It is so common to make assumptions about what it must be like to grow old. Often it is done without awareness or malice intended. Dr. Marc Agronin, a geriatric psychiatrist at Miami Jewish Health Systems, wrote an essay recently that all should read. It's a reminder of how we think about aging, skewed at times, even when being helpful and empathetic. To read the one page essay, click here. Excerpts of the New York Times piece are below.
The old woman had drawn down the shade in her room - hoping, I imagined, to stop the midday Miami sun from penetrating her grief. But the sun still hit the window full force and illuminated the shade like a Chinese lantern.
She sat silently in a wheelchair, her 93-year-old silhouette stooped in the bathing light. I entered, held her hand for a moment and introduced myself. "Sit down, doctor," she said politely.
I asked her why she had come to the nursing home, and she described the recent passing 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 in close and spoke.
"I'm so sorry," I told her. "What has it been like for you losing your husband after so many years of marriage?"
She paused for a moment and then replied: "Heaven...."
As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the psychologist's fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it....
But I was wrong....
We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs for intimacy even in the most debilitated elderly. Our youth-centered culture equates love with sex; in contrast, I have seen with my older patients that love can be an endlessly blossoming flower, felt and expressed in hundreds of ways. A friend's mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease has fallen in love with another resident on her floor, and they walk around holding hands and snuggling with a newfound innocence that perhaps only their memory loss restored.
In the end, there is a cost to our myopic view of aging. We imagine the pains of late-life ailments but not the joys of new pursuits; we recoil at the losses and loneliness and fail to embrace the wisdom and meaning that only age can bring. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the sentiment well:
For age is opportunity no less
Than youth itself, though in another dress,
And as the evening twilight fades away
The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.
Here's to opening our eyes and hearts to the possibility that even we, those who work for aging services organizations, may look through a "narrow prism" at times, even when we don't intend to.
