Better stories about getting older

Jefferson Breland

(4/2025)I am hearing more and more of my friends complaining about getting older. This is probably a function of my being 63 years old. My friends generally range in age from about 40 to 75 years old, so I have a pretty good sampling of the various complaints in this population.

It might be better to call them concerns. Complaints are often about a personal and temporary dissatisfaction and seem a bit more superficial to me.

Concerns are similar to complaints in that they both wish for something to be different. And they differ in the root cause of their expression. Concerns are rooted in worry and doubt about something important to us. It is a more of a request for reassurance or information about an ongoing situation, not simply a call for change in the present moment.

Curiously, the concerns of my friends are often the same whether they are 40 or 75. The concerns are mostly about their bodies changing, their minds changing, finding someone to spend the Autumn of their life with, and what’s wrong with the younger generations.

These concerns are based on our societal ideas about aging. One only need to go the birthday card section of Walmart or Target to see what these norms are. As the age on the birthday cards increases, the stories of inevitable decline and disfunction get worse and worse. We tend to accept these stories as the way life is.

And yes, as we get older our bodies change. We may be frustrated that we can’t do what we used to do. We may be frustrated that there are biases against older people seeking employment. We have fears about financial security. We want to maintain a sense of independence.

These are genuine concerns. I share them, too. I imagine these sorts of concerns are tens of thousands of years old. We are not alone in our concerns. Americans are living longer. Life expectancy in the United States has increased approximately 60% in the last 125 years.

According to the Centers for Disease Control/National Center for Health Statistics, in 1900, U.S. life expectancy at birth was 47 years. In 2023, U.S. life expectancy at birth was 78.4 years, with women having a life expectancy of 81.1 years and men 75.8 years. What to do with our aging population? The federal government began preparing for this inevitability in the 1930s.

A report by the Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Nursing Home Regulation, states that "the federal government first became involved in nursing homes with the passage of the Social Security Act of 1935. The Act established a federal-state public assistance program for the elderly called Old Age Assistance (OAA)…. This stimulated the growth of voluntary and proprietary nursing homes. By the time of the first national survey of nursing homes in 1954, there were 9,000 homes classified as skilled nursing or personal care homes with skilled nursing facilities." It also states that "in 1950, amendments to the 1935 Social Security Act authorized payments to beneficiaries in public institutions and enabled direct payments to health care providers. The 1950 legislation also required that participating states establish programs for licensing nursing homes."

A report by the Institute of Medicine (US) Committee on Implications of For-Profit Enterprise in Health Care states, "The nursing home industry has grown as a result of a multiplicity of factors. It has thrived on the infusion of public dollars (through a variety of programs), a growth in need due to changes in demographics and shifts in morbidity patterns toward chronic diseases, and the interplay of policies aimed at other institutions (e.g., almshouses, mental institutions, and acute care hospitals)."

I mention the above as a context for our current views on growing older and the accompanying concerns. In plain English, between 1920 and 1970, there was a shift in our society mainly due to changes in legislation, population increases, changing attitudes about elder care, the beginning of economic shifts that necessitated dual-income households, the increased need of medical supervision, and decreases in family size.

And so, housing our elderly family members in elder care facilities became an acceptable option due to necessity and economic factors.

This shift from having multigenerational households to separating younger family members from our older relatives has led to a limited and more negative view of aging. It is more difficult to see the gifts of our older family members and gifts we receive as we age.

In an interview in the early 1980’s, the actress Betty Davis said, "Old age ain't no place for sissies." Since then, variations on this statement have popped up like weeds in our society. I have heard: "Getting old isn’t for the weak." "Getting old isn’t for the timid." "Getting old isn’t for the feint of heart."

But like many weeds, there may be medicine in them we don’t yet recognize. By medicine, I am referring to what helps. If all we do is focus on what we can’t do or what hurts today, we are blind to the what we have now, what we didn’t have before.

The most important of these, which is the least obvious, is strength. Yes, strength.

It is probably not the physical strength we had when we were younger. It is the strength of being alive. It is our resilience.

Our strength is the wisdom we have earned and gained through our difficulties. Our most profound learning comes from being challenged on the body, mind, spirit levels.

If we have lived, we have had the opportunity to gain wisdom.

I am not talking about an idealized, capital "W," wisdom. I am talking about the wisdom that comes from the day to day living and learning what helps us and those around us. This day to day learning is unique to each of us. Many people can read books. That is simply knowledge. Wisdom comes from paying attention to the world around us and using it. If wisdom is too fancy a word for you, then call it experience.

Life is a gift. If we are alive, there must still be a purpose for our living. When my mother, Helen, broke here second hip within 10 months of breaking her first at the age of 94, she began to lose the will to live. She asked me and my brother to look into assisted dying. She lived in Washington state where it is legal.

We inquired, and since her broken hip was treatable, the doctors said assisted dying was not an option. They did not consider her mind or spirit. Helen asked me, "Why am I still alive?"

I replied, "You must still have a reason to live, a purpose you don’t see. It might be that you still have something to learn or something to teach. So, you either need to pay more attention to life or my brother and I need to get our act together to learn what you have to teach us."

Helen lived two more years living in our family home, cared for by her grandson. She experienced chronic pain and limited mobility. She also discovered the reason she was still alive.

Helen recovered her will to live by recognizing we weren’t ready for her to die.

She still had to teach us how to live when she was gone. We had more to learn. She also wanted us to remain together as a family despite any differences.

Her purpose for living was to be love and in doing so, she taught us to be love, too.

Our strength always lies in what we can do. Our strength lies in recognizing that if we are alive we still have a purpose.

That purpose may be as simple as finding the beauty of the world around us and learning to love unconditionally.

I didn’t say it would be easy, and it will be worth the effort because it is the most important thing we can do for ourselves and others.

Jefferson Breland is a board-certified acupuncturists licensed in Pennsylvania and Maryland with offices in Gettysburg and Towson, respectively.
He can be reached at 410-336-5876.

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