Position Open - Your Next Adventure Starts Here

I’m sitting with my Dad in a pre-op suite at University Hospital in Colombus, Ohio. We were engaged in what was to be our very last conversation. Of course, neither of us knew that or even actually considered that. The doctors had promised that things would be just as they were before the pending surgery, except the brain tumor that had grown back would be removed.

As fate would have it, his surgery was delayed, which gave us an unexpected 90 minutes together. We didn’t have a history of talking much, so we sat quietly, saying nothing. Along the line somewhere and for some reason I can’t explain, I was prompted to tell him how genuinely proud of him I was. So, I did, knowing I was breaking all of the family norms talking like that. Saying those kinds of things.

I started out by telling him how proud I was of the way he had lived his life and of the lessons he had taught me along the way. What amazed me most, I told him, was not how he had lived during his strongest years, but how he was living during his weakest, most vulnerable ones.

Only a few years earlier he had been a vigorous, energetic eighty-year-old. Then brain surgery left the entire left side of his body paralyzed. Now he was preparing for yet another operation to remove a brain tumor that had returned.  A tumor believed to be the result of the massive radiation exposure he received while being a front-line player in the testing of atomic and hydrogen weapons in the South Pacific shortly after World War II. Friends and cohorts who had been there had died of the same kind of brain cancer.

I spoke of how he endured his disability with a grace that still humbles me. No bitterness. No self-pity. No complaints. Only gratitude for the life that he had been gifted with and that which remained. Gratitude that I had showed up for this day in his life.

It turned into 45 minutes of the most amazing experience that he and I ever had. Intimate words and feelings never expressed before. I have written the details in a previous blog. Suffice to say, if it were a Hallmark movie, no one would believe it was true.

What triggered this memory was a conversation with a friend, who, like me, is approaching the final chapter of his earthly life.

My friend and I marveled at our improbable good fortune. The odds that either of us would ever have been born are beyond comprehension. Literally trillions to one. We survived infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and now find ourselves ascending to elderhood.

Roughly half of the babies born the year we were in the U.S. never made it this far. We did. Not because we earned it, but because life gifted it to us.

That realization naturally led us to other questions. What do we do with our lives now? As we are ascending the elderhood ladder? What are the duties of an elder? How do we continue to contribute to humankind?

For much of our lives, our value had been measured by what we could accomplish. Every stage after infancy came with expectations. Learn to walk. Learn to talk. Learn to read. Develop skills. Build a career. Earn a living (which I think is a telling concept, as if we have to ‘earn’ the right to life). Raise a family. Produce. Contribute. Achieve. Our identities inextricably intertwined with what we could do. The value we could produce.

We spoke of how things were changing in ways we haven’t known. Our bodies. Our energy. Our opportunities. Our reliability. All diminishing. Titles we once carried, CEO, Business Owner, Foreman, President, Teacher, Nurse, Doctor, Farmer, Laborer, Entrepreneur, Professor, Mom, Dad, Grandpa, Grandma, becoming more honorary than functional.

Increasingly, the answers to questions about life and living and the ‘how to’s’ that we provided are now answered by Google, YouTube, or ChatGPT. More efficiently. More effectively. Quicker. More accurately. The point is that there comes a time when many of us simply cannot contribute in the ways we once did.

It occurred to me that there are only two stages of life in which we are not primarily valued for our productivity: infancy and elderhood. And perhaps we can frame this as an invitation, not a tragedy. 

Babies contribute almost nothing to the economy. They produce nothing. They accomplish little by conventional standards. Yet they transform every room they grace. Without saying a word, they teach us. They remind us what wonder looks like. Curiosity. Presence. Trust. Authenticity. Receiving love without apology. Giving love without conditions. Expressing joy, sadness, fear, and anger honestly, without shame. They delight in the ordinary.

Captivated by the antics of a butterfly, a spoon, and a shaft of sunlight creeping across the floor. The mystery of their own shadow. They live completely in the present moment. Place a baby in front of a mirror, chances are good they'll smile at themselves, try to touch, even kiss their own reflection. It hasn’t yet occurred to them that there is something wrong with their nature, or the world, for that matter, that needs fixing.

Babies do not spend their first years trying to become lovable. They simply assume they already are. Perhaps that is what they have come to teach us. Model for us. Remind us of.

Their lives point us towards a mirror, offering us the chance to see ourselves as they see us. The us we were before we learned to hide ourselves, compare ourselves, judge ourselves, and wage war against ourselves.

What if elderhood offers us the opportunity to become the kind of teacher we once were in our infancy? Not because we have returned to infancy (for sure there may very well be some of those unpleasant episodes, as us elders can attest) but because life has slowly stripped away so many of the roles that once defined and confined our true nature.

Perhaps the invitation is since we can no longer do as much, we become more. Shifting from achievement and productivity to presence. From on-stage performance to backstage authenticity. From role to real. From proving our worth to embodying it. From accumulation to sharing the radiance of our grandest possession, our authentic soul.

This doesn't mean we stop contributing in the usual ways. Quite the opposite. We still downsize the house, write the family stories, visit old friends, volunteer, travel, mentor, plant gardens, and rock grandchildren (the verb). All worthwhile and priceless.

But perhaps our greatest contribution is something far less tangible. Perhaps our last sacred task is to recover what babies never lost. To become people whose very presence gives others permission to relax into themselves.

To embody acceptance. Live gratitude, wonder, compassion, delight, forgiveness, humility, joy, and celebration out loud. Spontaneously. Infants offer these gifts naturally, perhaps we elders can offer them consciously.

The goal being to leave this world, not merely having done many things, but having become someone whose way of being is itself a blessing.

Our first gift to humanity was our innocent presence. Perhaps our last gift can be the same. Tempered now by experience, suffering, wisdom, and love. After all, we’ve spent a lifetime discovering what love is, and what it isn't. Ought not all that we have experienced count for something? I’d argue that this is the final assignment of elderhood.

And from my perspective all these things mentioned above don’t just happen because I want them to. Just as I might want to play the piano. I have to ‘study’ and practice, sometimes relearning how to offer these things. I might need some help to clear away the rubble that now keeps me from knowing myself.

We can probably benefit from some help to clear away the cobwebs and clean the mirror so our one precious, beautiful, one-of-a-kind in all of time, humanity can be more easily seen by others and maybe more importantly, ourselves.

So, schools not out. It means going back and getting another degree. The degree granted for re-learning all the things that we were once masters of and have simply forgotten how to do. It isn’t that we don’t or can’t, we just haven’t practiced for a few decades. Thankfully, ‘schools’ and teachers and classrooms and fellow students exist to help us. I know some of them. They’d be grateful for us to join them.

I’d like to be on the receiving end of the last words I shared with my father.  I have some work to do.