Though Boo wasn’t my “real” grandfather I could not miss the realness of his final days. Despite the sticky doorknob, the smell of last week’s lunch, dead flowers, and the junk pile obstacle course, I made my way to his bedside. The clutter used to spark an uncomfortable itch throughout my body, but I’d accepted it. His 98-year-old body was tired, but his spirit was very much alive as he pondered the end.
Posts tagged #elderhood
Growing Older In America: The New Culture Wave
When I was a kid, my grandparents appeared to be permanently ancient in my eyes. Grandma smelled like cookies and mince pies. Grandpa (retired from working on the line at Chrysler at age 65) smelled of gardens and woodworking. The oldest person on TV in 1963 was Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. She was portrayed as a cross between a beloved spry old chicken and your slightly demented next-door neighbor for whom you shovel the sidewalk each winter. Although this show presented a few progressive plot lines about class conflict, you still could not have made an episode about seniors and bathrooms 30 years ago for TV. Only when us baby boomers began to ride the cultural wave of aging in America did perceptions of what it meant to be an elder start to change.
The Autumn of our Lives
One of the many reasons people enjoy living in Michigan is our four seasons: spring, summer, fall, and winter. The seasons can also be described as birth, growth, maturity, and death, or child, teen, adult, and elder. Four seasons gives a year rhythm, and yet we are better at some beats then others. Culturally, we praise awakening and increasing—spring and summer, childhood and teen—far more than we appreciate maturity and death, fall and winter, adulthood and elderhood.
