WHAT THE GOSPEL (AND COVID) REVEAL ABOUT AGING

Covid is showing us what needs to change – How will the Church respond?

One of the greatest joys of my long home stay during Covid-19 was watching three little children jumping, bumping and dancing on the newly installed trampoline in their backyard directly across my back lane. I could watch them from my kitchen window while I kneaded my bread dough, my heart leaping with their every bounce.

Even happier was the day the children came out of their house wearing tall boots. The combination of a recent rain and the landscaping project going on in their yard had caused a wonderful wide, deep puddle to form. The children – a slightly older brother and preschool twins – took turns jumping high and landing hard to see how well they could splash each other with the sloshing, muddy water.

Of course, when it was all over, and the game had moved on to body daubing and mudball slinging, I was also happy enough that it was their back door, not mine, that opened to them. While they were being showered and scrubbed, I could just get on with making bread, glad I had gained that skill during the early years of retirement. Sharing bread with family and friends was one of the few ways I could reach out to connect with others, to remind myself that, however alone, I was still part of a community.

When a couple of years ago I wrote an article titled “Still Time: The Beautiful Grace of Aging, Community and Friends” about retirement offering the gift of time for quiet reflection and stillness (www. FaithToday.ca/StillTIme), I had not envisioned anything like the solitude imposed by Covid-19. I was then in the 57th year of a long and rich marriage, enjoying a companionship that had grown deeper and more tender over the many shared years. But late in the summer of 2019 my husband Cam died very suddenly, his call home coming in one fell stroke.

Heightened by grief and sharpened by my natural need for people in my life, the isolation imposed by Covid was for me, as for so many others, very difficult. It offered me a preview of what advanced old age can mean – to be alone and lonely, to be cut off from the normal social exchanges of community, to be shut in and invisible, and on top of all that to know that just by your existence and age you present a hazard to a fragile and overburdened health care system.

At the same time I understood deeply the distress felt by families as they – and we as a nation – were forced to re-evaluate a system of care for the elderly on which we have all come to rely. My own parents spent the last four years of their long lives in long-term care. I was grateful then, and still am, for their care in a facility set up to let them stay close to each other to the end of their lives.

Yet, with government austerity measures forcing budgetary cuts during those years, I also saw the level of their care gradually undermined by reductions both in ratios of staff to patients, and in the level of training required of staff. Throughout those years, I asked myself again and again the question that has grown urgent during Covid-19: Is this the best arrangement that could have been made for my parents’ old-age care? Is this the best I can do? The best we can do?

I have never been quite sure I knew the answer.

On the table of national concerns

Now, Covid-19 has put this question squarely on the table of national concerns. Dr. Theresa Tam, in her press conference in early May 2020, called the number of deaths from the disease among fragile seniors in nursing homes “a national tragedy.” Now, Covid-19 has put the question of eldercare high on the list of national concerns. We have an obligation to examine how aging happens in our culture, and an opportunity to contribute a Christian vision to the national discussion. Here are some ways we could ground our thinking, speaking, and acting at this momentous time.

First, we can take a lead in joining other voices that urge us to acknowledge and face our mortality, including the fact that aging is fraught with complexity. All the advances of science and interventional medicine have not changed the reality that our years on earth are numbered. The human lifespan remains remarkably close to the “seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures” of the psalmist (Psalm 90:10). There are, of course, a few outliers still running marathons at 90, and the wealthy and well-tended octogenarians attractively posed for popular magazines. But ad

vancing years will be, for most of us, marked by increasing losses, progressive disability and fragility. Sadly enough, the longer we live, the greater the probability we will experience dementia. At some point most of us who live into our mid-80s will need some degree of care.

And while not everything that can be done medically to extend our lives must be done, and while I have long argued it is right and ethical to refuse (or to authorize our proxies to refuse on our behalf) such medical intervention as might lengthen life but leave us in prolonged incapacitation, it is also my conviction that the normal process of aging has been allowed in God’s providence as a meaningful stage of life. It is meaningful both for us and for those who care for us. Learning how to support each other through those years is the challenge we need to help each other meet.

Second, the Christian faith has a core value on the intrinsic worth of every human life, quite distinct from the utilitarian value of that life for its economic, aesthetic or cultural contribution. Even when, as Dr. Tam went on to say in her national tragedy address, we should recognize the value of the elderly as being the bearers of our history or the founders of our nation, we are locating value in what they do or have done rather than who they are.

What then is the value in elderly people who have lost their own history, let alone that of our nation? In a culture which is primarily driven by the production and consumption of goods and services, and which values most highly beauty and/or economic productivity, it is very hard to separate identity from function – but it is also utterly essential to any real meeting of the needs of the elderly. Describing His Father’s loving knowledge of and care for every living creature, Jesus said (I think maybe with a wry smile), “Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows” (Matthew 10:31).

True caregiving, caretaking and, perhaps hardest of all, care receiving must come from such deep love rather than any perceived societal value in the recipient if it is to reflect the heart of the Creator.

Third, the Christian Church has inherited from the Jewish tradition a vision of shalom in which old and young thrive together in community, a vision which can guide our thinking, speaking and acting in the way we value and care for the elderly in our culture. This vision is most clearly enunciated by the prophets Isaiah (chapter 65) and Zechariah (chapter 8). These prophets foresee a day of human flourishing marked by the thriving of the very young and the very old together – Isaiah foreseeing a time when the human lifespan has been extended to a hundred years. A time which Zechariah describes as being when “men and women of ripe old age will sit in the streets of Jerusalem, each of them with a cane in hand because of their age . . .the city streets … filled with boys and girls playing there” (Zechariah 8:5).

My heart leaps at these words. The old people in Zechariah’s vision are, indeed, old. They need their canes, their hearing aids and their walkers. But they are not segregated into what has, during Covid, been rather euphemistically termed congregate living.

They are – canes and all – welcome, visible members of a community that includes the young as well as the old. They are situated where they can enjoy the vibrant, noisy life of children at play. In this vision of shalom there is an open welcoming of each other, a sense of safety and inclusion that could become the working plan for an entirely different vision of care – one that integrates the elderly fully in community in safe streets where both young families and old people are welcome and secure.

Intergenerational community

I saw something of this vision realized during our 12 years living in Nova Scotia – everywhere the elderly could be seen being helped to do their shopping by

grandchildren and great-grandchildren, nieces and nephews. Families of several generations shared meals in grand and unpredictable melees around the tables in the local Tim Hortons. Homes and lives were rearranged so the elderly could live near or with family.

It is possible in other, more mobile and more urban settings, that the Church could reconceptualize itself as extended family, creating neighbourhood circles of caring that include people of all ages. We have had a little taste of it during Covid-19 as younger people in the community have quickly offered to do grocery shopping for shut-in seniors, visited with them by phone through glass panes and kept connected by way of technology – all to preserve the emotional and physical well-being of the elderly. This freshly realized sense and experience of connection is something the Church is uniquely equipped to foster, if we are willing to re-evaluate some aspects of how we do church.

The stratified age-specific programming of many contemporary churches now seems to be quite out of step with the real needs of our culture. Even as the Church in the first century was made up of rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, Covid-19 may offer us a crucial opportunity to hold up a prophetic vision and build working models of community that include old and young together. It may be time for new thinking about the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus yet to come in its fullness, but of which we are, as the Church, called to be a harbinger.

Where might we start? We could initiate councils on aging and the gospel in our local churches, denominations and interchurch fellowships – councils given the task of listening well and envisioning boldly. The new comfort level which seniors themselves have gained with communication technologies during the Covid experience would facilitate fuller participation of seniors with young people on such councils.

There are many in care who can articulate their wishes and needs. Those a few years away from needing help themselves, who have seen our parents and friends through to their deaths, could serve as resource people along with some taking leadership in elder care.

Let’s ask and listen with our hearts and minds open to the Spirit of Christ. Such questions and answers – with seniors and caregivers – could go a long way to making existing end-of-life care more humane.

Needed: a range of choices

But listening and dreaming, while a first step, is not enough. Let’s also find ways to imagine and support a wider range of choices for old-age care, making congregate living just one of many ways of approaching the end of life. Indeed, we have seen in our culture as a whole that the least effective and most dangerous way to care for the elderly is in segregation from the community. We could now join our voices with those who advocate greatly expanded home care so that, as most seniors most clearly wish, they can stay in their own homes as long as possible.

And, as a Church, we could establish and advocate for working models of a range of living arrangements – intergenerational co-op or cohort housing, perhaps in townhouse-style accommodations around a hub housing medical care, library and church – and, above all else, playgrounds and benches. We could also encourage further developments of integrated graduated care designed in such a way that the elderly are not moved from one place to another – and sometimes away from supportive friends and family – as their care needs intensify.

And, of course, Christians have led the way historically in modelling, advocating for, and providing palliative and hospice services. These will become more important if there are to be genuine alternatives in how we die. We need to take that lead in our communities – as recently, a respected Christian philanthropist has led the community in fundraising and building the first hospice in Halifax.

If younger people listen carefully to the elderly, and if they become involved in both advocacy and participation in every level of government from municipal to federal, we can at this crucial time urge governments across the country to provide substantial incentives for churches and communities to provide better care for the elderly in a range of innovative and even prophetic ways. This may well be our chance to bring into the public square both our valuing of life itself and our sense that human life can only really thrive in community.

On the day the Church was born of the Spirit, the Apostle Peter quoted a passage from the prophet Joel that summarizes the prophecies of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and embodies it in the life of the Church. The Holy Spirit, Peter preached, has come to enable sons and daughters to prophesy, young men and old men to envision together, women and men to serve together.

Today, we are looking for a new vision of our society that takes fully into account the realities of how care can best be shown to the elderly. As Christians we have an unusual opportunity, if we dare, to dream and bring into being innovative and creative models of what that might look like. And in the process we will also enlarge and enrich our vision of the Church itself.

I dream of this as I knead my bread and rejoice in the shouts of children on their backyard trampoline.

. . . our chance to bring into the public square both our valuing of life itself and our sense that human life can only really thrive in community.