“Acceptance” describes how we feel as we mature into aging. But there is another way to talk about aging’s culmination, one that focuses less on how we feel and more on what we do. I call this role “elderhood.” In traditional societies, male and female elders had certain roles to play and jobs to do that compensated for the losses that come with aging. They were the ones who told the legends and stories, who knew where the medicine plants grew and what their uses were. They were guides for younger adults, and caregivers and mentors for the community’s children. They also commanded respect by virtue of their having lived a whole life and knowing the full meaning of it. Even if an old man could no longer walk, or if an old woman could no longer see, they could fulfill their role as elders and be honored for it. There is even a theory among evolutionary biologists called the “grandmother hypothesis,” which holds that “evolution favored older women who used their knowledge and experience to benefit their relatives’ children.”1
Anyone who has visited a skilled nursing facility and seen its hallways filled with the infirm, the disabled, and the confused must wonder if this is the best we can do for our elders and if there is nothing tangible left for them to do for us. Yet it would be too simple to say that in today’s media-saturated, youth-oriented society the role of elder has entirely vanished. These days, many of the elders’ traditional roles have been professionalized. A person who is troubled goes to a therapist. Instead of gathering medicinal plants to cure our illness, we visit the local pharmacy. Young children are tended to in day care; the old stories are stored on Wikipedia. Today’s elder generations are sometimes lucky enough to have appreciative grandchildren to mentor and occasionally care for, but even then, it is most often a very part-time job.
But in the same way that a toddler takes her first step or a young mother gives birth to her first child, elders know how to be elders when the time is ripe. As Dr. William H. Thomas says in his book What Are Old People For, “We do not have to think about breathing in order to breathe, and we age whether or not we wish to do so. Aging is within us, not imposed on us.”2 The basic skills of elderhood are innate. That being said, those skills can also be honed, particularly by studying with another elder. The following stories illustrate both possibilities.
When my father, Emil, burst into my room holding the book of Robert Graves, his distress stemmed partly from the fact that there had been no older role model in his life when he was young, and no one to go to now for his middle-aged anxieties. His own father left when he was three. Young Emil grew up poor and without male guidance. That loss haunted him and made it harder for him to be an elder to me. Once, during an aging workshop, I spoke of elderhood, and afterward an Indian American man approached me and introduced himself. He was a professor of engineering at a nearby university but had grown up in a small town in northern India. “You are right about the elders,” he told me. “I saw that for myself when I was young.”
His parents had come from a once prosperous village in the rural foothills and wove cloth to send to market in the city. But now, that work had mostly gone to low-cost factories in China. The village had become poor and there were few jobs for the men.
“Once, when we were visiting, my father took me to sit with the men in council. I watched as the younger men implored the elders of the village to help them know what to do. The elders didn’t necessarily have all the answers, but I could see how much the younger men respected them, and how much dignity the elders expressed when they spoke. Something was happening in that room that felt powerful to me. Everyone was in difficulty, but the old men gave something like medicine to the younger men. I have never forgotten that.”
In his groundbreaking 1950s book Childhood and Society, Dr. Erik Erikson proposed a theory—now widely accepted as fact—that the human psyche develops in discrete stages, beginning with an infant’s “basic trust” and concluding with an old person’s “integration.” When I was in college I studied with Erikson and heard him describe integration as “the time when we have come to the point of being able to understand our place in the world and the life we have lived in it.”
The class reading for integration was Shakespeare’s King Lear. I had some difficulty with the assignment, finding it hard to see Dr. Erikson’s “integration” in the character of Lear. So when Dr. Erikson came to our study session one afternoon, I asked him about it. “Lear doesn’t seem to me to be a typical old man,” I said. “In fact he seems kind of crazy.”
As I remember Dr. Erikson’s answer, he said, “Oh, he’s pretty typical, I think. You need to look past the high drama. In the end he’s just an ordinary man trying to come to terms with being old.”
I ran into Dr. Erikson again thirty years later. He was still the same self-effacing, avuncular presence that I remembered from college. With his mane of white hair and exuberant moustache, he felt every inch an elder. Now in his eighties, to me he was not just a world-renowned author and teacher, but also an ordinary man who himself had come to terms with being old.
Mr. Pauzer came to live with us when I was about seven years old. We lived on an acre of land at the edge of the suburbs, and there was a small apartment out back that my parents rented for extra income. Mr. Pauzer was thin and frail and spoke in a near whisper. I knew little about him, but from my parents’ conversations I got the sense that he was a widower and had been wounded in the war.
Even as young as I was, I sensed sadness in Mr. Pauzer. I think now that he was slowly dying of emphysema. No one ever came to visit him and he rarely went out. He must have been quite lonely, and I imagine it cheered him up to have a little boy tagging after him as he wandered around the grounds, pruning, planting, and watering—“puttering” as my mother would say.
My mother had a rose garden on one part of the property, and one summer I was given the responsibility of watering the roses. There were trenches dug around each rose bush, and channels connecting the trenches, but when I turned the hose on I could never get the water to flow smoothly from one bush to another. The water always seemed to spill out into the driveway.
One afternoon I looked up, hose in hand, and Mr. Pauzer was standing next to me. “Water flows downhill,” he said in his raspy whisper. “Watch the water. Watch the way it goes.”
I watched as the water spilled out into the driveway. “You see,” Mr. Pauzer said, “the water knows where it wants to go. You’ve got to dig the trenches deeper.”
He picked up a hoe that he had brought with him and showed me how to dig. Over the next few days he coached me as I dug out the trenches—sometimes by hoe, more often by hand. The day came when I turned the hose on and saw the water flow just the way Mr. Pauzer had said it would until every bush was fed by its own pool of water.
“You see?” Mr. Pauzer said. “The water knows.”
Later that week I came home from school and saw Mr. Pauzer beckoning me from a distance. When I approached there was a mischievous look in his eye.
“Here,” he said, dropping a piece of chocolate into my hand. “Don’t tell your mother.”
And then he made a sound that first seemed like coughing. When I looked up I realized that he was laughing, something I had never seen him do before.
Not long after that he was taken away in an ambulance and my parents told me that he had died. But for a short time, Mr. Pauzer demonstrated his elderhood in showing me how to water the roses.
Harry Roberts was a part-Irish, part-Yurok Indian who had spent part of his youth on a reservation in Northern California. During that time he trained with his Yurok uncle in how to be a medicine man. When I lived at Green Gulch Zen Temple in the 1970s, Harry—by now in his seventies—served as a farm adviser, horticulturalist, and down-to-earth spiritual adviser.
One day a group of us was walking with Harry to inspect a water reservoir. Harry brought up the rear. We were all chatting among ourselves when suddenly from behind he spoke up sharply, “Stop! Don’t step on that.”
We all froze. Usually Harry spoke quietly, in a barely audible voice. It was a surprise to hear him talk so forcefully.
He strode past us and pointed at the path beneath our feet. “That’s yerba buena. That’s a medicine plant. You never step on that.”
That’s when I learned that Harry always watched where he put his feet.
Another time, I watched as Harry was showing my friend Richard how to weld with an oxyacetylene torch. Richard had done a little welding before and thought he knew how to do it, but Harry was teaching him a different way, a more careful way. He gave a few spare instructions and then watched in silence as Richard fired up the torch and began to work.
I didn’t know anything about welding and was curious to see how Richard would do. I watched as he went about applying the flame to the thick metal plate. All of a sudden his stool shifted under him and he threw out a hand to balance himself. As he did, the torch turned and the flame passed over the palm of his free hand. Richard winced in pain.
I glanced over at Harry, sure he would say something. But Harry’s face was impassive. He didn’t say or do anything. Richard didn’t say anything either. He knew Harry. He carefully turned off the torch, set it down, and went off to find the first aid kit.
Harry got up and left too. I remained, alone, to think about what I had seen.
In Native American culture, a teacher does not usually explain things but lets students find out for themselves. Harry had told us that was how it was with his own teacher. Shunryu Suzuki said the same thing about his own Zen training.
Once, I was the attendant for Suzuki at Tassajara monastery. A visiting teacher had come and it was my job to serve tea to the two of them, along with fresh-cured olives the kitchen workers had harvested from a local tree. Suzuki and the guest each ate their olives and drank their tea, and after serving them I did the same.
While Suzuki was talking to his guest, without turning around to look he reached back, picked up one of the olive pits on my plate, popped it in his mouth, and began sucking on it. I was dumbfounded. What was going on? I glanced down and realized that on each of my olive pits there were a few bits of olive meat. I hadn’t eaten them completely.
After he was through sucking on the pit, Suzuki replaced it on my plate, all the while talking to his guest and pointedly ignoring me.
I was so embarrassed that I wanted to sink into the floor and disappear. But there was no time for that. Instead I poured Suzuki and his guest another cup of tea and spent the next forty years thinking about what had happened that day.
Suzuki often spoke of his own teacher. “He never explained anything,” Suzuki said. “He just scolded us when we did it wrong.”
Neither Harry nor Suzuki was an ordinary elder; each was master of his respective teaching traditions. These stories tell how they taught and how the wisdom their age had granted them was revealed. I have long considered what they did and how they acted, and I have concluded that a younger person, no matter how talented, could not have done what they did. Their actions stemmed not from just knowing something, but from having lived it fully. Their responses were at once spontaneous and long practiced. I think they both embodied Dr. Erikson’s description of an elder as someone who has “come to the point of being able to understand his place in the world and the life he has lived in it.” Always watching where you put your feet, or eating someone else’s olive in a way that makes it into a lifelong teaching are not just particular skills, but a way of being that takes a long time to grow into.
The old men in the village in India and my childhood friend Mr. Pauzer had no special training in how to be elders; they just knew how to do it when the need arose. In a sense we could say the same about the fictional King Lear; throughout the play he rages until at last he comes to the true humility of his years—an insight that has little to do with his being king. In contrast, Harry Roberts as a youth trained with spiritual mentors, and Shunryu Suzuki did the same.
There are many possible ways to express elderhood. What are yours? This contemplative reflection encourages you to explore this question.
First, reflect on whether there was a Mr. Pauzer in your childhood—an elder who stepped forward to help you when you needed it. You might need to jog your memory; until I sat down to write this chapter I had forgotten how Mr. Pauzer taught me to water the roses. An elder is different from a parent. Often parents don’t know about the elders in their child’s life. My parents never knew how Mr. Pauzer helped me; that is a piece of what made him special and memorable for me.
Elders from childhood are early models for our own aging selves. Make a list of your childhood elders. Write down their names and next to each name write a word or two to describe their gift to you. Next to Mr. Pauzer’s name I would write the word “confidence.” Next to Harry’s name I would write the word “alertness.” Next to Suzuki I would write the word “thoroughness.” Who are your elders and what are your words?
Next, sit quietly and contemplate the question, Am I an elder? If you are, then ask, In what ways do I function as an elder in my life?
If you are not, why not? Do you think you’re too young? See if there is something you can do—and a person you can do it for—that will allow you to practice elderhood, even in the smallest way?
Finally, write these words:
BABYHOOD
CHILDHOOD
TEENHOOD
ADULTHOOD
PARENTHOOD
ELDERHOOD
And next to these words write one or two adjectives that best describe the flavor of that time in your life; if you have never been a parent, describe how you imagine parenthood might have been for you.
What do these descriptors tell you about the full expanse of your life and where you are in it?
And if you do not feel that you have lived long enough for elderhood, write instead a word that describes how you might want elderhood to be once you arrive there.
As King Lear himself said, exhausted from all his inner turmoil and reconciled at last to his youngest daughter, his tender old age, and final elderhood:
So we’ll live, and pray and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies…
And take upon us the mystery of things
As if we were God’s spies.