The aging mind
Since before sunup Old Jack has been standing at the edge of the hotel porch, gazing out into the empty street of the town of Port William, and now the sun has risen and covered him head to toe with light. But not yet with warmth, and in spite of his heavy sheepskin coat he has grown cold. He pays that no mind. When he came out and stopped there at the top of the steps, mindful of the way the weight of his body is taking him, he propped it carefully with his cane and, in the way that has lately grown upon him, left it. …Though he stands leaning on his cane on the porch of the hotel in Port William, looking into the first cool morning of September 1952, he is not there.
Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack
I’ve started to suspect that the aging mind is too often studied by researchers who are too young to ask the right questions.
My mother doesn’t experience time in the linear way that’s the go-to of doing business in our world. She samples from different temporal distances. Is time more cyclical for her? Many presents are true at once. Some people refer to her perception of what’s true now as delusional. But it’s not delusion. It’s sampling from a more distant present.
My dad’s creativity and exceptional capacity to weave a web of connections hasn’t waned at all. But his grasp of some of the details and how-tos of daily living has slipped a bit.
What if these changes serve us as we age? What if we’re completely missing the value of the aging mind, even in dementia, as we scurry around officiously and feel and express contempt as grasp of appointments and banking apps declines.
Is the way we study and treat aging just another form of colonial imposition? As we try to shoehorn our elders into our norms of order and hygiene and how things should be?
What if we engaged in active participatory sensemaking with our elders? What if we tried out some intense listening, as if we didn’t know better already and really had something to learn? What if we reframe neurodegeneration as transformation?
What if we consider the ways in which cyclic time may prepare us for death? What can a window into cyclic time offer those who are younger or still experience time only linearly? What can we learn from a capacity to make more distant connections – framing it as enhanced creativity rather than reduced plausibility?
Practically speaking, how can we free our elders from the daily tyranny of banking apps and MedChart and appointment keeping in order that we can benefit from and celebrate this transformed way of inhabiting the world – without throwing people into soul-crushing, numbingly boring institutions and care that that is brutalizing at worst and disrespectful at best? What structures can we create that support active engagement with the world and other people as moments of time become disengaged from adjacent moments and linked to distant ones?
Even if we’re younger, how can we ask the right questions?
Old Jack has become a worry to them. In the last several weeks his mind seems to have begun to fail. They have been watching him with some anxiety, they and the other members of the community who care about him, for fear that in one of those spells when he seems to go away from himself he will fall and be hurt or be hit by a car. They have all found him in the various stations of his rounds, just standing, as poignantly vacant as an empty house. And they have watched him, those who care about him, because they feel that he is going away from them, going into a past that now holds nearly all of him. And they yearn toward him, knowing they will be changed when he is gone…
Wendell Berry, The Memory of Old Jack
Virtual performance, Dementia, from Piece of Mind Collective: