Let me Introduce Myself, as a Newly Old Person

The first installment of a new blog about 'training for old age'

Photo by James Bruce on Unsplash

Eastrose Unitarian Universalist Fellowship was tiny when Michael and I first started attending in the 1990s. We were one of about three new, young families. Eastrose had just been through some hard times. Lots of people had departed. When we arrived, the only people left were the stalwarts, who were pretty old.

But we found them to be great people. We enjoyed acquiring 15 to 20 energetic new parents/grandparents—quirky and full of opinions. When I signed my boys up for religious education at Eastrose, I met Eleanor Hunting, the DRE (Director of Religious Education). My favorite grandmother had just died, but Eleanor looked and sounded just like her. Our meeting was like a baby duck imprinting onto a mama duck!

Nothing stays the same, and Eleanor kept getting older (not me, though). I remember visiting her home when she could no longer attend Eastrose regularly. She now needed a walker. As we sat and talked, she confided that it was tough getting older. She said, “I wish I knew earlier what I know now.” (Of course, who doesn’t think that at one time or another). Then she leaned in toward me and said with emphasis, “I should have trained for old age.” We laughed. It was a funny moment, but the phrase stuck with me. She died in 2016 at 99 years old.

I’ve thought about that phrase off and on over the years. I’m a short drive from my parent’s home. I started worrying about and caring for my parents over five years ago. I was the proximate daughter, and we all know what that means! I spent a lot of time with them. My father died in 2018, the same year my mother had a major stroke. She stayed in her home for the next five years with a lot of help from some wonderful caregivers. Recently, she died.

A young father, Stephen Marche, writes, “When I ask my friends when they felt they became a man, it was when they became a father, or they lost a father.” However, when you turn 70 years old, just when your last parent dies at 93 years old, you aren’t becoming a woman. You have been a woman for a long time. No, you are looking at old age. Just the beginning of it, but yes, old age. What I have in common with the young father is that he was looking at moving into a new stage of life with clear-eyed affection for the future. I am doing just that, moving from one stage of life into another. How I move forward into this new life interests me right now.

Over the last five years, as I watched my parents decline, the phrase, ‘training for old age,’ increasingly came up in the back of my mind. I learned a lot from my parents about aging. They did a lot of it right. The phrase started to guide me. When I discovered I had osteoporosis, I began exercising for bone health. ‘I’m training for old age,’ I thought matter-of-factly. I would use Eleanor’s phrase when I told others what I planned to call this new blog. If they were older, I would get a thoughtful laugh. There was something about the phrase that was meaningful and even hopeful. It acknowledges that old age has challenges, joys, and complexities and encourages dealing with them directly.

I already have a blog, Natural Religion, that many of you signed on to. I stopped writing it right after my mother’s death. Training for Old Age is its new incarnation. Many of the topics of natural religion will still flow into this new blog. They will show up as I integrate natural religion into my life, change my habits, and become more fully an old person. Because training for old age is not just caring for your body through diet and exercise. It’s about how your life changes as you age and how to minimize or avoid losing your way.

Let’s get training!