Aging

Sometimes lost within rambling thoughts, with my bare feet planted into the Earth, my soul feeds from the soil that consumes Death to make Life…and my thoughts linger on the waves of Destiny, through ebb and flow, as time slowly ages everything. Sometimes I momentarily forget the unforgiving brutality of Life that hides within the decadent and cloying rolls of comfort…but slowly as I age…the dripping saliva of Death dissolves this comfort to reveal the clenched fangs of Nature’s savagery.

In the final stage of aging, we are deprived of nearly all external sources of happiness that we have relied upon when younger. Most cannot hear or see well or exercise or travel or even balance without falling. Reading or watching TV becomes difficult and most are left emotionally isolated without any genuine social contact. Many have chronic pain and are trapped in cycles of perpetual sickness and recovery, ravaged by the side-effects of multiple medications.

Aging is a divine part of the cycles of Nature. The final stage of aging is the ultimate final exam of our spiritual journey, because it is only then that the entire external world is stripped away and you are left completely alone, unable to control or affect the world around you….it is only then, at the gates of Death, that the deepest layer of your soul is exposed. Though horrifying and frightening, this should be our most magnificent spiritual masterpiece where we use all of our life’s experiences and training to test the depth of our souls in the harshest spiritual climate…and yet very few prepare for it.

Watching my grandmother’s journey, this page is my first incremental step into comprehending the journey of aging. Below, I share my thoughts on the different stages of aging leading to the final stage. Feel free to contact me to discuss, criticize, give advice and/or collaborate.

Stage 1: Retirement

In my opinion, transitioning into retirement is far more important than marriage or transitioning from childhood into adulthood. Retirement is a Second Birth, where many of the lingering umbilical vestiges of predestiny wither away. For some, it is the first time in their lives where they have the freedom to think about themselves, their identity and their dreams. It is a time when they can bloom unhindered, fertilized by a lifetime of experiences. Sadly, many retirees feel apprehension, uncertainty, and a loss of identity that was always associated with their employment. With passing years, as the retirees fade from the vision of the social consciousness, many slowly wade into waters of depression and frustration…never realizing the true brilliance they could have brought to the community and themselves.

Retirement should begin with a large ceremony held by the community…one that is different than the common retirement party which only celebrates the ending of traditional employment. Instead, this ceremony should reiterate the idea of the Second Birth and honor the retiree by proving them with tools to realize their destiny and resources to take a very active part in improving the community. The Second Birth should be a rite of passage.

Below, I outline 4 objectives that define the Second Birth.

Objective 1: Life Summarization, Dream/Masterpiece Creation. The elderly should thoroughly travel through the layers of their history and summarize their life lessons, skills, and accomplishments by creating a portfolio that allows them to see the larger themes of development within their lives and even the thematic progression of ideas throughout their family line. Many incorrectly feel that they have accomplished very little because often society perceives accomplishments as only being certificates or fancy job titles. Every life that has passed through decades of failure and success has beauty in it. It is just a matter of examining, organizing and expressing it. The development of the portfolio will also help create a framework for each person’s dreams and the requirements to reach it; after which they can realize their masterpiece. The creation of the portfolio is a beautiful process and having the youth involved is important because it teaches them to develop a vision that sees both into the past and the future.

Objective 2: Community Development. Once the portfolio has been made and the dreams have been identified, the retiree should examine how they can make their community better using their set of skills. In many ways, the youth and the elderly should be the active drivers of making the community better because ‘normal’ adults will be consumed by raising a family and earning a living. If the retiree has connections to another country, they could work on projects that bring together communities from both nations.

Objective 3: Body and Mental Health Development. At this stage of life, the elderly should place greater emphasis on balancing and making peace with their bodies and mind. Especially at this stage, exercise and meditation are absolutely vital to be healthy. I feel that at this stage, the relationship with one's body should change, going from being a tool to being a spiritual component of a person’s identity. The meditation component is extremely important as well because as a person ages, their body will fail and slowly they will be pinched away from the flow of the world, and at that point, they need to be able to detached from the world and find a reservoir of contentment from within. In this stage, I think everyone should train and develop their meditative practice so that they can successfully experience a vipassana-type event, where they are silent and mostly motionless for 10 days. This idea came after being motivated by my mother who attended the vipassana.

Objective 4: Enjoyment. Because this is the final stage before the body begins to truly fail and weakness begins to encroach, significant time should be allocated to enjoying life, travelling, and pursuing hobbies. Many retirees have difficulty with this because after spending an entire life devotionally working, they don’t know how to just enjoy life (some see enjoyment as a waste).

Objective 5: Rite of passage for the youth. The rite of passage for the elderly into retirement should be coupled with the rite of passage of the youth. For the youth to spiritual develop properly they need to be taught spiritual devotion. To have the youth observe, participate, help and analyze how a retiree organizes and summarizes their life is essential in teaching the youth to think about their futures. Therefore, one rite of passage for the youth should be helping a retiree create their portfolio and, in doing so, the youth develop their own portfolio and narrative.

Stage 2: Approach into the final stage

As my grandmother entered into her mid 70s, her body began to fail and through a series of injuries and a general loss of independence, she went from being very active, social and happy to being depressed and frustrated. She requested to visit the doctor many times and eventually she was brought to a monstrous doctor who prescribed her a range of drugs, many of which were harsh antidepressants and psychoactive drugs. Those medications tore through her fabric of sanity and left her completely debilitated, leaving her unable to read clocks, hold coherent conversations or remember short term memories. Her face would often show multiple emotions within minutes, as if the inhibitory walls that defined one moment of reality into the next were destroyed and emotions from multiple simultaneous thoughts bled into one another. One side of her body showed unusual tics and shaking, causing other doctors to prescribe her muscle relaxants that caused her to urinate uncontrollably. They also put her on heavy sedatives and sleep medication. At night, someone (usually my aunt or my mother when she was in India) would have to bring my grandmother to the bathroom. On one night, no one woke up and my grandmother walked by herself. By the time I got to her, she had fallen down and I remember seeing her completely helpless, nearly naked and covered in urine…and for a brief unconscious moment I had a look of disgust on my face. My eyes connected with her and for that brief moment, it seemed that she regained sanity and I could see the emotional pain in her as perhaps she remembered how she took care of me as a child. To this day, I am ashamed of myself for that moment.

When we brought her to a hospital, newer doctors looked at her uncontrollable shaking and incorrectly diagnosed her as having some unknown form of Parkinsons and/or cerebellar degeneration. Later, led by our own experimentation, we discovered that much of her tortured state was created by the medication given to her when she fell into depression. Towards the end of the page, I provide a much more detailed description of her decline, her medication, and the mess that is the BHU hospital.

What could have avoided this chain reaction of misdiagnosis? The first, is a general understanding in society that depression is common in the elderly often caused by a frustration because they can no longer experience life in the same way. The solution is not only medication but a growing emotional support system that helps the elderly digest their frustration and make peace with their changing bodies and minds. In India (in the general public and even with doctors), I felt that the two most common views on aging are: 1. Aging sucks, there is nothing you can do about it, stop complaining and just deal with it and 2. There is nothing wrong with the elderly, they are just pretending to get attention. As a society, we need to place greater emphasis and funding on geriatrics.

Stage 3: The final stage of aging

Written below are thoughts and ideas slowly evaporated over time and collected in culmination through deep discussions with my grandmother throughout her journey of aging. When I visited her in February 2018, I found her perpetually tired and weak with barely enough energy to remain sitting while eating. She is consumed by cycles of illness and recovery; and only a few months after I left, she fractured her arm. Because of her deteriorating hearing which is not alleviated with hearing aids, she no longer enjoys watching TV, listening to music or socializing. Disconnected from the external world and detached from most forms of sensory information, nearly every moment of her life is spent in bed by herself. Though she feels hunger, she doesn’t enjoy food and has no desires which she wishes to fulfill. Is there any meaning of life at this final stage of aging? Below are three 'meanings of life' that I uncovered.

The First Meaning of Life: Weaving our fractured family together

The two families that descend from my grandmother were initially fractured because we live far apart and because both families have fathers that injected poison into our upbringing. For a while, the primary reason we assembled was to visit my grandmother. The culmination of these gatherings occurred in February 2018 where we proposed something very new: the development of a Family Collaborative. In this way, after my grandmother passes, her legacy will be woven into the union of both families and the resulting collaborative projects. To learn more about this, go to Projects->Family Collaborative.

The Second Meaning of Life: The Spiritual Training of the Younger Generation

These days, especially in the US, the elderly are hidden away in the soul-absorbing bowels of retirement homes, far away from the collective consciousness of the world that obsessively fixates on the healthy youth. With technological advancements that help us maximize comfort and with society’s trend to forget and hide the suffering that is inherent to life, I wonder if we are all becoming more emotionally and spiritually fragile. I believe that to truly comprehend and make peace with the Nature of Life and its brutality, we need to inoculate ourselves with persistent discomfort….that forces us to struggle and fight….and eventually leads to the creation of a spiritual immune system that will help us overcome the larger waves of devastation that we all have to face, such as death, loss and the final stage of aging. For this reason, we need to be as directed and targeted in preparing for the final stage of aging as we are for career development and job advancement. Every major experience in life should contribute to the development of this spiritual masterpiece.

But where do you find this training to prepare for the final stage of life? I believe it is found in providing devotional care for the elderly, especially for the ones that you love. This sort of care is much more than just occasionally visiting them in a retirement home, instead it is the day-to-day caretaking that grinds you down and makes your soul bleed…forcing you to find a way to heal...until eventually your view of the world fundamentally changes and you develop a spiritual immune system and a library of wisdom.

For example, it is when you see someone that you love, who once was so powerful and capable, slowly lose control of their lives, that you realize your current job title doesn’t always correlate with contentment at the end of life. It is when you see the prevalence of depression and frustration in the elderly caused by their inability to move or enjoy life in the same way as before, that you have to learn ways of finding happiness beyond your body. It is when you discover that loneliness eats away at most of the elderly, that you make the resolve to spend more time with them and teach yourself how to detach from society. It is when you see the terrifying effects of multiple medications battering the elderly, that you understand that a doctor’s prescription is not absolute and the state of geriatrics is still very rough. And it is when you see the unforgiving brutality of the last few days leading to death, that you emotionally understand the necessity to prepare for your own passage.

Spiritual growth doesn’t come from just listening to wise people…it comes from intense, hard and devotional work spread across a long period of time that demands problem solving amid intense stress through cycles of breaking and healing. That is why the current flow of society frightens and saddens me. Most of the elderly, especially in the US feel as if they are a burden…they feel that they just consume and take and have nothing to provide. But this is so wrong! Their journey offers something so vital and valuable that it can be found nowhere else: free training to develop one’s spiritual practice and free training to help one prepare for the final exam of life.

The Third Meaning of Life: To Become a Living Prayer

Before I visited my grandmother in February 2018, I spent hours collecting and printing all of her pictures with the expectation that she would be very interested in seeing her past. As I searched her face while she looked through the pictures, I only found a polite indifference. I realized that her existence has no past nor does her existence have a future. She spends nearly all of her time alone isolated in her bed. She receives minimal sensory information. Every day is the same as the one before, every hour is nearly the same as the one before…in a way, time has stopped for her and she exists within the same singular moment repeated again and again. And within this repeated moment, she connects to a vast spiritual river. She exists nearly completely outside the cause-and-effect cycles of Karma. In this way, at the threshold of life and death, she is the closest to God that any person can get. She is a living prayer. Much of this is thanks to the devotional care that both of her daughters provide.

The role of God/religion/spirituality at the end of life

When I was on my life-journey in India, I stayed with a family whose grandmother was more than 90 years old. Age had robbed her vision and given her extreme osteoporosis which left her perpetually bent over. She could barely walk to the bathroom and would suffer severe vertigo. Her life was extremely difficult and as I spoke to her over a year, I discovered that she was sustained by a strong devotional connection to God. Similarly, conversations across many years with my neighbor, Josephine Murphy who lived to be 99, revealed that she relied on a strong devotional connection to God. I found the same in my grandmother.

My grandmother’s journey through religion is fascinating. In her early years she had a polytheistic interpretation of Hinduism, where she would perform traditional pujas to worship many different personifications of God. As she entered into the final stage of aging, her perception and comprehension of God fundamentally changed and become more abstract. Her interpretation of Hinduism became monotheistic. In a way, her relationship with God no longer required a framework, now she has developed a direct connection. In our discussions, she explains that God is neither male nor female, neither alive nor dead…that God exists without form and is present everywhere. She taught me that God is a river of energy from which everything manifests. She explained that one can connect to God through many routes, of which performing pujas is one way…however religious traditions are not imperative and, though harder, a person can form their own connection to this spiritual river of energy. She spends most of her day immersed in this spiritual river, often chanting short mantras which helps her find the river. Time to time, she takes pleasure in listening to Ramayarn, which is a mythological and religious story that carries deep connections to her past, her parents and beyond.

These discussions have convinced me that it is important for each person to find a way to connect to this spiritual river of energy. I do not believe in a personified God nor do I belong exclusively to any one religion. Swami Vivekanand, the person I am named after, once said that both paths (the path of faith and the path of intellectual exploration) lead to the same truth and from my grandmother’s journey, I feel the hope that one day I will be able to connect to the spiritual river without needing a religion or a personified God.

My Family’s Preparation for the Death of my Grandmother

I have been mostly sheltered from the violence of the cycles of Life and Death which can sometimes rupture a person's reality. To understand the fundamental rhythm of the Universe and of Life, I think it is very important to ruminate and discuss and think about the meaning of Death. My grandmother's journey has been my spiritual guide through the process of aging, motivating me to brainstorm, ask questions and create my own understanding. The document below are the ideas and thoughts I came up with before going to visit my grandmother in February 2018.

Since I returned, with my Mother, Sister and Brother, we have held 2 conversations to further think about what my grandmother's passage into Death means. Below are some general questions that we explored.

1. Is there anything that we regret not doing with our grandmother?
2. How do we prepare ourselves spiritually to withstand death?
3. What sorts of rituals should happen once she passes?
   1. Should we completely follow traditional rituals? Should we modify them ourselves?
   2. What are the points of rituals? Do they connect us to the ancient past?
   3. If we cannot cremate her in Varanasi, how does that change things?
4. Will we be able to travel to India immediately?
   1. Is it more important that we gather as a family immediately after her death or is it more important that we try to assemble beforehand?
   2. If not, how will we observe the 13 days of mourning?
   3. Will we assemble somewhere in the US? Will doing rituals/ceremonies in the US mean anything?
   4. What is the role of Mirzapur and the land where NG was born?
5. What will we do after she has passed?
   1. Will we all work on a collaborative project to honor her legacy?
   2. Will we give something to Mirzapur (where she is from)?

My General Future Directions

Step 1:

• Conduct standard literature review of what other people/religious/traditions have done to address aging and the transition into death.
• Volunteer at retirement homes, assisted living homes, hospices and places that offer palliative care to observe, learn and collect which ideas work and which do not.
  • I will use this knowledge to develop my ability to be a spiritual guide for those that are passing and eventually create a generalizable model.
• Formulate and document the rites-of-passage idea.
  • Create a series of rituals/ceremonies for each stage of life for both the elderly and the youth.
    • Stage 1: Entering into retirement (the second birth), where the community bestows honor and resources and where the elder person does devotional service for the community with the help of the youth. Part of their rite of passage is to create a portfolio and life summary, along with realizable dreams.
    • Stage 2: Entering into detachment, where the elder person enters more into meditation and spirituality and trains the younger generation.
    • Stage 3: Final Stage of aging, where the youth help create a beautiful atmosphere for the elder’s passage into death.
• Formulate the idea of a Narrative of life
  • In this idea, people create a Narrative, which is a storyline made from pieces of truth gathered throughout life (see Projects->Family Collaborative). One idea is for the elderly to identify the progression of themes throughout the generations of the family. For the youth, by helping the elderly, they can have the honor of integrating some pieces of the elder person’s narrative into their own.
• Develop my meditative practice
  • Grow my meditative practice and then lead sessions for the elderly to help them detach from their bodies.
• Help develop portfolio->life summary->masterpiece for the elderly
  • First I need to develop my own portfolio that contains a summary of my life and contains a collection of my dreams. In parallel, I am motivating my mother and my aunt to create their own portfolios which will give guidance to all the children on how they can help their parents achieve their dreams.
  • Once I formalize the process and nature of creating portfolios, I will lead sessions with willing elderly.

Step 2:

• Develop the rites-of-passage idea and the narrative idea and weave them into my interpretation of the American Identity (see Projects->American Identity).
• Provide an academic contribution to gerontology
  • Start with standard literature review and collaborative discussions with leaders of the field.
  • Develop a more standardized system of assessing the effectiveness of medication on patients and create a more standardized system for tailoring the dosage to each individual. Currently, I feel, that dosage amount is determined by averaging data from clinical trials that span thousands of people. Because there is huge variability, these medications report many side effects. Without understanding and studying individual differences and accounting for them, these dosages are not very useful. There needs to be a much more thorough understanding of individual differences and variability.
  • Develop a more standardized system of analyzing the effect of multiple medications and create a database.
  • Study what sort of emotional structure decreases the likelihood of depression and helps the elderly transition into the final stage of aging.
  • Study more extensively the role of the placebo effect on reducing things like chronic pain and see if there is some generalizable rule.
  • Study whether VR/AR/technology can improve the quality of life of isolated and immobile elderly.
• Create a video series on my understanding of aging and use footage of my grandmother.

Step 3:

• Bring the journey of aging into the vision of the collective social consciousness by creating a narrative of Life and Death and thematic progression tumbling through generations of family.
  • Popularize and romanticize the rites of passage for both the youth and the elderly and the idea of the Second Birth.
  • Popularize and romanticize the idea that the final stage of life is the final spiritual exam.
• Create an course that will run in all public schools in the nation on the larger theme of American Identity which will also include devotional service for the elderly (see Projects->American Identity). Creating a course like this which can unify the divided nation and bring together the different generations is essential for the survival of the US. The public school system can change the identity of the entire nation.
  • Make the required community service to be more focused around elderly care.
• Create national program for greater tax incentives for caring for the elderly.
• Help create a national program of meditation and vipassana-like training
• Create a network of doctors and researchers and change makers and revolutionize the entire indian medical system, especially those in semi-rural areas.
  • Help with the medical system in India, especially the BHU hospital because that is where my family is from. That hospital is such a mess.

Appendix

Overview of my grandmother’s journey through aging

• When she was young, she and her sister would work out and exercise.
• When I was young, she was very active: walking regularly, practicing yoga and meditating.
• In 2010, when I was on my life journey in India, she entered into the second stage of aging. She came to visit me in Rajasthan but by then she no longer was cooking for herself or doing much else. She was well fed and taken care of, however her lack of freedom and independence was perhaps the beginning of her deterioration. Even at that time, I could sense the fangs of depression and frustration slowly biting into her soul.
• In 2013, I found her in a horrifying state of frozen torture, where rampant medication had left her a prisoner in her body. It was frightening. The document below outlines my desperate attempt to understand what was afflicting her (this version was addressed to a doctor in the US). By the end of her stay in the hospital, they had diagnosed her as having some sort of Parkinsonian type affliction or cerebral degeneration.
• By 2014, she was slowly weaned off of the Parkinson’s medication. It started to become apparent that the initial set of antidepressants and psychoactive drugs she was given was responsible for her condition in 2013 and that she did not have any sort Parkinsonian disease. This discovery was made by us and not the doctors.
• By 2015, she had fully entered into the final stage of aging, where she was perpetually tired and could only minimally walk. By then, she had mostly detached from the material world.