Aging in the Lord - Mary Hester Valentine, SSND
"Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old" (Jonathan Swift). Eventually we must face our mortality. Mary Hester Valentine writes as an old person who has recently moved into a Health Care Center. Her insights are honest, profound, challenging, and disturbing. She is both an observer and participant in the twilight of life. She helps us to understand the vast differences "between the young-old, those in their sixties and early seventies, and the old-old, those eighty and older" (17). "For no other of life's passages is finality so built in" (21). Thus, growing old is full of threats: "Illness strikes the aging when they are most vulnerable and when inner resources to endure seem in short supply. Their financial situation is suddenly threatening precarious; loneliness sets in as friends and relatives dies or move away, or they themselves become incapacitated. As a result they feel that their world is falling apart. When haunted by these ultimates many answers to life?s ambiguity are frightfully inadequate" (17). These challenges can lead someone further or closer to God. Valentine encourages the elderly that "while our daily lives may seem to be dull and monotonous, they are not unimportant to the God who has counted our every hair" (116). Jesus even sympathizes in our fear of death: "Fear of death is not forbidden us; Jesus' agony was a dreadful wrestling with the same fear. One translation of scripture says he was terrified, and both Matthew and Mark have him crying, 'My soul is sorrowful, even unto death'" (124-125). Trust in God carries the elderly in the final hours: "While everything seems to be slipping away forever, we believe that everything of value is safe in the fullness of God. We are dust, but into no other dust did he breath his Spirit" (127).