 Welcome to my program, the Think Tech Hawaii program. Don't just age, engage. My name is Larry Graham and every two weeks here at two o'clock, Tuesday, on Think Tech Hawaii, we discuss the issues around aging. Some of those issues are external, have to do with resources. How do we make a living will? How do we prepare the way for housing? How do we engage a system of aging and a medical system that is troubling? But today I wanna look at some of the internal experience that you have in the process of aging. And that is that aging aggravates grief. I wanna focus on that because too often we think that, yeah, what aging people are doing are just getting angry. They just get upset with everything. And we tend to take that to ourselves too and don't really understand that perhaps what's going on is a deep and profound sense of grief. So we're gonna look at that today. But just as a preliminary, let me introduce a little bit of groundwork for how I think. This is don't just age, engage on Think Tech Hawaii. But my concern is that people as we age can make an extraordinary elderhood for ourselves. And we can do it when we make a transition between adulthood and elderhood and clear the way for us to be fully involved and engaged in that process. I am fond of thinking of, I'm not the stage theory person, a stage development, developmental stage theory. If you know Jean Pioget or Eric Erickson from back in the 1960s, 1960s, 50s, 60s or Colbert who developed thinking about how we develop morally. Then you have an idea about stage theory. James Fowler took stage understanding of the stage development theory into faith and created a book called Life Maps in which he looked at the map of how faith develops as we go from one stage to another. And there are many ways of identifying these stages. Some of them are very particularly detailed, small stages from one to another. I guess I should move this way. And I like to think of just, I identified four stages that I like to work with in my own frame of reference and thinking. First stage is childhood. We go through childhood and we are learners, we're students. And as we learn, we are learning about the world, we are learning about ourselves, we learn how to manipulate the world, how to get what we need, we're students and all of that. And that goes actually into our adolescence. But I think about the next stage, once we are kind of completed important dimensions of learning, the next stage is adulthood, where we are producers, we are creators, we create families, we help develop human beings in our families and develop ourselves too. We produce business students, we create, creatively engage in the callings that we feel we have, we produce communities, we produce the society in which we live and in which we've inherited. So yeah, we're producers, we're householders. We're people who take responsibility for the world in which we live. And that's our adulthood. And we take all kinds of roles in our adulthood and we fulfill those. And then there's a time that we start asking the question, really what's it all about? Now, Carl Jung said this came at about age 35 in the Western male in particular, the 35, 30 to 35, I think into 40 years old, male and female and both. And we ask that question, what's it all about? We ask that question again, which we asked in the 20s, who am I? Who do I wanna be? Who am I and what is my future going to be like? And then we move from adulthood to what I call adulthood. Now, it's just not my name for it. Elderhood is a concept that's gained a lot of traction in the social sciences since the 1990s. And adulthood can be, I think is marked by the kinds of things that come up in our life that kind of present themselves and they have to be dealt with. Now, the first set of those are things that have to do with transition from adulthood to elderhood. We make a transition. It's a very important transition. And most of us really don't have any examples of good, the people who have made that transition well. A lot of us just are on our own to try to figure it out. And the transition is marked by and facilitated by engaging in five spiritual tasks. Five spiritual tasks that I came to understand by listening to people's stories, listening to how people thought about this and I developed my own work in personal coaching for life and faith, particularly in terms of creating your own extraordinary elderhood. If you visit my website there, well just let's go ahead and flash that website and you'll see that I've developed the global community for your extraordinary elderhood and participating in that community gives you access to one-on-one coaching, a group online experience and an educational process that will enrich your understanding of yourself and further enable you to engage in creating that extraordinary elderhood. I don't, too much of our social orientation is arranged around people in elderhood becoming victims. I don't want you to be a victim. I'm part of this and the reason I have this program on ThinkTek Hawaii and I'm so grateful to ThinkTek Hawaii, please donate and help continue the process that we're involved in here in raising issues, personal and social issues in our society and in our culture with this marvelous ThinkTek Hawaii opportunity. But be that as it may and I hope you will donate. Not many models exist for us in our Western society and Western thinking to make that transition from adulthood to elderhood, a smooth and natural experience. I say we really kind of hate aging and we are very much afraid of dying and it's part of the natural process, all of that part of our natural growth process. We can think of our stages of life which I've mentioned, the student, the producer, the reflective and the elder wisdom stage I like to call it. We can think of those as the seasons of life certainly and much literature and music has been given over to the seasons of life and the seasons changed. I like that metaphor because the seasons change. We don't hurry them. We don't slow them down. We can't decide to opt out of them. Well, we can opt out of them. But I'm awfully glad to say that most people I work with have opted in to aging through those stages. But it's this transition between adulthood and elderhood that I am focusing on. And one of the first things that I've noticed is that there's a great deal of grief as we go from one stage to another. Now, that's true of any of those stages, any of those stages. We have changes that are inherent in our growth. After all, if we're not changing, we're not alive. Life is change. And certainly as we change into the elder years, we're experiencing some pretty profound and deep changes. They're actually extensive and that they encompass a wide range of human experience. And they're also intensive and that they are very profound changes. And at that point, the season metaphor kind of gives way because the season metaphor doesn't embrace the depth of profundity and that these changes can bring about in our lives. And therefore, personal coaching for life and faith is my way of making my skills, my orientation available to people so that you don't just age, you engage. And that's what we do here at ThinkDick Hawaii. The internal, the profundity of the change is most felt, I think, at first as grief. Now, we've sort of sold you a bill of goods, we leaders in social sciences and religion. I'm a Presbyterian minister, I've been a pastor, I've been engaged in congregational life and all of my career. And then into chaplaincy in long-term care and hospice care. So I have worked with this stage of life in certainly in others all my career in those different roles. And now, of course, in myself as an aging person who is beyond the age of 65, by the way, there's over 260,000 elders in Hawaii and people over the age of 60. That's 260,000, which is nearly a quarter of the population. Now that's just in Hawaii. Globally, of course, it's a huge number. And there are ways in which we engage each other globally because of the internet and because of this wonderful communication tool that we have. But now back to the stages, changes in stages. We move from adulthood to elderhood. And in that transition, we experience a great deal of loss. What are the losses that you can name that you notice perhaps observed in other people, family, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters? What are the changes and losses that have gone along with those changes that you can say you have noticed in their lives? Usually we start with the physical. Physically, we, of course, usually are dragged into adulthood with some physical changes. I was in conversation with a good friend of mine in Denver last night who noted that he had gone through some tremendous urinary problems that he had never had before. Pain like he had never had before. He also noted that he had lost a sense of security in the world, that as he evaluated what's going on in the world and how it affects his family, his children, his grandchildren, he is much more distressed about the future than he has ever been before about the future of the world. Here are these changes that have really, along with which go these sense of loss, a physical loss of viability, a physical loss of resilience, a physical loss of peace in the body. Suddenly the body seems to take on a kind of hostility towards ourselves and it's difficult for us at times to really let go of that and almost impossible at first. So physicality can bring that on, bring on a lot of change in that rich area of our lives. That can be that change and sense of loss. What has been your physical sense of loss in yourself? I used to be a football player. I was in good shape. I now, I had knee operations in the 1970s and my doctor said, you can't have knee operations in the 1970s and not expect arthritis in your knees in the 2000s. And that is indeed what I experienced. So yeah, I've lost, physically lost the ability to run a certain degree of agility and confidence in that agility, which I used to be able to trust on the time. That's a loss for me. I lost my marriage in a transition that I had in Denver. I lost, in a sense lost my closeness of my children when I moved to YE four years ago from Denver, Colorado. I lost my grandparenting closeness to my grandkids. I lost the immediacy of friendships there that I had where I could go out for a cup of coffee with a friend at the drop of a hat. All of those loss, those are losses that are not necessarily physical losses, but are relational losses. I lost the sense of who I am. I lost the sense of who I am as a chaplain for a while. I reconnected with that when I became a chaplain here in hospice care and was able to, once again, use what I think are cherished gifts. I also do that. I see myself as a chaplain for the world now and the community chaplain. And that helps me because I like having those roles. But one of the things we lose as we go from this adulthood and producer life to elderhood, reflective life as we lose our sense of self is defined by those roles. Now, most of us experience that as loss and it is a loss of what are the roles that you use to define yourself, your business role, your relational roles with your family members. Everyone has been telling you who you are by virtue of the relationships they've had with you by virtue of the producing processes that you've been engaged in. And as you move from adulthood to elderhood, you can feel those roles falling away. You're no longer those roles. In fact, you never were those roles. Who you are, the person, the entity that you truly are, but I refer to as the true self. The Hindus call it the true self, the Brahman. The true self, and I like to think of it as in Christian terms as child of God, you are a child of God and that will never change. And in all of those roles, all of those stages, we have been children of God, which means that we carry the divine nature in everything that we are and everything that we do. So those roles were really not definitions of the true self in my opinion. Definition of the true self is that you are a child of God and that will never change and that is always the same. And so when we move through these transitions and feel so insecure and truly we do, it's reconnecting with that reality in our consciousness that the reality that we are part of the eternal and the unchanging that I is one way of dealing with that grief, but grief itself, I have a little couple of memes that I'd like to share with you. The first one is this gentleman who says, welcome to elderhood. What are you doing for the rest of your life? And that's really the question that comes up, isn't it? It has for me. And I've had to respond to that question. It's such a cusp issue. You're on the cusp. What am I gonna do with the rest of my life, that elderhood? We are leaving behind something very important. Look at the next meme that is fun. We were young and beautiful, but now we're just beautiful. The idea here is that they're connecting with that which is unchanging. We're connecting with that which is beautiful and wonderful in every human being, an expression of the divine love and grace. But grief, we've sold you all the goods. We kind of suggested to you that grief is a peak at the experience of loss and then it sort of declines over the year. It peaks else to other times and then declines, beaks. And mostly we've seen it as a sense of a feeling of loss, a feeling of bereavement, of being bereft, a feeling of being a painful feeling. And it is. However, I want to suggest to you that this grief, this, along with this loss as you move into elderhood and sometimes through elderhood, the loss surfaces as rage. It surfaces as this orientation. It surfaces as fear. It surfaces as this, sometimes as joy. It surfaces as a need for companionship and compassion. It surfaces loneliness and all of these emotions are expressed in various ways when I was working long-term care. And in hospice care as well, we would have family meetings and in the family meetings, the families would often talk about the experience of rage that their family member has. And they would search for reasons why this was so and they would oftentimes blame it on the facility that the facility wasn't doing its job properly. And if the facility was just covering all the bases, then their loved one wouldn't be angry. And I would compliment, comment that this is also part of grief, of their loved one losing everything that made sense to them in their world. And it surfaces as anger. One of my favorite poems is the Dylan Thomas poem, Rage, Rage Against the Dying of the Light. Do not go gently into that dark night. Rage Against the Dying of the Light. Excuse me, I misquoted that. And if you'll look on a search on YouTube for that Dylan Thomas program, Michael Sheen does a beautiful rendering of that in his Welsh accent. People rage against the dying of the light. We naturally rage against this transition. We naturally rage against this loss, which seems so unfair. And so the emotional state and spiritual state that we're in looks more like a round ball, a round ball of emotions, denial may be at the center, but then around that are all kinds of emotional experiences aggravated by aging. This rage, this fear, this disorientation, we're dislocated. And so I wanna sensitize you to the fact that, or to that range of emotions. I think the metaphor I use that's most helpful is when I've put my laundry in the dryer at the laundromat. Have you ever stood in front of those dryers? They have the big window door and you put your laundry in and turn on the dryer and you watch it just spin around and around and all of your laundry tumbles around, tumbles around. And I think grief feels like that. Grief feels just like that, tumbling around with all kinds of emotions. Now, one question that came up is, what's the difference between grief and bereavement? Good question. Bereavement comes from that word bereft when we've lost something and we feel bereft. Bereavement maybe refers to that longer experience of grief, stretch it out and work with it over a period of time. Goes along with another question here, which is, do we ever get over grief? How am I going to get over the grief of loss of a loved one, a sibling or an uncle or an aunt or even more difficult a spouse? Someone with whom I've been very close. One theory is that we finish our grief about something when we replace it. Now, you can't replace everything. You can't replace the loss. I mean, you can't replace my mother you've lost or a father you've lost. You can't replace a loved one you've lost or a sibling you've lost. Well, what we replace the reality, the person with is the memory and the new relationship that goes along with that memory. Now, I know some people have said to me and I accept what people say is their reality. I've said, you know, I felt my husband so close to me the other night. It was as though he was standing at the foot of the bed and we talked. Now, that to me is the new reality. That person is moving towards a new dimension of relationship with her husband and the grief will take on a different tenor, a different timber, a different feeling as she moves into that recollection. So yes, we replace what we can. Sometimes it's really replacing what's gone and my youngest daughter and Denver and their family lost their beloved dog that had been in Amanda's companion for so many years and so close. And the kids that her children had begun growing up with this and with this dog. Well, he died unexpectedly. And I noticed in a video that she recently sent me there's another puppy. So they've replaced what they lost and they will indeed love that puppy. So yes, we do finish griefs with replacement. We do replace what we've lost with a new memory, with a new relationship, a new immediate relationship. And sometimes that takes the help of a community who can support us and accept us. And finally, I'd say that's what's so very critical about moving into elderhood is having a community. Sometimes it's a matter of one person, sometimes it's a matter of several, a community with which we can talk these things over. We cannot talk about losing viability, physical or emotional or mental with our family members often because they don't wanna hear it. Our children don't wanna hear it. Our siblings don't wanna think about it. So where to whom do we turn to? Well, there are many people we can turn to. Pull up the next meme, please. It's a stage of wisdom and compassion and joy when it can be shared. Now it's wonderful if siblings, if, excuse me, if spouses can share that with each other and be honest with each other about the kind of loss they experience. Next meme, and here's one woman who suggests that every morning she wakes up and says, I'll never be as young as I am today. Ah, today is the youngest day of the rest of my life. Get up and do something fun. That's resolution and the reality that we can actually create something spectacular in this elderhood and we can engage rather than feel as though we're victims. I'm here every two weeks, aloha, come back, join me in Hawaii here and get a chance to reflect further on the significance of transition from adulthood to elderhood. A movement and a growth from your roles telling you who you are to you discovering again that you are refreshed as a human and as part of the eternal expression of eternity here in this world. You are a child of God. Aloha and be well. Thank you.