Tag: John Lennon

The Afterlife and Psychic Hygiene

Old folks have a reputation for worrying, for longing for the good old days, for catastrophic thinking.  I don’t think I am an overly negative person (my kids might disagree), but these are surely times to try an old lady’s optimism.  I know the stereotype is that elders are backward-looking, but I don’t want to return to the days before vaccines and the Civil Rights Act.  I am, however, searching for something positive to look forward to.

For years, parents could look forward to a better life for our children; upward mobility is not so easy anymore, for economic, environment, and political reasons.  At the founding of the UN, there were hopes for world peace.  We could find comfort that we would leave the world and our loved ones in better shape than we found them.  But no more.   So how can we alleviate our worries, calm our psyches, have the courage to soon leave life behind?

In “The Stages of Life” (recommended), Carl Jung acknowledged that old people needed something good to anticipate, and he suggested that the notion of the “afterlife” could have therapeutic value for us elders, particularly as it could take away some of the fear we face as we begin “transitioning” to death:

I therefore consider that all religions with a supramundane goal are eminently reasonable from the point of view of psychic hygiene.  When I live in a house which I know will fall about my head within the next two weeks, all my vital functions will be impaired by this thought; but if on the contrary I feel myself to be safe, I can dwell there in a normal and comfortable way.  From the standpoint of psychotherapy, it would therefore be desirable to think of death as only a transition, as part of a life process whose extent and duration are beyond our knowledge.

Death as placebo, you say.  Maybe.

It is interesting to note that in the medieval period in Europe there was a general belief that life was getting worse, that mankind was declining from a golden age (Eden?) through silver and brass to iron.   Even earlier, Ovid gave a clear delineation of the ages in the Metamorphoses, from the Golden Age, which “still retained some seed of the celestial force,” through the Age of Silver, when constant springtime was compromised with the addition of the other seasons, to the Age of Bronze, and finally the corrupt Iron Age, when humanity let loose to “Violence and the damned desire of having.”  After this cycle of decline, the population is destroyed in a flood and new men are created out of the earth, and presumably the cycle starts again.  I don’t really know where we are in the current cycle, but “violence and the damned desire of having” sound familiar.  Any rewards or punishments were to be found in another life, in a very real heaven or a very scary hell.  The assumption of “progress” only became common after the Enlightenment.

Americans tend to believe (or say they believe) in an afterlife of some sort (reincarnation counts).  According to a Pew study in 2021, about 73% of Americans believe in heaven but only 62% believe in hell.  There’s optimism for you. More people over 50 believe in heaven and hell than younger people (no surprise there) and more Republicans believe than Democrats.  Maybe that’s why they are not so afraid of an earthly future of global warming and increasing warfare – as they say, “there will be pie in the sky when you die.”

But back to Jung and the idea that believing in an afterlife is an act of psychic hygiene.  Can we make ourselves do it?  As John Lennon inferred, we are past that.   “Imagine there’s no heaven/It’s easy if you try/No hell below us/Above us, only sky.”  Not believing in heaven is “easy;” believing has become very difficult – a little like trying to believe in Santa Claus again.  And yet I understand where Jung is coming from.  In his memoir (recommended) Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung has a chapter entitled “Life After Death,” in which he recalls glimpses of eternity that he got as a child and again cautions against ridiculing the therapeutic comfort that believers receive:

Leaving aside the rational arguments against any certainty in these matters, we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence.  They live more sensibly, feel better, and are more at peace. One has centuries. One has an inconceivable period of time at one’s disposal.  What then is the point of this senseless mad rush?

This led me to think about Herman Melville.  In a little-read book Melville titled The Confidence Man (written by the master just after Moby-Dick), one of the characters cautions against forcing old people up against the truth:

“Yes, poor soul,” said the Missourian, gravely eyeing the old man – “yes, it is pitiless in one like me to speak too honestly to one like you.  You are a later sitter-up in this life; past man’s usual bed-time; and truth, though with some it makes a wholesome breakfast, proves to all a supper too hearty.  Hearty food, taken late, gives bad dreams.”

And that is what facing the truths of our world reminds me of – “a supper too hearty.”  Is a belief in an afterlife an answer?  Simone de Beauvoir suggested in The Coming of Age that we all needed a project in old age, we must continue the good fight. Beauvoir says that “there is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning – devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.  In spite of the moralists’ opinion to the contrary, in old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in upon ourselves.”  Yes.  But.  She also says (and all of this is in her conclusion to the book) that it is fairly inevitable that “illusions” will vanish and “one’s zeal for life pass away.”  And where does that leave us?

In this, as in most things, I land in Spinoza’s camp. Spinoza said that we were thinking about eternity in the wrong way; he says that we think of eternity as a matter of time rather than a matter of the moment, of awareness:

If we attend to the common opinion of men, we shall see that they are indeed conscious of the eternity of their mind, but that they confuse it with duration, and attribute it to the imagination, or memory, which they believe remains after death. (Ethics V)

Reminding myself of my own mortality (try the Buddhist Five Recollections daily), helps me do this.  William Blake puts it more poetically:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.

For an example of a very old lady’s momentary heaven, you might try my short story, “Like Heaven.”  For a blog on another aspect of this subject, try, “Retirement, Death, and the Land of Cockaigne.”  And try to put into words what it is you do believe.

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.

Old Karma, Instant Karma

I have heard the word karma tossed around a lot lately. There is a subtle thread that postulates that humanity is reaping what it has sown in terms of overpopulation, globalization, and racial inequities. Buddhists will tell you that there are many kinds of karma. I am partial to John Lennon’s kind of karma – but we’ll come back to that.

Karma literally means “action,” it is what we do or think. Because the world seems to work on a cause and effect basis, what we do has consequences. This is the good news and the bad news. It means we can get ourselves into trouble, but it also means we can get ourselves out of trouble. As older people, most of us are well experienced with this concept. The sins of our youth might still haunt us, but most of us have learned some lessons, overcome some of the consequences of our misjudgments, and carried on. Maybe not entirely, though. Cicero continually reminds us that a well-spent youth is the “best armor of old age,” but Cicero is not right about everything. Erasmus, on the other hand, quotes a common medieval proverb that a “young saint makes an old devil” and vice-versa. In any case, the good news about karma, even if you do not believe in multiple lifetimes in which to reap the consequences, is that as long as we can act, we can change our karma. And, I believe, this is even true on an individual daily basis and collectively over the long term.

None of this is to say that bad things (or good things) cannot happen to undeserving people; earthquakes and rainbows are indiscriminate as far as I can tell. And I am not saying we could even figure out the ramifications of our past or present actions very accurately – even the Buddha said such an effort would drive one to madness. But it would also be madness to think that our actions have no consequences. It is a kind of madness that we apparently have collectively, and the earth and its creatures are suffering for it.

Again, old people know all about this. We know it with our bodies – we are dealing now with the sins of our youth when we got too much sun, smoked, did drugs, or didn’t eat well or take good care of our teeth. And we know it in our hearts. It often occurs to me that I have far clearer memories of my mistakes than I do of my successes, that I can summon up the details of bad times more easily than I can remember the good ones. Karma.

You might remember one of Lennon’s last creations – “Instant Karma.” Here are the chorus and some of the lyrics:

Well we all shine on
Like the moon and the stars and the sun
Well we all shine on
Every one, come on

Instant Karma’s gonna get you
Gonna knock you off your feet
Better recognize your brothers
Every one you meet

This is the karma of conscience. Things I did, things I didn’t do (and should have); the guilt, shame, and remorse of such things don’t wait for another lifetime. They are, as Lennon says, instant. These pangs don’t disappear instantly, however. In the little book on conscience by Paul Strohm that I have been reading (highly recommended), there is talk about the “black book of conscience” that we must carry with us to present to the “Final Judge.” Oh boy.

What we’ve done or not done, where we come from, what we’ve thought, has repercussions throughout our life. Of course, we cannot change the past, and yet… one spends a lot of time with regrets and might remember Yeats words about remorse:

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest. (“Dialogue of Self and Soul”)

May it be so! But how to “cast out remorse”? And do we always want to?

But here’s the thing – I have remorse that I spent too much time in the sun, didn’t brush my teeth enough, didn’t drink enough milk. But I don’t spend any time berating myself about it – I just get a good dermatologist, a decent dentist, and take my Prolia shots for osteoporosis without complaint. So far, however, there have been no such “remedies” for the bad karma we have inflicted on the earth and its creatures. Covid and the Black Lives Matter have reminded me of this. And I know remorse won’t help unless it is fueling action (new karma) and a new heart (instant karma).

The story this week, “The Widow’s Dream,” is not so much about karma within one woman’s lifetime, as about how the past can cripple us if we allow it to. Let it not be so.