Their years are told in the stories of their lives
The pandemic has stolen the capacity for ritual and gatherings that provide for “good grief.”
What the young often forget, gazing on the elderly in all their frailty, is that all of us remain to some degree all the ages we have ever been.
“Because I was once a child, I am always a child,” wrote “A Wrinkle in Time” author Madeleine L’Engle. “Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me and always will be. Because I was once a rebellious student, there is and always will be in me the student crying out for reform.”
Overwhelmingly, COVID-19 has attacked the elderly. But beyond the number that signifies their years are the stories that chronicle their stages, of how they found their way, made their mark.
Jim Henderson died at 79 on Tuesday in Toronto. He was a former Liberal member of the Ontario legislature, a psychiatrist who became fluent in Spanish while helping establish psychoanalysis services in Cuba.
As an MPP, Henderson earned the wrath of his boss, then-premier David Peterson, by opposing the Liberal ban on extrabilling by doctors.
But if he was a man of independent view, he was also one of ideas and compassion. He worked to reform divorce law and presume joint custody of children unless there was reason not to. He pressed for anonymous HIV testing at a time those at risk feared being outed.
His career may have been obscure, but there was a lot of spunk and spirit in Jim Henderson’s life, idealism that the young might find appealing.
The late American columnist Sydney J. Harris once said that older people feel young inside because we enter each new stage of life as beginners.
“A man going from middle to old age is just as inexperienced in coping with his new status as he was in moving from youth to full manhood. He knows no more about the capacities and limitations of being older than he did when his voice changed from soprano to baritone.”
And so we learn, ever adjusting to our changing place in the scheme of things, knowing — even as we find acceptance and contentment — what it’s like to be unsettled and uncertain.
An essay in the June issue of the Atlantic magazine by undertaker Thomas Lynch said that what the coronavirus pandemic has stolen is the capacity for ritual and gatherings that provide for “good grief.”
Instead, there is only the duty to bury or cremate the dead in isolation.
The family of Bill Rowell, who died last month at 88 in St. Catharines, understood that loss. They called Rowell, who worked 35 years at DuPont Canada and was also a parttime firefighter and district chief for 25 years, “a man who got the job done.”
In his obituary, Rowell’s family thanked the hospital “angels” who provided love and compassion while relatives could not be with him.
Could not laugh and weep and revel in the stories of the man he was in all seasons of his life, of the lessons he learned, the things he could teach.