Tag Archives: age

A dignified ending

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I had a wonderful chat with a family member yesterday. She has a nursing background and is taking a course to become an end-of-life doula. In her words, we spend a lot of time helping to bring someone into this world, but don’t often give enough thought to that kind of support for people leaving this world. She also said something that stuck with me… we are very thoughtful and compassionate about caring for our pets end of life, more so than we are with humans.

When we see a pet suffering, we want to end that suffering. When a family member is suffering, we want them to hang on, to stay strong, and to endure for just a little longer. It makes me wonder, is this love and kindness or selfishness? Are we holding on for their sake or our own?

It’s one thing to want to end a life unnecessarily early, when counselling, support, and opportunities and potential for better days lay ahead… and yet another for someone with a painful and terminal illness. For the latter, there can be opportunities to make the process dignified and maybe even joyful.

In thinking about diseases of the mind, like Alzheimer’s, I wouldn’t want my family having to care for me while I can’t even remember them. If I had terminal cancer and was in pain every day, I would not want to drag out my end of life simply to prolong my daily suffering.

I can see a lot of value in an end-of-life doula to put the inevitable process of dying into perspective. To help provide not just support to a dying person but also to the family they leave behind. The process is not easy, and having kind and thoughtful support at such a stressful time is probably something many people would benefit from.

Hopefully I won’t be needing one any time soon, but it’s nice to know that there are people out there willing to provide caring palliative support to people in the same loving way we would provide end of life care for the animals we love.

Wear and tear

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I have shoes that I only use in my basement to go on my treadmill and stationary bike. The shoes have red soles. Yesterday while stretching I looked down at my treadmill and I saw two red lines on the track belt where my feet land when running.

They are a bit hard to see in the photo despite playing with the colour contrast, but they are quite visible when I look for them on the belt. I don’t know why, but it didn’t occur to me that I would be wearing down the treads on my shoes just running on a treadmill. Thinking about it now, it does make sense. I’ve been using these same shoes for five and a half years… of course they would have some wear and tear as I walk and run on a treadmill 4-6 times a week.

But had my soles not been red, leaving their marks on my treadmill, I probably would have ignorantly ran in the same shoes for another 3-5 years without replacing them. It’s funny how we take objects for granted, expecting them to work, not thinking about repairing or replacing them until they just don’t work anymore.

You aren’t likely to replace a kettle or toaster until it stops working. Your favourite jeans remain your favourite until they tear. That 5,000 hour light bulb was not something you ever thought would need replacing until it just doesn’t turn on.

While our bodies age and show signs of wear and tear, we don’t always think about other things that do until a repair or replacement are needed. But these worn down shoes can actually affect my stride and cause me issues before I realize they need to be replaced. They can affect my personal wear and tear.

What’s something you just expect to work until suddenly it doesn’t anymore?

Reflections of the past

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I noticed it just as I was hitting ‘send’. My daughter had sent a Snapchat from a cottage she was leaving, a quick note to her family to say that she enjoyed her little getaway. I sent a response photo, a quick selfie as a replay with a comment like, ‘Hope you had fun’ written over the image. I didn’t pose. I didn’t concern myself with how I looked. It was only a quick picture going to my family, and so I just clicked the photo, wrote the text, and sent the image off to the group chat… knowing that it would disappear just after my family saw it. That’s the thing about Snapchat, unless one of my family saved the image in the chat, it would be gone after they look at it.

Except, for a split second before I hit the send button I saw something I didn’t expect. I saw a reflection of my grandfather in the image of myself. This was unusual, because I don’t really look like him. Sure, I often see reflections of my dad in my own reflection, we have similar traits and they seem to converge as I age, but I don’t have a lot of similar features to my grandfather, my mother’s dad.

I’d only seen this once before, years ago, and again on Snapchat. I used the aging filter and for the first time ever I saw a resemblance to my grandfather when I added about 25 years to my current age. But this time there was no filter, no gimmick, just a quick, unposed image of myself and a peek of my grandfather looking back at me.

It has been almost a quarter of a century since my grandfather passed away. Just over 38 years since the other one passed. That amazes me, because some of the memories of them still feel close. A friend recently shared this about aging, “The days seem longer, and the years seem shorter.” This resonates with me. A day seems to last about a day long, it doesn’t fly by, but the years have. My reflection in the mirror is somehow older than it should be. The man looking back has seen more years than I expect him to see.

It was just a quick glimpse of my own reflection, but one that has me reflecting on how quickly time passes. One that has me appreciating those who have been part of my life, and are gone, as well as those who are here with me now. The years are short, but they are lengthened by the memories we form, the moments that are not just ordinary. If we don’t make efforts to connect with others and create special moments, then those moments are nothing more than Snapchat memories… gone moments after we look at them.

Gen X Wave

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We are in for a unique change in the workforce. We are approaching a wave of Generation X retirements and that’s leading to shortages in the workforce. Teachers, nurses, doctors, plumbers, and many more positions that AI won’t easily replace, are seeing retirements happen faster than they can be replaced.

So part one of the change is simple to see, and that’s workforce shortages. The other part of this wave is these same Gen X’ers taking on different jobs. People retiring in their late 50’s and early 60’s are not all going to leave the workforce completely. This will happen for a couple reasons.

They won’t leave because their pensions need to be subsidized to live the life they want to live, and they won’t leave because work gives meaning to a lot of them… being productive is important in feeling young and staying healthy. Some of these people will continue working in their old fields after receiving there pension, ‘double-dipping’ and earning both a pension and also doing their old job part time. But others will go into whole new fields.

This is a part of the wave that is undefined and even exciting. I think you are going to see an increase in ‘creatives’ who are going to be 55+ in age. Older social media influencers, and artists, and producers of creative content. You’ll see novelists whose first best seller was written after the author turned 60. You’ll see short, clever, high quality filmmaking and storytelling. You’ll see new companies going viral with first-time CEO’s and entrepreneurs who are also senior citizens.

When Gen X retires they are going to ‘hit different’. Then again they are a generation that seemed to define themselves as different all along. I’m excited to see how they hit retirement are redefine it in the coming years.

What’s my age again?

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My youngest turns 22 today. Sometimes I struggle to grasp how I am the father of 2 kids in their 20’s? Am I really that old?

I remember hearing old people – as in my current age – say that they didn’t feel very old. I remember the look on my dad’s face when I asked him how ‘my old man’ was doing for the first time. I remember being in my 20’s and seeing old people, like in their 50’s, on tv and thinking they were ancient.

In some ways I’ve earned my way here. In other ways I feel like an imposter pretending to be older and responsible. How did I get here? Wasn’t I just in my early 30’s?

My perspective on what ‘old’ means has changed year by year, or maybe decade by decade. My 60’s are just around the corner, so I guess 80 is old… for now. So what if younger me thought my current age was old, I’m not old… that word will always belong to people older than me!

Missing silence

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There are two things that make me feel old. One is my back, it aches in the morning and reminds me that I’m not young. It cautions me not to do any physical activities without warming up. It feels older than I feel. The other thing that makes me feel old is my hearing. First of all, I don’t have the range I used to, for example, I can’t hear the tones my fireplace makes when it is turned on and off. I can stand right by it, with my ear almost against it and I hear nothing to the surprise of my wife and daughter who ask, “How can you not hear that?”

But this is something I’m actually ignorant to, other than when I’m told to lower the TV. Although subtitles are always on for me, so I often don’t realize how much I rely on them compared to not having them and struggling. What really makes me feel old with respect to my hearing is my tinnitus, a constant tone that I hear all the time. Most days I can ignore it for long parts of the day. It sort of disappears and the sounds of activity around me drown it out. But when it’s quiet, like right now when everyone is in bed and it’s just me up clicking away on a laptop, this is when it really bugs me.

I don’t get to experience silence anymore. I miss it.

I miss it now, in the morning quiet of the house. I miss it at night when I’m trying to fall asleep. I miss it after a snowfall and the snow muffles all other sounds. I miss it when I’m trying to meditate and it distracts me and becomes the focus of my attention.

We don’t often appreciate what we have until we miss it. I miss silence.

Not so techie

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I’ve shared before about how I’m not as tech savvy as most people think. The reality is that I’m just willing to spend a lot of time getting to the bottom of an issue, and so my savviness has more to do with patience than with prowess. That said, I’m getting very frustrated with the technology challenges that seem to be coming my way that I can’t solve. A couple days ago the WordPress App stopped working. I could no longer save anything on it and so I couldn’t write posts on my phone. I deleted and re-installed the app, I tried logging in with my back-up access account, and then I gave up and finally moved to the Jetpack App that I have been begrudgingly avoiding. I didn’t want to make the switch because it forces block editing, which I think is clunky and works against me, rather than helping me with my writing. Now that app won’t work with my blog either. Maybe that’s a good thing because I wanted to write on my laptop rather than phone, so this might be the push that I needed.

Still, this wasn’t my only technology challenge this week or today. My wife is with her parents and her dad can’t access his Shaw mail. It’s an issue on his computer because my wife can access it on her phone and I can access it on my computer, so it has to be an issue with his machine. But the account uses web-based access and I suggested updating Chrome, and then we tried Firefox and while he can log into the account, he can’t click on any of the items in his inbox to read them on either web browser. The fact that I’m trying to give support over Facetime doesn’t make it an easier. I have Teamviewer (to take over a computer remotely) on my mother-in-law’s computer, but not on my father-in-laws, and while I’ll set that up soon, I didn’t feel like doing that for what I thought was a minor issue, and with my wife there, the support itself went fast, even if we couldn’t figure out the issue.

So here is my little rant, why does it seem that there are a lot more things breaking rather than working these days? I have to manually share my blog posts on social media because the tools I try to use (and have even paid for) don’t seem to work consistently. My wife gets a new phone and I spend a week updating issues that come up that were not a problem with the old phone. I upload a new plugin (after the issue with the WordPress login – yes I thought about that being an issue already), and it takes an hour to move from the free version to the paid one. I get stuck on a technical issue and google searchers seem less helpful than they used to. I buy a new toaster oven and the extra features make it harder to use and less convenient than the old one. I can’t decide if I’m getting old and curmudgeonly, or if things are being made less convenient and harder to repair?

In any event, I’m not feeling so techie right now. I seem to be coming across issues that are too hard for me to fix, and my patience is thinning. Cue the memes about old people not understanding technology… I hope that’s not me despite my little rant.

That’s a Nope for Me

I was at a dinner meeting and one of the group rode up in an electric unicycle, ‘a self-balancing personal transporter with a single wheel’. It looks like a lot of fun. A younger me would have loved to hop on it and give it a try… but that’s not me anymore.

I love adventure, I love trying new things, but I also like going to bed without being in agony. I enjoy when my back feels the same age as me and not like it’s 20 years older. And I know that one minor fall from an electric unicycle can launch me into a world of pain.

It’s not about lack of wanting to try, it’s self-preservation. I’ve learned (usually the hard way) that some activities have an expiry date on them. It’s not based on how old the activity is, it’s based on how old I am… And an electric unicycle’s expiry date went off about a decade ago. That’s a nope for me.

Who I used to be

One of the funniest ‘athletes getting older’ stories I know is one of a former national water polo player who was somewhere around 60 years old and playing in a game against an enthusiastic teenager. The old guy swam into the hole (centre position) and the you scrappy kid was all over him. The ball came into the hole and the overactive kid fouls the old guy… a normal thing in the game of water polo, but the kid was a bit aggressive. After the foul the old guy looks back at the kid and says, “Hey, don’t you know who I used to be?”

It’s fair to say that I used to be an athlete. I played water polo at a high enough level, and trained hard enough to say so. And while I’m pretty fit now, and probably in better shape than 70-80% of people my age, I am not an athlete. I don’t say that disparagingly, but I don’t play any sports, and I’m very much past my prime. Where this comes into play is in my inability to really push myself.

I see it specifically in training certain muscles. I struggle to go past 80% effort. That’s the challenge point for me. If I really like an exercise, I remember how to push hard, but if I don’t like it, I struggle. I’ve lost that ‘athlete’s edge’ where I can push through the discomfort and really give my maximum effort at will.

That’s why I say I used to be an athlete. It’s not about the fitness, it’s not about feeling positive about how well I take care of myself (I do). It’s about the lack of ability to really push myself to a point past the threshold of discomfort that athletes can do every workout.

Maybe I’m just out of practice, and I need to have a sport as a reason to train? Maybe it’s that I’m more externally motivated and I need a team relying on me? Perhaps if I joined a gym and was surrounded by people I’d push myself more than I can training at home alone.

In any case, I know who I am now and who I used to be, and I’m good with that. I might have been an athlete, but now I’m a guy who wants to still be fit and healthy in 25 years. I don’t want to run a marathon, and I’m too crappy a swimmer and not willing to do the work to get back in the pool and play water polo again… but I am going to push where I can, be smart about how much weight I move around so I don’t hurt myself… and every now and then push to my max and remember who I used to be.

Time in, time out

There is a certain wisdom that comes with age, with the passing of years and the recognition that more than half your life has passed. I’m not talking about how my days are numbered or anything like that, but rather that the time we have left is worth something. So how do we use our time? What do we put time into… and what do we get out of that time?

I have a good job that is in the service of others. I get good job satisfaction out of my work, but I also put a lot of my time into my work. I have an awesome family that I’d like to spend a bit more time with… and do, like our recent vacation to Spain. I have a small group of friends that I definitely want to spend more time with. I have a weekly walk and coffee with a friend, and I have regular events (plays & musicals) where my wife and I go out with 2 other couples we are close to. I have some awesome connections to my wife’s family and we meet for events like a dinner this long weekend. Beyond that I really don’t make time for friendships, and when I do it feels like an effort.

As I get older I’m seeing that the effort to connect with friends and family is vitally important. Vitally as in it fosters vitality. I spend so little time making the effort to connect to others I care about, but those connections are worth the effort. And if you don’t put the time in, you don’t get the reward out. My circle of friends is small, and I don’t want it any smaller. I need to make more time to connect to people whom I value… and who value me.

I need to make the time, because to quote a Canadian band, ‘They say, absence makes the heart grow fungus‘. If I don’t make the effort now, I’m probably not going to make it later, and friendships do not grow stronger out of time apart. New experiences with old friends: that’s what I need more of in my life. And these don’t happen unless someone is making an effort to connect… and more and more I’m realizing that I’m the one that needs to make the effort; to put the time in.