Is This A Coincidence?

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Nicky Mendenhall
  • March 9, 2022
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Is this a coincidence?

On Saturday, as you are reading this, I will be meeting Sullivan, my first great-grandson. Is it just a coincidence that this past week I’ve found myself pulling books from my shelf on aging?

Many of you know about my habit of pulling books off the shelf, opening them at random and seeing where they take me. In these times we are living in, this is a safe and easy form of travel.

The book I selected this week: The Grace in Aging: Awaken As You Grow Older by Kathleen Dowling Singh. The back cover blurb says she is old enough to be eligible for Medicare. That gives her credibility in my book.

Here’s one sentence from Singh’s writing that caught my attention. “To live a life of an elder is to ripen into being that is more than simply elderly. More than just old. It involves ripening into clear-eyed acceptance of the way things actually exist.”

You will notice that the statement I picked out positively reframes aging and makes use of the word elder, which to my mind is a special form of older. This may be to counter the voice in my head that reminds me how my mother would say growing old is hell. I don’t want to remember that, so I return to Singh’s sentence.

Her words resonate with my lived experience of Freudian psychoanalysis, where one remembers the past and the present in a more focused way. Persistent exploration in this way creates a new, more well-rounded reality, one that is grounded in fact. This is hard work.

I’m feeling a reluctance to think about the reality of aging. I start to cry. Tears run down my face as I recognize a new piece of reality: I have, so far, lived longer than my mother but not as long as my father. 

I want to read more about Grace in Aging. Singh can support me.

And it is reality that I am going to meet my great-grandson. 
Copyright © 2022 Nicky Mendenhall, All rights reserve
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