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.
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thank you for the acknowledgement of aging in our community.i especially appreciate mountain drum's posting and would like to explore even further both the ideas of how do we care for one another as we age in our community, what does that look like and what recognition is there of eldering in our community? i've seen in some situations where the aging among us have simply been dismissed as no longer useful or out of touch. how well do we open ourselves to the wisdom and experience of those older among us and also what means do we have for caring for ourselves and one another? what about those who have contributed a lifetime of volunteer work to our community and who now find themselves in difficult economic situations as the result of all the offering of time and talent for free? i personally find myself not offering to take on any more leadership roles unless at least a stipend is involved because i cannot work for free & yet i have a good deal to offer & have the wish to offer my time and talents but altruism will not pay the bills. what concrete ways do we have of caring for one another as we age? community households of multi generations is one useful model so that resources are shared and people are not isolated.
ReplyDeletethank you for reading. i'd like to be an active participant in this conversation and actually see clear, material plans for how we respond to aging in our community. best wishes, meg rinaldi