Preparing the Ground

Contemplating the interesting articles in the New York Times about the nuns in upstate New York who are mindfully, with discernment, caring for one another as they die, I started to think about how they had prepared the ground for being able to work with death in that way.

What came to mind was that these women had chosen, long ago, to live and work together as a community and to make that community, and its work, the central focus in their life. In that way, over many years, they created a container, and relationships within it, that were in place when they needed to relate with serious illness and impending death.

For most people getting old stretches out over many years, several decades, while terminal illness is often relatively shorter. As, over the past year, the Shambhala Working Group on Aging has been exploring the issues of aging in the context of enlightened society, it has been evident that we need to pay attention to the early stages of being old, when people are still able to care for themselves, and establish formal and informal networks and containers that will be in place when the need for more intensive care arises.

In Shambhala we are, except for a small number of monastics, a community of lay practitioners. We do not live in a convent. Our lives are quite complex, we live relatively independently and have all kinds of relationships and responsibilities. In that kind of situation, when severe illness or impending death arise, we rely on ad hoc circles of care, put together on the spot. Sometimes these circles are wonderful, other times not so much. Sometimes it’s not possible to form a meaningful circle at all.

The point for me is that how we organize ourselves as we get old, before we need care, will set the ground for what can happen when we do.

Convent provides model for working with dying

Mary Lang found this very interesting article from the NYTimes .

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/health/09sisters.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Mary's comment is that; "It seems like a model of what Shambhalian Aging could look like, particularly end of life. The quote about bringing "discernment" to the process seems particularly apt".

The article is the second in a series; see the link below for the overview.

http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/

Guaranteed to cheer you up

Jacquie Bell sent this wonderful video link.

An old couple walked into the lobby of the Mayo Clinic and spotted a piano. They've been married for 62 years and he'll be 90 this year.

http://www.fark.com/cgi/vidplayer.pl?IDLink=4365716

We have been discovered

Many thanks to our friends at the Shambhala Sun who, on their own, discovered this blog and put an announcement about it on their new "Maha Sangha News" website. The link is:

http://www.shambhalasun.com/news/?p=3376#more-3376

It may be a good time to remind readers of this blog that it is part of a larger effort by the Shambhala Working Group on Aging to cultivate discussion and action around the question of what it means to grow old in an enlightened society.

For more information on the working group see:

http://www.shambhala.org/community/aging/index.php

Reunion

Last week I had dinner with two friends I had last seen fifty years ago. We were teenagers at a summer camp back then, now they are a married couple in their mid 60’s. They had found me through mutual friends. We spent three hours over dinner at the Inn where they were staying in Halifax, on a vacation tour of the Canadian Maritime provinces. Of course they were older, but they looked, talked and acted much the same. They said the same about me.

The story of their life came out in bits and pieces; getting married, having children, various moves and changes of occupation, grandchildren, retirement to a quiet island in Maine, keeping in touch with life long friends. My story was different in detail, but not that much different overall.

By the end of the meal the stories seemed to have been told and for a few minutes we chatted about the state of the world, the weather, the local tourist sites; just an ordinary conversation, as if we were friends who had seen each other the previous day; not half a century ago.

Since that evening I’ve been contemplating the meaning of this experience, this reunion. What does it mean that fifty years of life, theirs and mine, can be encapsulated in a few hours, over a meal?

Last night PBS ran a documentary about Garrison Keillor, who is 67 (as am I). At the end of the film he commented that, when we are young we hope for an extraordinary life, but as we get older we realize that everyone’s life is fundamentally the same; “we all get an ordinary life”.

--dave whitehorn