The Gero-Punk Project

Toward the end of my most recent post, Gero-Punk Public Service Announcement, I plunked down a couple of provocative bits without offering any easy answers or resolutions.  This was intentional on my part, not offering any easy (or hard) answers or resolutions!  As a Gero-Punk, I’m committed to freedom of thought; far be it from me to be the Gero-Punk Thought Police!

I was hoping that some of you dear readers would be reading closely enough that you’d realize that I’d left a couple of tantalizing, possibly unanswerable questions just dangling there. I wrote, “At the end of the Understanding and Addressing Ageism workshop I facilitated last week, one of the participants asked me if it was wrong that they appreciate being told that they look good for their age.”  One of you dear readers responded keenly: “…what was the answer to be pleased to be told you look younger? At 63 I love it when folks think I’m younger! Of course, my immaturity lends to that as well! Hahah.”

+++

I have a recurring memory of meeting for an interview with one of my spiritual teachers.  How many years ago did this meeting take place? I think several, perhaps even a decade has passed.  I was struggling with memories around personal and family wounds over-taking me during my contemplation and meditation practices.  My teacher responded by asking me not about the memories that were intruding upon my practice – not about the content—but, rather, about the contours of my practice.  I don’t remember what I described about my practice. But I do remember the dharma she offered to me; it was advice in the form of an aspiration.  She said: I wish for you more opportunities to encounter the empty and groundless nature of reality, as you spend a lot of time in the realm of relative experience and self-cherishing.

+++

I’ve been pondering my ongoing misgivings regarding the anti-ageism activism I’ve been engaging in for the past quarter-decade (at least). My misgivings feel fierce but hard to pin down. I often feel possessed by the conviction that much of the work on ageism isn’t quite getting it right, that there’s something problematic about the framing of the issue, there’s something problematic about the impulse to privilege ageism above all other forms of bias and discrimination. I’m sympathetic yet grumpy with the idea that because aging is a universal human experience, something that we are all doing across the life-course regardless of the many ways in which we are diverse, that this is the idea around which we can organize and engage in anti-ageism education and activism.  The assertion that when we engage in ageism toward older persons we are discriminating against our future older selves is a potent idea, one that connects to the work I’ve been doing for at least twenty years around imagining and befriending our “future older selves” as a practice for more deeply engaging in one’s own life-long aging journey, as well for opening up space for curiosity about (and perhaps greater empathy for) others’ aging journeys.

I’ve seen many people experience profound transformations in their consciousness about aging and old age as a result of engaging in an intentional relationship with their future older selves (as well as their previous younger selves). I’ve never tested whether this practice leads to a reduction in internalized or externalized ageism – this has never been an explicit purpose of the practice; rather, my fundamental aim in inviting others to engage in deep reflection (and sometimes discussion and writing, too) about their imagined future older selves is because it offers a creative way into experiencing ourselves as emerging, always-developing beings and aging as a dynamic, multi-faceted life-long process.

The universality of aging is a potent truth – it is dharma. But I think in the context of anti-ageism education and activism we may hold some confusion about how best to harness this truth. (I myself share this confusion.) What is the texture of this truth and how might we embody and enact it? Touching the universality of aging feels to me to be connected to the “empty and groundless nature of reality” that my spiritual teacher entreated me to become more intimate with.

Aging is also a deeply personal experience which is embedded in the context(s) – times, places and spaces – in which one is situated and shaped by (often over-determined by) one’s positionalities such as gender, class, race/ethnicity, ability, nationality, generation, and more. Contexts and positionalities contribute to the tremendous diversity of how aging unfolds and is experienced over the life-course. The diversity of aging experiences – the exquisite particularity of how we travel through the life-course — feels to me to be connected to the “realm of relative experience and self-cherishing.”

We often get mired in the “realm of relative experience and self-cherishing,” possessed by and obsessed with the particularity of our experiences traveling through the life-course and confronting (and being confronted by) our aging.  We feel betrayed by aging – how our bodies and minds change in ways that feel out of our control. We feel wounded by aging…or perhaps it would be more accurate to say wounded by ageism, those reductive and damaging messages which are projected and internalized. Our aging wounds can become totalizing forces, unconscious and under-theorized and thus potentially huge blind-spots.  Aging wounds…. wounded by each other, by the culture, self-inflicted wounds. Oh, I’m barely scratching the surface, there’s so much more to be explored here!

My strong and abiding take-away, which has been confirmed multiple times now in the context of the many informal and formal conversations I’ve facilitated about age, aging and ageism, is that our suffering around ageism has to do with the relative realm, not the universal realm. Our suffering has to do with feeling stuck, misunderstood, hemmed in, reduced, out-of- control, confused, disappointed, bereft of hope…. fundamentally aggrieved that the aging journey, which is the human journey, is a journey toward ultimate destruction of the self. The stronger our “self-cherishing,” the deeper and more intense our wound.

Aging unfolds over the potentially long life-course and involves a balance between gains, losses and stability of abilities and functioning across multiple domains: body, mind, spirit, social roles and relationships. This is another important bit of dharma.

When we foreground our aging wounds, when we focus on ageism, we tend to activate our fears of the many losses that inevitably visit us as we travel through the life-course (As Kunitz pleads in his poem “The Layers,” How shall our hearts be reconciled to its feast of losses?).  Being human is to be vulnerable and at risk of losses no matter our age or life-course stage. But it is when we enter the land of later life – old age – that these losses and vulnerabilities become unavoidable and most intense.

There are also many gifts – gains – that may come with traveling through the life-course. Every life-course stage and age is characterized by its special gifts.  Part of the work of understanding and ending ageism and expanding aging awareness is to discover and celebrate the gifts of different ages and stages, to create the causes and conditions for these gifts to be appreciated and shared within and between generations.  But what are the gifts of different ages and stages? Can we say that there are shared universal gifts, or are gifts made manifest in diverse ways at the individual and communal level and, thus, in the “eye of the beholder”?  I’d suspect that there are gifts which are both shared and particular.

One of the challenges in talking about “the gifts of aging,” which is often the antidote offered by anti-ageism workers addressing the “losses of aging,” is to do so without perpetuating a positive aging stereotype such as older people are wise in place of damaging negative aging stereotypes such as older people are senile. My friends, a stereotype is a stereotype, even if it is positive. How do we imagine the gifts of old age — or any age — without doing so in a totalizing, reductive way?

+++

This is all so complex, isn’t it? And we humans seem to not prefer to dwell with complexity. And yet, I suspect that dwelling in complexity is the secret to muddling through all of this.  It surely feels like the answer to the question of how to reconcile my heart to its feast of losses.

Dwelling in complexity – in this case the complexity of the aging journey – requires me to explore the ways in which aging is simultaneously an empty and groundless phenomenon, and a deeply personal experience of self-hood.

Complexity is the dharma of aging.

I just realized that it’s that time again. Actually, it is well past that time again. But as I always like to sing: Better late than never; no time like the present; sooner rather than later; life is short, act now!

What time is it? It is time for a Gero-Punk public service announcement!

A Gero-Punk’s gotta eat

Whatcha doing this spring? Wanna hang out?

If you live in or near Portland, Oregon, USA (or happen to be passing through), why not join me some Wednesday for lunch?

Beginning Wednesday, April 3^rd, from noon to 2:00 p.m. PST, I’ll be hosting a weekly informal brown-bag-lunch conversation.

Here’s where you’ll find me:

Oregon State University Portland Center

Room PCMF 2006. Just drop-in, no need to RSVP.

And you don’t need to be affiliated with OSU to attend – all are welcome! Bring yourself, a green smoothie or awesome food cart sandwich, and whatever happens to be on your mind.

We can eat and chat and laugh and commiserate and scheme and dream.

For more information: jenny.sasser@oregonstate.edu

The Critical Gerontology “Thought Space”

I think I may have forgotten to mention that my long-time collaborator – Harry R. Moody – and I have a chapter in Critical Gerontology Comes of Age: Advances in Research and Theory in a New Century, edited by our colleague Chris Wellin, Ph.D. and published last year by Routledge.

If you are curious about what it means to do Critical Gerontology (C.G.), you might dig reading this collection of essays.  We explore the different areas in which the C.G. perspective has been enacted as we quest to understand the complexities of contemporary aging and construct gerontological knowledge. We authors represent diverse backgrounds, interests, and – so cool – generations, so what results is a kaleidoscopic view of where we’ve been and where we might be heading as gerontologists working in this radical “thought space,” as Stephen Katz, Ph.D. describes C.G.

Speaking of Stephen Katz – a C.G. luminary – he’s written a hot-off-the-presses review of our book for the March issue of The Gerontologist. Check it.

Better with age

And speaking of my comrade Harry R. Moody, we’ve commenced work on the 10^th (!!!!) edition of Aging: Concepts and Controversies, published by Sage. You’ll see the new edition hit the ground sometime later this year, hopefully, with – per usual – updated data and sources, as well as some new juicy supplemental readings and focus areas.

In the meanwhile, if you are a user of our text, whether as a teacher or a student, we’d love to think together with you about what works well and what could work better, not to mention any ideas you have for new things we might want to consider including.

Sound good?

Send your ideas to me at littlecoracle@gmail.com

Gero-Punk Ponderings and Provocations

At the end of the Understanding and Addressing Ageism workshop I facilitated last week, one of the participants asked me if it was wrong that they appreciate being told that they look good for their age.

Yesterday, I had a delightful and illuminating phone conversation with a soon-to-be 76-year-old on the topic of political candidates who are chronologically endowed. They began our conversation by describing the down-shift in energy they themselves have experienced as they’ve grown older, and the necessity and pleasure of taking a daily nap.  They wondered if it is possible to take a daily nap when you are POTUS.

As I was jumping on my mini-trampoline this morning, I was singing a little song of praise to gravity, who is my life-long friend.

And you? What’s on your mind? What’s up-and-down with you?

Thanks for tuning in.

Coming toward me is a man and a dog.   The man is tall and on his head is a shock of beautiful white hair.  My heart skips a beat – is that my dear friend Tsloan? And then I remember that my dear friend Tsloan died of pancreatic cancer at 9:37 a.m. on December 17^th, 2018.

+++

The name given to him is Tod Sloan. The name he chose for himself is Theodor (Theo) Arnason.  The name by which I refer to him is Tsloan.  I consider Tsloan to be a good mash-up of his given and chosen names, a potent symbol of his complex and multifaceted identity(ies).  Tsloan also sounds a bit edgy, like he’s a musician or an anarchist. (Actually, he’s both.)

The name Tsloan gave me is “Fierce Jenny.” He named me this not because he thought I was mean or angry, but because he thought I was brave.

+++

Tsloan and I met in February 2006.  He was Professor Tod Sloan, Ph.D. in the Counseling Psychology program at Lewis and Clark Graduate School of Education and Counseling.  I was Director of Gerontology and Chair of Human Sciences at Marylhurst University. We were both committed to enacting the principles of critical social theory in our teaching, scholarship and activism, he as a community psychologist and I as an educational gerontologist.

+++

Over the more than a decade we knew each other, Tsloan and I cultivated a vibrant, textured relationship.  Of course, we exchanged and discussed various books and articles, we talked about music and movies. But other much more surprising mutual offerings were made. He hooked me up with a side-gig teaching doctoral students in depth psychology, he connected me with a publisher in the U.K. for a project I was working on. My now-partner Simeon Dreyfuss and I taught an undergraduate capstone seminar together at Marylhurst, and we used two essays from one of Tsloan’s critical psychology texts as required reading for our students. Tsloan invited me to be a guest presenter in one of his graduate seminars and one time, he asked me to write something about disillusionment in later life to use as a prompt for students in his adult development and aging course; in exchange, his students responded to and expanded upon my ideas – an amazing collaborative inquiry experience! As he approached his 60^th birthday, he admitted to me his ambivalence around growing older, he asked me for support as he entered a new, mysterious phase of his journey through the life-course. We thought together about and gave each other feedback on various writing projects. It was he who encouraged me to begin writing into and through my lived experiences, introducing me to the genre of “auto-ethnography.” In many ways, the Gero-Punk Project was sparked by his conviction that I had something interesting to say in my own strange way.

We also shared a musical sensibility. One of my potent memories is of Tsloan playing the electric guitar and me singing Coldplay’s Yellow. He introduced me to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a band to which I continue to be devoted.  Tsloan, me and my daughter Isobel saw them perform at Roseland Theater. It was Isobel’s first edgy concert experience. We got props from some of the other concert-goers for bringing a little kid with us. Isobel was by-far the youngest person there; Tsloan and I were by-far the oldest persons there! It was a cool intergenerational scene.

+++

On February 19, 2006, my mother experienced an unexpected major cerebral aneurysm. Tsloan and I had only met a week before and were just at the beginning of knowing each other.  I don’t remember how he found out about my mother’s aneurysm – I likely told him, but I have no memory of doing so.  What I do remember is that he and another friend, Amy, sat with me all day at the hospital while my mother had emergency surgery. I also remember that Tsloan came with me on a reconnaissance mission to where my mother had crashed her car – she was driving when her head exploded. I was in shock.  He followed me in his car as I drove my mother’s car home.

Tsloan was supportive and helpful in so many ways during that dark time. I just learned recently that he wasn’t a “dog person,” so it makes it even more remarkable that he stepped up to help me out by walking Happy-the-puppy who I’d only recently adopted from the Humane Society (to celebrate Isobel’s 10^th birthday).  Happy was traumatized and unruly and suffering from anxiety. So was I.

+++

Simeon and Tsloan had heard about each other over the years, but they didn’t meet in person until December 21^st, 2011, when I at last had the change to introduce them.  I’d invited them and a few other close people to my home – not something I do often! – for a winter solstice celebration.  It also happened to be Simeon’s birthday (and my birthday would be two days later).  I enjoyed watching these two people who I loved so much shyly suss each other.

A few years later, Tsloan visited Simeon in Oceanside, on the Oregon coast, with the gift of two green chairs. Very much on a whim, in the spring of 2016, Simeon and I discovered a curious rambling home in Oceanside – one of our favorite places – a hybrid of an old cabin and a newer two-story wing with an upstairs room that would make the perfect space for floor-to-ceiling bookcases and a big library table.  I knew that this was our place, and I beseeched Simeon to move there, to commence immediately the shared dream of living on the coast.  That’s another thing Tsloan and I (and Simeon) have in common, by the way, our love of the wild Oregon coast.  Tsloan was one of the first people I told about our plan to buy a beach home because I knew he’d be thrilled for us and because I wanted him to know he’d always have a place at the coast where he could dwell.

So, back to the green chairs: Tsloan was in the processes of moving (something he’d had to do several times in the 13 years I knew him) and offered us the two lovely green chairs that he no longer needed, thinking they could live at the Oceanside home. He came on over with the green chairs and he and Simeon had a lovely visit, just the two of them.  I wasn’t even envious that I wasn’t a part of the green chair adventure because I assumed Tsloan would visit us in Oceanside many times in the future, that we’d gather for weekends of walking, talking, cooking and drinking, listening to music, reading and writing. But that was the only time he had the chance to be at the beach house, when he brought the green chairs, though I offered to drive him out for a weekend during the many months last year when he was undergoing “Chemo Extremo,” as he called it.

The green chairs – one upstairs and one downstairs – hold space for Tsloan to visit us any time he’d like.

+++

The last time I saw Tsloan was on December 12^th, 2018, a few days before he died, at the home he shared with his son Daniel.

I took over a plate of roasted veggies – at Daniel’s request – and some cheese and bread.  Tsloan’s sister and Daniel’s mother were there, as well as Tsloan’s best friend from graduate school and his wife.  Songs from the ‘80s were playing – at Tsloan’s request.  I sat on the edge of the hospital bed next to Tsloan, I held his hands. I rubbed his distended stomach.  He was uncomfortable but not in pain.  He was shining so brightly!  I kissed his forehead. I sang along with a Depeche Mode song (Everything Counts). He looked at me and raised his eyebrows and smiled; I raised my eyebrows and smiled back. We said some little sweet things to each other: Thank you; It has been wonderful; I’m so grateful; Don’t worry about anything.

My dear Tsloan, what a precious and unsurpassed gift our relationship is in my life.  You are a bright shining star.  I wish you safe travels as you soar through the universe.

Love,

Fierce Jenny

P.S. To learn more about Tod/Theo/Tsloan, visit here.