Renie Schapiro.
As a director of the Senior-Student Partnership program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health in the early 2000s I researched old age as if I were a cultural anthropologist. The elderly seemed like a different species from my 50ish-year-old self.
Our program was aimed at showing future doctors that old age was more than a discombobulated patient with a broken hip in a hospital room, worried, hurting, demanding and a little cranky. We paired each first-year medical student with an independent senior in the community to give them a fuller understanding of aging.
As time has passed, I now find I have morphed into one of those seniors. The program no longer exists, but if it did, I would today make a good senior partner.
When I ran the program, I asked the seniors what they wanted medical students to know. I repeatedly heard, “We may look old and wrinkled on the outside, but inside we are the same person we have always been.” I hear those same words from my peers today.
When I did presentations to seniors, I was surprised to be asked to speak more slowly. These days, I am amazed at how fast young people speak.
When I asked seniors if it was okay for students to ask them questions about their personal health habits, one senior laughed at me and said, “We talk about our bowels over dinner.” Eww, I thought at the time. Today I am well acquainted with the workings of my friends’ sometimes incorrigible digestive systems.
Perhaps what surprised students the most was that seniors were less worried about their future physical health than whether they would get dementia and become a burden to their loved ones.
If I had listened more carefully to those seniors more than 20 years ago, I might have been better prepared for my own aging. I might not find the aging process so, well, surprising.
But what young person thinks about their later years? Who thinks a conversation with an older person about their losses and challenges sounds like fun? If we are lucky to be in our youth, why imagine ourselves otherwise?
My friends and I are traversing our later years, pretty much making it up as we go along.
In our 20s and 30s, life had a clearer direction, if you took the traditional path: Find meaningful employment, a partner, and if you want a family, start it. In middle age, you play out those decisions.
What is the equivalent for your 60s, 70s and 80s?
On long walks, a good friend and I invented a framework for our retirement years. We came up with several aspirations. Take care of personal health and wellness; continue to learn and grow; stretch ourselves into unfamiliar and even uncomfortable territory; enjoy rich social connections; and be of service to others.
We were fortunate to be able to contemplate such a rich new stage of life. I don’t take this for granted. I feel gratitude every day.
But I make my plans humbly, recognizing that more than at any other time, life is shrouded in uncertainty. In youth, I may not have foreseen every bump ahead, but I had a sense that mostly I could evade disaster. I felt autonomy.
Now setbacks seem never distant enough. I see a call on my phone from my friend’s husband and my instant reaction is “Oh no, did something happen to her?” It turns out she was just using his phone. I need to remind myself to assume the best.
Yes, I still buy green bananas. But I do wonder about planning that vacation a year in the future.
A get-together with friends too often becomes the proverbial organ recital — each person has some body part going awry that they want to discuss. One challenge is recognizing that we cannot always be fully repaired. Unhealthy conditions can’t always be cured. Youthful bodies are for the young. It’s so damn obvious, yet so damn hard to accept.
I now appreciate what the senior told me years back: that she is still the same person inside. But no matter how youthful I feel, I am constantly reminded that others see me otherwise.
A friend and I ride the bus to campus twice a week to audit a class as part of UW-Madison’s great senior auditing program. The first time we got on a crowded bus, young students stood up and gave us their seats. Wow, we thought, what nice young people.
But when it kept happening, we began to wonder, with a little outrage, do we look too decrepit to be able to stand? What if they knew that, after class, we briskly walk two miles back home? As if going through the stages of grief, we finally arrived at acceptance.
Ah, acceptance. It’s proven to be another challenge — but also benefit — of this age. Our aging brains seem to make it easier to accept and move on from things that would have bogged us down in younger days.
Hey, sometimes it’s better to sit, than to stand.
Renie Schapiro is retired from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and lives in Madison.
