We are people living
in a culture which anesthetizes birth and death. We birth our babies just as we
die, numbed and hidden away behind closed doors, in places most of us fear to
go. We hate hospitals
and nursing homes because when we open the door we smell the scent of our own
fear. We fear death and we pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe for other people,
not for me. Not yet. And anything which reminds us that we are aging, that’s
the stuff we make jokes about. For example, check out the birthday card aisle
in your local Hallmark store. We fear becoming the stereotype we ourselves have
perpetuated: irrelevant, ineffectual, nodding off at meetings. Not invited to the meeting. A
self-fulfilling prophesy, we will feel irrelevant if we have helped to create a
belief system which marginalizes old people.
It has not always been so. If we lived in a more traditional culture, birth and death would happen in our midst, and would give meaning to the rest of the life which happens in between. Old people, who had grown into their roles of midwives, shamans and healers, would be our guides and companions as we make our journey from one life to the next. Aging and death would simply be part of living.
- Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Burlington, VT
