Coast Chronicles: You are here — thoughts on elderhood

Published 8:16 am Monday, April 25, 2022

“As a late-career writer, it feels like my job now is to figure out how to remain engaged with the world, in love with the world; how to not despair; how to keep seeking out plausible occasions for hope while remaining as brave and as honest as I’m capable of being.”

—Tony Kushner, playwright

A sunny day, a view of the bay

Is it the war in Ukraine that has me pondering my elderhood and my mortality? With so many issues to think and worry about, why this one? Why now?

One can’t deny that the images of bodies strewn on sidewalks, collapsed in parks, crumpled on streets is having an effect… on me and, I presume, anyone who follows the news. How can we live with the fact that right now, as I type, and as you do whatever you’re doing, both soldiers and civilians are trapped like rats inside the Azovstal Iron and Steel Works in Mariupol while Putin has pledged that “not even a fly will get through.” No food, no water, nothing that resembles a human existence is allowed to these people who were just weeks ago minding their own business, having their own lives, with perhaps nothing more on their minds than what to have for dinner or how to get the kids to bed. It’s a reminder that nothing in life is guaranteed.

The horror of Putin’s actions is so hard to fathom, and the destruction of not only lives but stunning architecture, priceless art, billions of dollars in human infrastructure, the richness of social organizations and neighborhood networks. Whole cities, fields and crops, human systems destroyed. How can one begin to calculate this senseless loss?

While here I am with a view of the bay, on a sunny day — bonus, our second in a row! — with minuscule agency to change any of this. I am despairing of our species.

Nearer to home, we have clear evidence that our politicians regularly lie to us. McCarthy who said, “No, that’s false news, that’s wrong” then was caught just hours later when we heard a recording of the exact words he declared he’d never said. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, on the stand, suddenly forgetting every TikTok posting, email, video and phone conversation she’d participated in denying Biden’s win during the run-up to the Jan. 6 insurrection. The fact that these and other outrages go largely unremarked by their political cronies is gob-smacking

How can we have faith in any of our elected officials, or even in ourselves, when this is the accepted climate?

Sand in the gears

First, I respond by thinking, I am so lucky, so grateful to be drinking a second cup of coffee in the sun on my front porch. Then this is quickly followed by guilt that I’m not doing more to right these many wrongs.

But in that now perhaps outworn adage, “Think global, act local,” I do continue to share my Nahcotta-based thoughts with you, volunteer and help with worthwhile projects (the Vet Lunch was so heart-warming), feed the birds, tend to Jackson’s needs, mow the lawn. These small actions provide tiny structural frameworks for my day; but hovering over me like thunder clouds are these larger storms, brewing not only in Ukraine across the seas but in our own nation. (We must remember that the Ukrainian war is not a regional conflict — it’s a battle for democracy.)

The chipping away at a woman’s right to make choices about her own body, the retro legislation that seeks to take us back to the middle of the last century on gay bashing, the tone-deaf politicians who cannot heed the call of alarm about global climate change, etc. I’m truly sorry if I’m putting too many dark thoughts into one paragraph, but really, how can we continue on this trajectory? What should/could we be doing to get ourselves out of this hole? We must throw sand in the gears.

On the Peninsula, I have friends who sit quietly together in Quaker-style gatherings every Saturday at the Ocean Park Library. (Our Timberland Library and its staff is one shining light in the gloom!) They find this calming and comforting; and perhaps it helps to create in them the equanimity to continue right action. I have other friends, writers and poets, who spend their time working behind the scenes to capture in language between covers thoughts on beauty, diversity, the miracles of the natural world, even hope. Visual artists continue to create canvasses that catch our eye.

I have friends and neighbors who make food and distribute it as needed to folks who are going through hard times, people with medical challenges, or those who’ve lost a beloved. So many acts of love circle around on our Peninsula. And maybe that should be enough; maybe that’s all we can hope for now.

But still, the clanging in my ears of injustice, the cycle of lessons learned then unlearned (the shooting in the back of the head of Patrick Lyoya — was George Floyd’s death so soon forgotten?) gets louder sometimes, so loud that I clench my fists at night.

Elderhood

Pull Quote

Now we are the elders. Now we are the ones holding the roof beams in place while our progeny buy crypto and have babies. We have hopes for them.

Then there’s this. In our Peninsula covid-pod, there was still one member-mother living; all our other parents had moved to, we hope, happier climes. But now our last pod-mom has passed into whatever paradise mothers fly to after their hard work on earth is done. We know what this means. Now we are the elders. Now we are the ones holding the roof beams in place while our progeny buy crypto and have babies. We have hopes for them.

In the U.S. we don’t have much of a tradition of listening to or valuing our elders, except maybe “elder statesmen” now appearing on TV to comment on the Ukrainian War. Though last week the Vet Lunch brought many Peninsula elders to the fore: Marian Lee, George Bess, Robert Simcoe, Jerry Nichols, Robert Rodgers served in World War II, Korea; and many others were on the job in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

I wonder what our vets think about the current state of affairs? (I bet they’re saying, “We’re still fighting wars? Clearly that has never solved anything.”) Though I see, because I feel it in myself, as one ages, one tends to lean out rather than leaning in. One tends to say, “I’ve done my part. It’s someone else’s turn.” One tends to pull away from contemporary events with an eye to more perplexing spiritual concepts. (Is there an afterlife?)

In my 20s, 30s, 40s I fought assiduously for the environment; then, as time went on, I began to realize that no battle is ever definitively won. Every new generation forgets, or never knew, or just re-litigates the same issues — so that we must again and again fight for clean air and water, social equity, human rights. Though often it’s not a circle looping back on itself but a spiral as new scientific knowledge is gathered, usually proving that old ways were sound. (How many times did our moms tell us to wash our hands?)

Does the arc of history bend toward justice? I want to say it does. Will Ukraine win this cruel 20th Century-style war with genocidal Russian aggressors? I want to think it will. Can we sustain the principle that every American citizen has a vote? Please make it so. Can we uphold, can we fight to make real the foundational proposition our democracy is built on: “liberty and justice for all”?

This elder hopes with all her heart we can right ourselves.