By Jim Selman | Bio
This has been a sad week. My partner’s mother died at the
age of 94. Even when the end is expected (and perhaps even welcomed after a
long period of decline), it nonetheless has a powerful impact on those who
cared. All of the clichés aside, there just isn’t much to say to the bereaved
other than “I am sorry for your loss.” As we get older, death and dying becomes
a larger part of our day-to-day reality as we lose friends and loved ones.
One of the things we need to learn if we haven’t learned it by the time we reach retirement and our ‘golden years’ is how to deal with loss. Aside from the obvious loss of friends and family though death and incapacitating illness, we have a host of other things we can ‘lose’, such as systems of support, material possessions, our physical abilities and perhaps most importantly—possibility. Not everyone experiences loss and certainly not in the same way. But loss, whether real or perceived,
By Don Arnoudse
Bio
By Marilyn Hay
Some bodies weather age better than others. In my case, arthritis has invaded my whole spine and all major joints, so my mobility has diminished quite significantly over a relatively short period of time. While I was never much of an athlete, I was always on the go, with energy to burn, traveling pretty much constantly in my job and for pleasure … And then, because of the unbearable pain and attendant exhaustion, I just had to stop. I couldn’t do my job any longer.I
scarcely remember the first two months of this change of lifestyle as I
spent most of the time sleeping. When I woke up enough to really look
around, I realized I was no longer the person I had been.
And that’s a hard awakening.
There are so many aspects to this kind of sudden and significant life change.
I
had to deal with feelings of grief over the loss of what was, guilt
about no longer being able to do my job (and the relief I felt, as
well, that I didn’t
By Shae Hadden
Bio
The
thing that struck me most about the patients’ lives was the silence—the
absence of any sounds of life emanating from them. The few exceptions
were the ‘babblers’. The music teacher who sang a music only she could
hear and who conducted the world with her hands permanently wrapped in
bandages to protect them from the damage she inflicted on them. The
50-year-old man confined to bed and paralyzed from the waist down with
a libido
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the fifth post in a five-part series.
Is there any joy to be found in sadness? I believe there is.Sadness is almost always about loss. If we are able to examine in a
serious way the nature of that loss, I think we would find a validation
of what we took to be good. In other words, sadness can be a
reaffirmation of the virtues we hold dear. This can be a bit tricky
though. For example, if one regrets the passage of youth for its own
sake, enormous and ultimately futile effort is needed to ignore the
Ronni at TGB recently took a whack at being inundated by wrap-around sexually explicit media
and how it can negatively stereotype older folks whose libidos are in a
state of “natural” decline. I wonder if a declining libido is natural.
If we know of examples of late-life lust, then it can’t be natural. It
is a choice.
Now,
if people simply lose interest or want to let it go, then I respect
their choice. However, if they are buying into a story that they
‘can’t’ or