…When I am old, do not forsake me…

“Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone” (Ps. 71:9).

I’ve been thinking about this verse ever since it showed up in the lectionary a few months ago. With all the talk of the Bomb and the turmoil of the 60’s I never thought I’d reach my 30’s let alone 60’s. I figured it would be a relief to die in my prime.

I felt what a mercy it was for my mother and father when this happened to them. Both avoided a nursing home. My mother lived with lung cancer at home until the last few days when she entered hospice. My dad was here and then gone. The same with my brother. I felt the mercy of their deaths, what Christians call “falling asleep.” My parents did not have to go through the humiliation of losing their minds, of losing control over their lives or bodily functions, of cutting away unneeded stuff, so they could make a room sized home in a nursing facility. They didn’t have to bear the smell of fake potatoes permeating the halls and breathe indoor air 24/7 or share their final days with a roommate they’d never seen before.

With so much loss in my late twenties and early thirties I felt like an old woman. When I lost my family, I lost my history, the people I could reminisce with or ask questions about things I found in the family album. My days were heavy and tired. I carried grief and anger, especially anger, for about a decade. I had to teach myself to stop whining, crying and complaining, playing the victim. Living in a community where you don’t belong unless your family had lived there for a hundred years didn’t help either. (But isn’t this true of most communities?)

It didn’t help that I didn’t grow up eating Midwestern dirt. There are ways of coping with the world that are rooted in place. When I first moved to Illinois, I remember doing publicity trips to New York City and found more friends in a shorter period of time than I had in the months of staying in the western suburbs of Chicago. The people I grew up with, and my family, are a thousand miles away in upstate New York.

Most of my closest “friends” on Facebook come from the Northeast. Some of us share history, even it’s only from the first seventeen years of our lives. That history binds us even though we haven’t spoken to each other for years. In Where The Roots Reach for Water, a book about how Jeffrey Smith’s medication stopped working for depression and how he coped, he talks about how one of his cures involved moving back to the region where he grew up. It’s almost as though his body vibrated with how the light fell, and the ground rose up under his feet back in the region where he was born. He got in tune again.

As I’ve aged, I’ve felt younger, healthier. Retiring rolled the weight of working off my shoulders. Those workaday frictions were eased and I have felt lighter. I wake up thankful to be alive in this body. When someone talked about the youth in our church I wanted to raise my hand, but no, no, I’m not a youth in our church, no not at all, though I feel like it. I’m 60 years old, married to Bruce for half that time.

I’m afraid of growing old, alone. But I am old at 60. And wonder about the community I don’t find myself in. As a young woman I bought into the business about zero population growth and did my part by not having babies. Sure it was more complicated than that. I did not have the emotional constitution to raise children. Neither Bruce nor I had the burning desire to raise them. I read Molly Peacock’s Piece by Piece a memoir that discusses how she gave up having children for her art. But she became a famous poet in exchange. I worked quietly, never becoming a famous or well published anything, but I made peace.

Only once did the longing for children rise up, when we moved to the farm, and everything was in turmoil. I watched Bruce during the children’s services at church, the look of warmth on his face, and grieved that I did not give him a son or daughter. I avoid books and websites about motherhood. And marvel at how my friend’s babies are adults having their own babies. I know in my bones motherhood would have been an utterly difficult choice.

Now I am 60 and realizing it’s time to get rid of the excess clutter, because the next move will likely be to a town house for seniors. I look at what I may take with me. I think of the grief when the precious things have to go. Who will do the hard work of tending our affairs if our minds go or our bodies become too frail to move?

Sometimes I regret not having children so they could watch out for us. I mentioned this to a friend, who said it doesn’t always work out that way. Even Bruce and I kept our distance from Bruce’s mom until that last year. During those five years of silence, there was no guarantee we’d be back to help. Though one good thing lead to another and we did return.

But my friend is right. I remember another friend who refused to go to her mother when she was dying the next state over. Having children doesn’t mean they’ll be personal social service agency. Besides the point of having children is to send them out into the world to become their own people, not as future concierges orchestrating the details of their parents’ old age.

I feel this, what this verse says, “Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone” (Ps. 71:9). I feel the raw fear of it as I consider how estranged I feel from community. I regret leaving the very first church we joined, but we’d invested in the community for several years, volunteering, participating in small groups, and were told if we didn’t have children in the school we wouldn’t make friends. We haven’t made friends with the church we attend now and they haven’t made friends with us. Our pastor has said that his priority are his members and we are not members. Bruce and I figure that it’s like this wherever we go.

If something happens to us, what will we do? Who will tend to us? Bruce and I aren’t the only ones who are childless, who are the end their family lines in the Baby Boomer generation. And there is some resentment brewing in the culture towards the rich, as if it’s a scandal that seniors are more well off than young people. Well, that’s been true for years. I hear the worry about how our vast numbers are likely to overwhelm social services. I wonder what society’s answer will be.

Dean Robertson writes in Looking for Lydia, Looking for God how she entered an assisted living facility, The Lydia Roper Home. Robertson writes how she came to live there, “When I arrived at the Lydia Roper Home, I was a resident, not a volunteer. I had spent a year paralyzed by depression and struggling with neurological disorders; soon after Christmas, I had a terrible fall. I ended up in the hospital, in a rehabilitation center, and finally, at the Roper Home.”

Robertson shares how a person can find community even when confined to a rehabilitation center or nursing home, how what might be the loneliest time could really be the least lonely time because of the friendships that might develop. who are afraid of this time in our lives. She writes about how she wasn’t happy to be there at first but she decided to walk out of her room and teach a Bible study because the Bible as Literature was a class she’d taught for years. In doing so she finds a vibrant community with the women she gathers. Her book threads interesting insights about the Bible, with Robertson’s own search for who Lydia Roper was. (The home was named after her. And Robertson was stunned to find very few family stories around her.)

Even Bruce’s mother, who was terrified of being abandoned in her old age, of leaving the home she and her husband built, was cared for by a woman who healed old memories of being left in soiled diapers. Her doctors remarked how her skin was clean, without bedsores. And the part of her family who was estranged, us, returned to her. And that a miracle as real as someone rising from the dead. And perhaps there lies hope for us as well.

So my prayer to God is “Do not cast me away when I am old; do not forsake me when my strength is gone” (Ps. 71:9). Somehow as with other fears I need to let go of this one, and trust that God won’t cast me away when I am old, that He’ll provide for our needs, that Way will open. In the meantime all I can do is be thankful for this day, for being alive in this body on this ground with this husband and those animals. All I can do is work at the work I’ve been given which is to love.