in hand and snuggling with the innocence of a newly discovered perhaps just restored her memory loss.

We also project our fear of death in the elderly, on the assumption that fear and depression should watch the last years of life. And yet, in my 15 years working in nursing homes, I have never heard a patient that he or she was afraid of death. Sometimes there is acceptance, anticipation before, but more often than not a big concern. Life goes on in the shadows.

In the end, there is a cost for our myopic view of aging. We can imagine the pain of ailments later in life, but not the joy of new activities, that the decline in loss and loneliness and embrace the wisdom and the sense of that age can only bring. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the sentiment well:
For age is opportunity no less
that youth itself, though in another dress,
and as the evening twilight fades away
the sky is filled with stars, invisible by day. I am from www.storeingame.com

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