Contributing Writer
Dr. Sabrina Anderson
Aging, bravery, courage, and the life course.
How must bravery and courage be associated with the entire concept of aging? Physical, emotional, and relational challenges may turn unexpected corners. No one expects tragedies even as you try to be covered for them with health, life, car insurance, and prenuptial agreements.
In an effort to anticipate aging difficulties, one’s actual experience going through it is profoundly more difficult. Thought you would die before your spouse, child or grandchild? These are brutally painful tragedies that one might go through. You must wake each morning with bravery to get dressed, function and live through it, because you were left on this Earth for a reason. You have a task, a mission, a care, left to conduct.
If you have been left to age after losing a precious loved one, the grief may leave you destroyed and immobile. How can you possibly get dressed or feed yourself today? The Lord gives us His strength, causes us to hear His loving kindness in the morning, for on Him do we lean and in Him do we trust. He causes us to know the way wherein we should walk, for we lift our inner selves to Him.
Aging is not always visible to others as in the case of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), dementia or Trans ischemic Attacks (TIA). My profound hearing loss is unseen. Others are not always aware of your suffering. Courage in aging is displayed in tangible actions. Communicate gently that you have an unseen difficulty.
Save anger for your wood chopping or bread kneading. No one wants to hear you go on about your aging aches, pains or heartache unless they love you.
Act without harshness, huffing or puffing in your driving, gestures and words. Display a calm face even if the best you can muster is frown-free. So, I reiterate, kindness in your words, facial expressions, gestures, and actions are some visible signs of courage and bravery to aging through adversity.
Showing courage and bravery also shows love. C.S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.
But in that casket--safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable…The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers…of love is Hell”.
Think of aging as a piggy bank. As you achieve another day of courage, you have made a silver dollar deposit in your little bank. With deposits adding up, you will succeed at aging gracefully and have a life well-lived. Magazines and books are in abundance offering ideas, thoughts, and advice for activities to keep you engaged.
Are you financially stable with a little extra to engage in activities, hobbies and luxuries? Are you a pampered spouse that does not clean your own toilets? Your aging definitely looks different than many, if not most. If you are well off, do you continually worry that your money will run out before your days? I knew a person who disposed of their faithful, God-fearing spouse literally out of fear they would consume too much money not leaving enough money for themselves.
As C.S. Lewis defined, there is only one place this person will feel perfectly safe.
The middle class and those below the federal poverty level outnumber wealthy aging Americans. Food assistance (FA), temporary cash assistance (TANF or TCA), and Medicare are tools to help. The process to qualify for FA and TCA is cumbersome, requiring significant effort. A poor aged soul may use all their courage to go down to the store and purchase the four little items they can afford with their remaining social security dollars for the month. Still, they may be short $.87 cents and the clerk digs it out of the change cup for them. Think about the courage that required.
So where does aging courage and bravery come in for each of these? Each must make daily choices on where their best energies must be applied. For the wealthy aged soul their bravery may be tested in fear of the future, fear of losing what they have, fear of not having enough.
A pampered person I know owns closets full of clothes, tools for multiple hobbies and only stews about more for themselves. Bravery is evidenced in the generosity of self, spirit, love and giving. It takes courage to give without expectation, and to share your time and attention.
Finally, it is not simply the physical difficulties of aging that require courage and bravery, but the ability to love.
Be brave, age gracefully with courage.
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Dr. Sabrina Anderson lives on
Pine Island in Southwest Florida.
DrSabrinaAnderson@outlook. com
