My whole life I have been drawn to elders. From grandparents in New York and San Francisco, to great aunts and uncles around America and the world — my youth and early adulthood overflowed with the stories, convictions, artistic expression, and unquestioned love and interest from this previous generation. There were weeks spent in Virginia with a great aunt and uncle who had bought an abandoned church and filled it with Mordi’s art, huge canvases depicting biblical and natural scenes, weeks near Lake Constance with my great aunt who was a communist spy in World War II, and the civil rights activist Baptist minister who taught me to take my voice and writing seriously. Powerful and lasting legacies — not passing shadows.
Yet, they started to fail. A new role: I remember as a high school senior helping that same minister prepare his taxes as he recovered from a heart attack, detailed weekly shopping lists from a homebound great aunt on 5th Avenue, and holding tightly in my arms the great aunt whose dementia kept bringing her back to the pond behind the house in Waldfrieden where she witnessed her father’s assassination at the end of World War I.
As I build systems to support the spiritual lives of elders, draw people into caring for elders, and go each day to the difficult land of aging, I am blessed by those who lived interesting and profound lives, who loved deeply, who stretched and searched, and challenge me to do the same.
Till you grow old, I will still be the same; when you turn gray, it is I who will carry you. – Isaiah 46:4
God remains ageless, but I will someday become the grandmother, the great aunt, and must have love, stories, and teachings to share.
Rabbi Sara Paasche-Orlow is Director of Jewish and Chaplaincy Services at Hebrew Senior Life, Boston. www.hebrewseniorlife.org
