Tag: 1983

Retirement, Death, and The Land of Cockaigne

Younger people dream of retirement – of that rosy day when they have reached the right age for social security or pension payments.  Or banked enough money in retirement accounts to cover their living expenses for the rest of their days.  Middle-agers discuss retirement with others in the office; they fantasize about where they will live and where they will travel; they try to imagine not having to wake up to an alarm every morning or having to turn out the light earlier than they would like.  I had such fantasies, but that was many, many years ago.  Now, I can’t imagine how I ever worked nine- or ten-hour days, put up with the constant aggravation of an office, or made a commute in rush hour traffic.  I don’t miss it, never missed it much.

Here is what I sometimes miss though – the hope for an event which is going to make life easier.  I sabotaged this wish lately by moving to be closer to family and taking on the logistics of a move (will I ever be able to get through the red tape at the DMV or find a primary care doctor?).  In the middle of the move, one of the family members that I was moving to be close to unexpectedly passed away.  He died while the movers were emptying my house in North Carolina, and his funeral was the day the movers arrived with our stuff in New England. 

And then there are the minor losses – routines, habits, a sense of where things are.  Finding further problems with an already imperfect new/old house.  Major and minor problems and aggravations are constant.   Locating a cooking utensil is suddenly a big deal.  Bills have to be carefully monitored during the address change so that payments are not missed.  New telephone numbers and wireless passwords must be noted and memorized.  The view out the windows has changed.  Being close to family means being physically and blessedly closer to their lives – which unfortunately also include their problems.

So, if we can no longer look forward to retirement, what does the elderly one look forward to?  Assisted living, the nursing home?  We decided when we moved that we were not ready for communal living of any kind, and – while it may be necessary someday – it is far from our ideal.  It is not something to hope for.

In medieval Europe, there was the peasant concept of Cockaigne, or pais de cocaigne, which translates to “the land of plenty.”  It was pictured as a kind of heaven with enough to eat, time to rest, the abolition of work, and – of course – free sex.  It was something for poor men and women to dream about, a heaven more to their taste than the Christian one.  As I was going through the trials of the last few weeks, I wondered what my equivalent was.  If I believe in any kind of afterlife, it surely is not the “pie in the sky when you die” sort.  And, yet, I found in the midst of seemingly irresolvable problems, that I was reminding myself over and over again, that I would soon find myself (or more accurately others would find me) dead and all my worries would go with me to the crematorium.  So, is this what old people look forward to – leaving their problems and their bodies (which often are one source of their problems) behind them?  Interesting thought.

Death as something to look forward to?  An alien concept in our culture but not without its believers.  The wonderful poet Stevie Smith wrote “I have a friend/At the end/Of the world.  /His name is a breath/Of fresh air.”  His name, of course, is death.  The poem is “Black March.”

I do not wish myself dead.  I just wish to get settled in and live a more routine existence.  But Jorge Borges found some comfort in imagining his own death – he even wrote a story about it, “August 25, 1983“, in which Borges conjures up an older version of himself on his deathbed.  I once made an exercise of doing the same for myself (see my blog entry “Fantasies to Reject in Old Age” from last May).  It was informative and scary.

I will get used to my new location.  I will unpack my ladle and find a dermatologist and get a new driver’s license.  But none of that happens quickly and all of it is harder than it used to be.  But there is really no alternative, no Cockaigne, without going through it.  I try to tell myself that it is useful to challenge myself in my old age, but it is not easy.  It is worse than I thought it would be; I hope that, when I come to it, I will be able to say the opposite about death.  At least that transition will not require a trip to the DMV.

Fantasies to Reject in Old Age (or Sooner)

Youth is a time for fantasy, but it occurs to me that we may never outgrow some illusions.  The nature of our fantasies changes as we age (Santa Claus and Prince Charming may have been discarded), but our need for such magical thinking apparently does not.  I have been reading Swamplands of the Soul, by the Jungian James Hollis, which is a far more uplifting book than you might expect from the title.  Hollis and others whom I will discuss think that elderly fantasies are not entirely harmless.  And if you think you don’t have any such illusions, please read on.

Hollis is particularly interesting on the subject of aging and fantasy. He says that there are at least a couple of fantasies that we all need to reject as we grow old:

The two greatest fantasies we are obliged to relinquish in the second half of life are that we are immortal exceptions to the human condition, and that out there somewhere is some “Magical Other” who will rescue us from existential isolation.

My body has been working hard to convince me that it won’t last forever; so, I think I have probably come close to accepting my mortality (ask me on my deathbed).   But the “rescue” fantasy is harder – and it includes, according to Hollis, “Taking responsibility for choices, to cease blaming others or expecting rescue from them, …and to accept the pain of loneliness.”   I do have trouble with the blame thing – partly because my family of origin loved the blame game and partly because it is indeed an easy way of avoiding responsibility.  I have spent countless hours with therapists, siblings, and friends detailing the sins of the childhood that made me what I am.  But that’s over.  The older I get, the surer I am that those recalled injustices just don’t matter anymore.

As for the “Magical Other,” I think I have finally learned that no one can rescue me from myself.  I also realized over time that it was not simply a knight in shining armor I was looking for to redeem me. I often fell prey to the false belief that more money, another house, a new situation, a grand trip could do the job – never seeing that any remediation for “existential isolation” comes from acceptance within.

Much “magical thinking” is the product of conceiving our life as a story.  As James Carse says in his wonderful Infinite Games, “Because we know our lives to have the character of narrative, we also [think] we know what the narrative is…. [But] true story tellers do not know their own story.”

And of course, if we have a story, we want a happy ending.  This is another fantasy to reject in old age (related to Hollis’s second one).  My husband and I have recently lost the last of our parents, and it is clear that life’s end may be many things, but it is seldom happy and often it is quite the opposite.  The old have happy moments, happy memories – but to tell ourselves that everything will come out right in the end (think Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is indulging in a fantasy.   Many of us delay making necessary changes to our lives because we picture a quiet deathbed scene in our own bed, with loving (and not burnt out from taking care of us) friends and relatives holding our hands and playing our favorite music.  May it be so for you, but I hope I know enough not to count on it.  But accepting this does not mean despair.  Joko Beck posited that it could mean something else entirely:

When people know their death is very close, what is the element that often disappears?  What disappears is the hope that life will turn out the way the want it to.  Then they can see the strawberry is “so delicious” [even though there is a tiger below – you may know the story] – because that is all there is, this very moment. (Everyday Zen)

It is easy for me to say that I accept Hollis’s imperatives to accept mortality and to reject optimistic fantasies and magical thinking.  It is not easy to do, and recidivism occurs frequently.  Young children often cannot tell fantasy from reality; dreams seem real, Santa’s reindeer can fly, and there really are monsters under the bed.  We are older, but are we wiser?  We justify telling lies to children to protect them, to make the world seem less threatening.  An argument might be made that elders need the same protections.  I will, however, keep trying to “put away childish things.”

Jorge Borges wrote a story, “August 25, 1983,” in which he imagines his own death.  Using his format, I did something similar and found it an interesting exercise.  I highly recommend both the story and the exercise.  What do you think you will have to say at the end of your life?  What was important, transformational, disappointing?  Look at it as practice in dealing with reality.

I would also recommend a wonderful book by Stephen Levine, “A Year to Live: How to Live This Year as If It Were Your Last.”  It inspired my story, “Encore.”