An Amish boy and his father were visiting a mall. They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and back together again.

The boy asked his father, "What is this, Father?" The father, never having seen an elevator responded, "Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don't know what it is."

While the boy and his father were watching wide-eyed, an old lady in a wheelchair rolled up to the moving walls and pressed a button. The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched small circles of lights with numbers above the walls light up.

They continued to watch the circles light up in the reverse direction. The walls opened up again and a beautiful 24-year-old woman stepped out. The father said to his son, "Go get your mother." [Comedy on Tap]

Wouldn't we all love to have just such a magic machine that could turn the clock back before we get to the point when, as George Burns said,

… you stoop to tie your shoelaces and ask yourself, "What else can I do while I'm down here?" and when everybody goes to your birthday party and stands around the cake just to keep warm." [King Duncan, King's Computer Treasury of Dynamic Humor, Seven Worlds Pub. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1990).]

Or, as some other humorist put it, to a time before

Your back goes out more than you do.
Your knees buckle, but your belt doesn't.
You get winded playing chess.
You sit in a rocking chair and can't make it go.
You turn out the light for economic rather than romantic reasons.
Dialing long distance wears you out. [King Duncan, Mule Eggs and Topknots, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn., 1987),"Age".]

 

Our society has been overly oriented towards youth. Television advertisers first want to sponsor programs that attract viewers in the 18-35 year old age group. Clothing models are sometimes fourteen year olds made up to look at least ten years older, and the clothes they're hawking might look good on children, but look terrible on most adult bodies.

These High Holydays we've been going "Back to Basics" to take a look at what's really important in our lives. One positive result of the horrific 9/11 attack has been to challenge us to re-order our priorities, such as our skewed orientation towards the lower end of the age scale.

Youth is wonderful, but we all age out of it. With people living longer and longer, there are more and years to be filled after retirement. This can certainly be a wonderful thing. Believe it or not, older age is a period of greater accomplishment than youth:

The results of a study made of four hundred noted men of all times and in differing spheres of activity… revealed… that 35 percent of the world's greatest achievements were by people in the sixty to seventy age bracket. A further 23 percent were by those between seventy and eighty. The octogenarian group accounted for a further 6 percent. No less than 64 percent of the world's greatest achievements were accomplished by people over sixty years of age. [J. Oswald Sanders, Enjoying Your Best Years (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Discovery House Publishers, 1993).]

But we can't all be creative geniuses such as the people this study is talking about. Nor can most of us be like Ruth Rothfarb, an otherwise ordinary person who,

… at age 72, decided to start running for exercise. At age 80, she entered her first marathon (26.2 miles). Now age 89, she has run 10 marathons!

Ruth claims that she has the same aches and pains that everyone her age experiences but says that running keeps her healthy and distracts her from the aches. [Holly G. Miller. "Outpacing Father Time," The Saturday Evening Post (April, 1990), P. 96.]

But even for the rest of us, there are still compensations in old age:

The older you get, the more your furniture is worth.

You have reached that stage in life where you aren't required to exercise anything but caution.

You no longer have to ask permission to use the family car.

Nobody can make you eat your veggies.

You can't be drafted, no matter how many wars the politicians start.

You don't have to fret about finding greener pastures, because even if you did, you'd have trouble climbing the fence.

You no longer care who your spouse goes out with, as long as you don't have to go along.

If you need a little extra income, you can always threaten to tell the newspapers your grown children have forced you to subsist on cat food unless the kids agree to pay hush money. Regularly. In cash. ["Get Sly--And Live Better," by Larry L. King, New Choices, July/August 1993, p. 54.]

Yet compensations or no, after a while we know that we are on the other side of the bell curve, and we know what the end will be. Sometimes it's our bodies that deteriorate, leaving our minds intact:

One day when John Quincy Adams, one of America's early presidents was 80 years of age, a friend met him on a street in Boston. "How is John Quincy Adams?" the friend inquired.

"John Quincy Adams himself is very well, thank you. But the house he lives in is sadly dilapidated. It is tottering on its foundations. The walls are badly shattered, and the roof is worn. The building trembles with every wind, and I think John Quincy Adams will have to move out of it before long.

But he himself is very well." [LectionAid, April/May/June 1997.]

For others, the mind and memory begin to fail:

Several years ago, before the upcoming presidential election Bill Clinton was campaigning at a old age retirement home.

He went up to a woman and shook her hand and said "Do you know who I am?"

"No," replied the old woman, "but if you go to the front desk, they'll tell you!" [Joke a Day]

But for some, the ravages of old age, mental or physical or both, make it impossible to live without significant help. For some, help in the home is the answer. For others, an increasing number, some sort of assisted living facility where meals are served in a communal dining room, laundry and maid service is provided, and the residents each have their own room or apartment, make it possible for the elderly to live with dignity and a fair amount of independence. Then there are those who require far more help with the everyday tasks of life. Nursing homes, with twenty-four hour care, become a necessity.

As many of you know, I've just been through these events in my own life. For the last four and a half weeks of her life, when she wasn't in the hospital, my mother needed full-time nursing care. After a week in my house, my father suffered another in a series of spinal fractures, and went into the same nursing home as my mother. I'm happy to say that after almost two and a half months there, and with wonderful physical therapy, he left the home on Monday to live with my brother in Connecticut while he recovers further. He hopes to return to Florida, to an assisted living facility.

If you'll permit me, I'd like to share with you three of the most important things I learned during what was a difficult and harrowing experience in the hope that this might spare you some of what my family went through:

1. Get your parents' or other loved ones' affairs in order long before it becomes necessary. Know where records are, wills, stocks, bonds, jewelry, insurance policies, leases, mortgages, bank accounts, tax records, other important records - everything. Make out living wills, health care proxies, and powers of attorney before they're needed on an emergency basis.

2. I'm not a lawyer and can't advise anyone on the various financial and other ramifications of catastrophic health crises, but I can tell you, consult a good eldercare attorney. Now. Some lawyers specialize in this exclusively, while others do this work as part of a more diverse practice. But believe me, you need their help. The laws are so complex and change so often that even the professionals have a hard time keeping up, let alone the rest of us. I am convinced that these people are worth every penny we pay them, both in terms of peace of mind and for the financial advantages to the whole family that might otherwise go by the wayside. For this to work, the records I spoke about a moment ago are an absolute necessity.

3. Lastly, have a plan. In the same way that most of us shy away from buying burial plots and planning our own funerals, we don't like to consider the possibility of a catastrophic illness afflicting people we love. When my parents arrived in June, they were basically doing fine. My father was frail, which he'd been for quite some time, and my mother was able to do just about whatever she wanted. Suddenly, in the space of eight or nine days they'd both been in and out of the hospital, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer, my father couldn't move at all without excruciating pain, and we needed full-time care for both of them.

We were prepared for none of this and getting things set up for their care was a full-time job that took precedence over everything else. And these things never happen at an opportune moment. In the middle of all this turmoil, my brother was moving to a new home in Connecticut. He'd sold his house in this area, and had no choice but to move out.

So, have a plan. Gather information. Speak to the Council on the Aged. Visit nursing homes and assisted living facilities both in our area and, if they don't live here, wherever your parents are now living. There is no guarantee that if an emergency occurs in Florida or elsewhere, you will be able to move Mom or Dad up here to be with you. Consider pre-planning funerals, burial plots, monuments. It can obviate a lot of grief later on.

Obviously, we don't do these things to our parents, but only with them. We need to find out their wishes, and help them order things the way they'd like them to be. God willing, they and our other loved ones should live and be well and pass away quietly in their sleep at a ripe old age with their minds intact and their bodies not too badly ravaged by the passage of the years. But if, God forbid, it doesn't happen quite this way, having their affairs in order, having consulted an attorney, and having a plan in case of catastrophe, can take some of the pain away.

Youth is relatively easy. Old age can be much more difficult. Our society expends an inordinate amount of time and money on the young. It's time to see to it that the needs of the elderly become a priority as well.