Attitude determines Altitude? You bet!! Article from NYT

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Attitude determines altitude? You bet!! Enjoy. all the best Jonathan


The New York Times

March 2, 2010

Cases

Old Age, From Youth's Narrow Prism

By MARC E. AGRONIN, M.D.



The old woman had drawn down the shade in her room - hoping, I imagined, to
stop the midday Miami sun from penetrating her grief. But the sun still hit
the window full force and illuminated the shade like a Chinese lantern.



She sat silently in a wheelchair, her 93-year-old silhouette stooped in the
bathing light. I entered, held her hand for a moment and introduced myself.
"Sit down, doctor," she said politely.



I asked her why she had come to the nursing home, and she described the
recent passing of her husband after 73 years of marriage. I was overwhelmed
by the thought of her loss, and wanted to offer some words of comfort. I
leaned in close and spoke.



"I'm so sorry," I told her. "What has it been like for you losing your
husband after so many years of marriage?"



She paused for a moment and then replied: "Heaven."



Seeing my bewilderment, she smiled and went on to describe how she had
endured decades in an unhappy marriage with a gruff, verbally abusive man.



As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my
misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the
psychologist's fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone
else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a
life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it.



But I was wrong. She had not fallen into the abyss. She was glad to have
finally won a measure of freedom and was determined to make the best of it.
As her life unfolded at the nursing home over the next year, she threw
herself into new activities and relationships in a way that was quite
unexpected.



All of us lapse into such mistaken impressions of old age from time to time.
It stems in part from an age-centered perspective, in which we view our own
age as the most normal of times, the way all life should be. At 18 the
50-year-olds may seem ancient, but at 50 we are apt to say the same about
the 80-year-olds.



"So what's it really like to be old?" I often ask my patients, who are
mostly in their late 80s and 90s, and the responses are unexpected.



"I forgot I was so old," a 100-year-old patient recently told me, and then
excused herself to make it to bingo on time.



This age-centrism is particularly pervasive in people's attitudes toward
nursing homes. All too often we imagine that life seems to end at the
nursing home door - that it is loveless and lonely, with death hovering
close by.



We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs for intimacy even in
the most debilitated elderly. Our youth-centered culture equates love with
sex; in contrast, I have seen with my older patients that love can be an
endlessly blossoming flower, felt and expressed in hundreds of ways. A
friend's mother who suffers from Alzheimer's disease has fallen in love with
another resident on her floor, and they walk around holding hands and
snuggling with a newfound innocence that perhaps only their memory loss
restored.



We also project our terror of death onto the aged, assuming that fear and
depression must stalk the final years of life. And yet in my 15 years of
working in nursing homes, I have never heard a patient say that he or she
was afraid of death. Sometimes there is acceptance, other times
anticipation, but most often it is not a great concern. Life goes on in its
shadows.



In the end, there is a cost to our myopic view of aging. We imagine the
pains of late-life ailments but not the joys of new pursuits; we recoil at
the losses and loneliness and fail to embrace the wisdom and meaning that
only age can bring. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the sentiment well:



For age is opportunity no less



Than youth itself, though in another dress,



And as the evening twilight fades away



The sky is filled with stars, invisible by day.



Dr. Marc E. Agronin is a geriatric psychiatrist at Miami Jewish Health
Systems.