A great many people in American society spend much time caring for elder citizens who are in need. Professionals – – nurses, social workers, home-care aides, doctors, among others – – do so by reason of their jobs.
Family members everywhere – – wives and husbands, adult sons and daughters, daughters-in-law and sons-in-law and countless other relatives – – are also involved in the same task. They respond usually because they feel the force of blood ties and affection.
For both groups – – professionals and family members – – the challenges are often imposing. Almost inevitably, it proves not easy to deal effectively with those elders who are burdened by disability and disease. Both sides often find it a trial to be in the relationship of helper and helped.
Some of the difficulty, perhaps, comes from the lack of spiritual perspective. It may be that helpers, in particular, fail to see themselves in the light of their basic identity with those they serve. Instead they unconsciously assume a superiority and detachment that makes communication even more difficult than it needs to be.
The professional sometimes breezes into a sick room, filled with good intentions but exuding the pride of life. That professional may be blissfully unaware that, for help to be received best, a basic bond of shared humanity has to be established.
If the other person is suffering, those who offer help must not be exalted above such suffering and act as if they stand immune from it themselves. Otherwise the personal service may bring precious little consolation.
This is the basic message taught by the spiritual writer Henri Nouwen: “To care for the aging, therefore, means first of all to enter into close contact with your own aging self, to sense your own time, and to experience the movements of your own life cycle. From this aging self, healing can come forth and others can be invited to cast off the paralyzing fear for their future.”
This spiritual approach, Father Nouwen says, also means facing the real issues: “As long as we think that caring means only being nice and friendly to old people, paying them a visit, bringing them a flower, offering them a ride, we are apt to forget how much more important it is for us to be willing and able to be present to those we care for. How can we be fully present to the elderly when we are hiding from our own aging?”
So it takes a certain discipline to become a good caretaker. Ideally, we must learn who we are – – beings who at every moment are growing older toward an uncertain future. To offer the best kind of help to another human being, we perhaps need to put aside time for contemplation, to ponder and, perhaps, pray about the realities of life and death.
This is the impulse behind the recent career move of a professor well known in the field of gerontology. Bob Atchely left Miami University in Ohio, after many years of teaching there, for the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa is a new university established according to Buddhist principles and emphasizing what it calls “contemplative education.”
Professor Atchely is directing a master’s program in gerontology and long-term care management, a program that, in the words of the catalogue, “involves deepening insight into oneself.” To accomplish this, Naropa stresses for its students spirituality and the practice of contemplation.
When I interviewed Professor Atchely a few weeks ago, he told me: “At Naropa, we have this program – – to put the two together so that the students’ inner journey is given every bit as much importance as the external knowledge and all of that stuff.”
That is what Bob Atchley is trying to do for his students. They are learning how to integrate body and mind and to develop attitudes that dispose them toward service. If this approach to education takes hold, they will perhaps become better able to achieve the ideals set forth by Father Nouwen.
Some evidence lies at hand to suggest that spirituality does, in fact, make a difference for caregivers. When, two years ago, the National Alliance for Caregiving, asked non-professionals who provide care to family members about their most valued coping mechanism, an astonishing 74 percent said it was prayer!
Perhaps that is the reason for another surprising answer. Asked how they felt about being caregivers, more than one-half described the experience in positive rather than negative terms, words like “rewarding” and “grateful.”
Richard Griffin