The Gero-Punk Project

Part one of a two-part essay

From guest Gero-Punk

G. Wilder

Today I cleaned up messes – piles of papers covered in dust. These were not piles of papers that were on my top ten list of highest priorities. They were piles that have waited for me for years, some since March 2003. That was the date, remembered as clearly as being hit full force in the face with an icy blast of winter wind, that I listened to my Mom’s voice on the other end of the phone line: “I have cancer.” Life as I knew it stopped and would never go back to the way it was. I held the phone, closed my eyes, fought nausea, and tried to process what I had just heard. Her world and mine shifted as if from an earthquake that moves rock formations that have held safe and solid for eons. We both sat in silence, phone receivers to our ears, reaching out to each other across the atmosphere that had carried her voice to me. We ran out of things to say and hung up the phone. I began to do what I always do – plan for the unknown journey ahead.

Thus began a dramatic redirection of my life’s plans, and life itself. I had just entered the world of the family caregiver. Even though I had helped my Mom care for both of my grandmothers, I had always been in “second seat” and didn’t feel responsible. This was different – I was now fully in charge of supporting my Mom as she entered the world of cancer. At the time of her diagnosis, Mom was caregiver to my Dad, who denied and struggled with frightening cognitive changes. My mind raced into the battlefield ahead: Mom would undoubtedly undergo some kind of treatment and Dad would need someone else to be his caregiver. Everything pointed to me, as my brothers were not involved in any aspect of our parents’ needs.

As I predicted, Mom was immediately scheduled for exploratory surgery and began her pre-surgery bowel preparation. She was already debilitated from the cancer, and the bowel prep increased her weakness. She fainted and fell in the bathroom. I received a call from her neighbor while I was cooking dinner. When I answered the phone, he prefaced by saying “the ambulance is on its way.” I nearly passed out and listened as he explained what had happened. I shut the burners off on the stove as my husband tried to grasp what was happening, and I was out the door on my way to the Emanuel Hospital Trauma Unit. Life shifted again.

After all of the hospital diagnostics produced their findings, we entered new territory – Mom had a severe traumatic brain injury and would need specialized interventions and care. Cancer would have to wait. My brain catapulted down the log flume of issues I was faced with: managing and advocating for my Mom’s care and caregiving for my Dad. My own life was no longer on my radar. Except that I was in the middle of a year-long sequence of three cervical spinal surgeries. But I didn’t have time to think about that – I would deal with that as a lower priority.

As the weeks passed, Mom discharged from rehab to home and I essentially went to live there so I could provide the intensive rehabilitative coaching she needed and transport her to physical, occupation, and speech therapy. Dad was at best passive and at worst obstructive, even stating at one point that we just needed to “let nature run its course.” His obstructions and belligerence increased so my husband and I decided to move Mom to our farm, to get away from his negativity and in part so I could try to take care of things at home. Life shifted yet again.

Mom’s brain injury affected many things, including her balance and her bladder control. This translated to getting up with her three or four times every night to provide standby assistance to the bathroom so she would not fall (again). She had therapy appointments three days per week, as well as frequent neurology, oncology, and primary care appointments. She had constant therapy exercises to perform at home, and required 24/7 care with all of her activities of daily living. I made frequent trips to help my Dad and try to meet his caregiving needs. In my peripheral vision I could see everything in my life that was stacking up – a kind of awareness that was quickly dismissed as not being feasible to get on my list of “front burner” priorities. After several months of very slow progress, and my own impending third surgery looming, Mom moved to an assisted living facility.   This provided me with the respite I needed to attend to my surgery and recovery. At home, my life continued to sort itself into piles that would have to wait “until later” as I continued a high level of caregiving responsibilities.

Approximately sixteen months after that first gut-wrenching phone call, my Mom passed away. My Dad reacted in unexpected ways. Unlike his response to her injury and decline, he was devastated by her loss. My caregiving role ratcheted up considerably. The on-hold “piles” of my life grew ever larger, deeper, and dustier. This continued for four and a half years, until my Dad passed away in January of 2009. Suddenly the motion stopped: I was no longer a caregiver to my parents. It was as if I had arrived at the bottom of the log flume and been spit out on the shore. I tentatively began to examine my life and was massively overwhelmed by what I saw staring at me. I didn’t know where to start so mentally shut the door and focused on damage control. Only the highest priority issues would be addressed. Everything else would wait until I “caught up.”

Five years later, I realized that I would never catch up. The piles and issues that were always superseded by higher priority issues would never rise to the top.

That is why today something in me snapped and I put life on hold. I sat down to the first of many piles of papers and began to wipe the dust off and examine many-years-old documents. I felt as if I had just walked through the door in the back of the wardrobe and found myself in Narnia. Each paper took me a step at a time back into a journey full of memories. Some of the papers were about unpursued ideas and unfulfilled action plans. Some were about unexplored dreams. Some were about expired opportunities. Very few held any promise of resumptions of plans. Some were about things that were insignificant and some were heart-wrenching realizations of irreversibly lost opportunities.

In many ways it felt like dealing with more death and bereavement. It was also the genesis of this essay.

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G. Wilder is a native Oregonian and Marylhurst Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies/Gerontology student.  She holds a BS in Social Science/Gerontology from Marylhurst and works as an elder advocate with a look to the future in creating innovative elder social and residential models.

Part one in a series of essays

By guest Gero-Punk

Pascal Aziz

My Context

In the beginning of my educational career at Marylhurst University, I found my randomly picked gerontology electives to be irrelevant and burdensome. Even though I quickly fell in love with Jenny as an instructor I was not at all motivated to read the material she assigned or write essays around my embodiment and ageing experiences. To successfully finish the class, I read what I could with little interest and wrote my papers a term after the class ended with a vow to never take another gerontology course. At first, I was under the impression that I had no interest in understanding old age and that perhaps gerontology was a way of complicating what seemed to be a simple and inevitable aspect of our earthly existence that is old age and death. After all I was 19 when I took my first gerontology course and I was trying to understand the complex and dramatic experiences of becoming an adult, figuring my identities around faith, sexuality, and national identity, while being an international college student away from home and family, left to juggle life as best as I could with little direction. I also thought that I had nothing to plan for, secure in the knowledge that I will have a role to fulfill within some community and will have a younger cohort to reciprocate that role with care giving by virtue of filial piety and obligation.

Upon deeper reflection in more gerontology courses I registered for in order to learn from Jenny as a scholar and to solidify my relationship with her as a mentor, I found that I was wrong, and that contemplating old age and death would allow me to enter into some of the deepest chambers of my heart that were filled with inner confusion, suffering, and fear manufactured by my complex and oppositional identities. This inner chamber of despair motivated my emotions, behaviors, and worldview and impacted much of my identity and story throughout my life course thus far.

My Fears on the Surface

We always tend to avoid what we fear most. Through contemplation, I found that my resistance to any interest in gerontology was rooted in a deep fear of my own narrative and story provoked by my identity as a gay Christian Egyptian immigrant to America. This identity is a complex one that intersects contrasts, one that I can sometimes negotiate and play with, and at other times fail horribly to put in check with its extremes and polarized binaries. It has also created an equally complex and dramatic narrative that at times uplifts me with strength, resiliency and endurance, and at other times, imprisons me in a story of victimization and a desire to submit to my oppression. I did not construct these identities nor caused them to be in opposition, they are all very hereditary; I was born a gay male to a Coptic family in Egypt. Though I have at times denied and then once again claimed all these things as mine in my constantly assessed and renewed commitment to authenticity, they all seem very natural to me and essentially non-oppositional.

However, within my context (“time, place and space,” as Jenny would say), these identities are all contra-positioned to be at war with each other. The LGBTQ population was extremely wounded by those who claim to speak for Christianity and in its popular culture has deep contempt towards the Church. Most Christian churches look at the LGBTQ population with suspicion and condemnation, judge them as perverted or disordered, and interpret their reactionary anger as contempt to the person of Jesus Christ and his gospel. And beyond the external conflict between my identities and communities, they have internal problems and conflicts within themselves like racism and xenophobia, or very oppressive values of conformity. Moreover, Egypt is the country that persecuted me and the country in which I am rooted and dearly miss. America is the country in which I found liberty and dearly love and it is also where, as a Middle Eastern young male, I am racially profiled, othered, and perceived with suspicion as a potential threat to Homeland Security.  America is where I may continue to be a foreigner no matter what I do to belong. And in seeking to belong in America as a gay man, I have found that mainstream gay culture can be a very hostile and scary and, dare I say, a destructive environment for a gay man as it is a culture with its own set of conceptual boxes, social scripts, ideal body images, and tendency to condemn those who don’t fit or don’t agree with its standards.

I feel the same can be said for most religious communities, on which I will elaborate further in future posts. This civil war occurs in the personal lives of those who, like me, intersect these identities and communities. In the midst of the battling and peace processes that happen within us, we, voluntarily and/or involuntarily, live and age on the margin, a queer margin in which we, in the company of other queers, are alien to the mainstream, the dominant, the successful, and the normative. On this margin, I have found that I am able to embrace myself, the beautiful and the ugly, and to tell my story. I have also found that I have space to question, critique and deconstruct the unnatural normative, and to untie the knots of contradictions and unsolvable conflicts between identities, behaviors, and communities.

In other words, on the margin, I have found a place to age, and grow to my death, and that is the root of my praxis.

To Conclude (for now)

This is the first in a series of short essays I will be offering as part of the Gero-Punk Project. In these essays, I will synthesize the deep inner lessons I learned from gerontology and present them through a series of reflections on Gerontological theory, my narrative thus far, and opportunities for praxis and application. Throughout these reflections, I will attempt to bring two personal meta-lenses which I will explain further in future posts, “Queer Gerontology” and the “Aging Path.” By sharing these reflections, I hope to invite you to a marginal space of questions and possibilities in which we can engage in a critical and contemplative conversation on aging across the life course. I strongly believe that such a conversation has the potential to be an emancipatory spiritual and scholarly discourse that is transformative and meaningful to individuals of all ages, and identities.

Pascal Aziz was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.  He has a BA in Psychology, a BA in Interdisciplinary studies and a Certificate in Gerontology from Marylhurst University.  His main interest is doing further research in gerontology, as well as participating in senior citizen advocacy. He is looking forward to attending graduate school in the fall of 2014.

An essay by guest Gero-Punk

Jennifer Ortiz

A quarter of a century.

I have now had a son for a quarter of a century. I have been a mother for one fourth of 100 years. I was 23 then. Now I am nearly 50 and I have a son who is essentially fifty percent of my age. He is older than I was when he was born. It has been 2 and 1/2 decades since I first held him. I am almost a half a century old with a son who, in half that time, has been in my life. When his present age doubles, he will be a half a century; I will then be three-quarters of 100 years.

Twenty-five years old.

Twenty-five years ago, I had a baby boy. He was a preemie; 8 weeks early. He was born 60 days before his due date. I was younger than he is today, by two years. Twenty-five years ago, I became a mother for the 1st time. I held his 4 pound, two ounce body nearly 2 hours – roughly 120 minutes – after he was born.  Five neonatalogists waited in the room with us as he was arriving. At 7:20 p.m. on Tuesday, June 20, he came into the world and saw light for the 1st time.

This year, my son.

I have a son, who on June 20, is a young man with his own life and responsibilities; he pays taxes and has insurance. He has been around for as long as I can remember. He is a creative, artistic type. We have grown together. When he was an infant, I was struggling to understand the nuances of life. When he was an adolescent, I was discovering a provisional place in the world. And now, as he is one year more, I am learning how to be present in time that is fleeting. Together we walk. Sometimes I lead. Sometimes he leads. I no longer talk to him as a parent does to a child. We talk about loves, plans and new ideas.

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Jennifer M. Ortiz is a social observer and Progressive Era historian. She holds a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from Marylhurst University, and has worked as a writer for the past several years in the non-profit sector. Jennifer and her husband live in Portland, Oregon, with their three sons.