Losing a World

And learning to cope with the new one is an experience of several groups of people in our society. At one time they had "places" in society but lost them due to advanced old age, serious disability problems, or by immigrating (there are likely other groups). Every person in each of these groups may yet find a place in the new world, depending on their particular situation, physical and mental abilities, interest, and adaptability. I am focusing on one of these groups in this mini essay—those lucky (?) enough to have reached the advanced old age of 90 and above.¹ Currently that number is reported at 4.7% percent of the US population.² It is expected to grow.

            The world in which 90-year-olds reached adulthood (in my case, 1934-1954) and with which they coped during much of their working years (1954-2005) has passed away.³ One of my earliest childhood memories is the family ice box (the refrigerator came later) and milk delivered to the front porch twice weekly. I became aware of the passing of an old world in 1983, when I skidded from the typewriter to word processing and rather quickly into the personal computer. Telephone booths and landline phones, once common are now things of a former world, since most of us carry personal smartphones, by which we can have instant visual contact with someone half a world away (assuming the phone is not smarter than we). This new world features the presence of artificial intelligence writing television ads and responding to online searches (just give it a google!); online shopping has become a major industry, and television has any number of movies, news shows, and TV serials just a click away. A big change is the advent of GPS and the loss of paper maps! Coping with the numerous changes that a new world brings challenges those at the very far end of things (alas, some far-enders simply give-up coping with technological advances altogether).

            Challenges are not simply technological. Many of us entering the nonagenarian stage of life have lost our life partners, and find the adjustment to solitary living difficult. For example, grocery shopping for one requires a skill that must be learned over time. Intimate hugging and touching are things of the past (paternal and formal social hugs are permitted, and some do find intimacy at the far-end). A thick silence fills the house, broken only by the TV and the startling sound of one's own voice. Retirement from the demands of salaried occupations has brought with it an enforced isolation from colleagues, friends, and other workplace associations. If one has relocated the family residence to a distant city, then close friends of many years are no longer in the picture. Such circumstances contribute to the loss of a familiar world.

            It is not easy for an active person to adjust to the increasing frailty of aging. There is a noticeable decline in one's abilities: balance, hearing, sight, dexterity, stamina, agility, and mental acuity. Eventually the trajectory will result in loss of independence (John 21:18), which is a last stage of living at the far end of things. Far-Enders know that obsolescence is the way of the natural world and eventually come to accept the inevitability of the outcome.

            The Christian synthesis of the 4^th century common era, distilled in many ways from the failed philosophies and religions of the ancient Hellenistic world,⁴ held out hope for a new world, set free from its bondage to decay (Rom 8:18‒17), and hope for personal resurrection in a "spiritual body" (1 Cor 15:35‒57). Such an expectation seems to deny our life experience known through obsolescing (birth, youth, adulthood, the far-end), and prompts the question: does living in this physically changing world mean anything or have any enduring value? The poet appears to have a similar question.

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on a hill.⁵

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹Much of this essay relies on self-observation.

²https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/aging_population/cb11-194.html#:~:text=Because%20of%20increases%20in%20life,likely%20to%20reach%2010%20percent.

³In antiquity culture and society changed very slowly. In the modern Western world change is rapid.

⁴The Hellenistic period was the blending of Greek with indigenous cultures in the ancient world from Alexander, the Great (323 BC) to the end of the Roman Empire (410 AD).

⁵Wallace Stevens, "A Postcard from the Volcano" in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (Knopf, 1961), 158.