There are several recognizable stages of grief. Some of those stages include denial, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance. But one that many of us experience and recognize is anger. While we most often associate grief with the emotions that we feel when a loved one passes away, we can also go through grief over a lot of other things. People go through grief when their house burns down or when they lose a job or a pet. Another loss that we don’t often characterize as grief is the physical decline of aging.
We can detect in ourselves, or in senior citizens we know, by the comments we make, when we are experiencing grief from loss of youth. It is common to talk about looking back with remorse at lost youth and with the loss of functionality and strength that happens when we age. As a senior citizen notices strength decline and perhaps go through one of the many natural ailments of aging, such as arthritis, or problems with elimination, it is not uncommon to see a response of anger as a result of impatience with these problems.
Nobody aims to get old. And I am sure that if we could put it to a vote, aging would lose continuing to be part of our lives. As much as senior citizens themselves hate to grow old, your loved ones also hate to see it happen to you. And while you as senior citizen may not see it happen, your family is grieving the loss of the “young mom or dad” as much as you are.
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When you are raising your kids in your adult years, it seems you will never know a minute’s peace. Each day was another explosion of yelling, running and wild activity in the house from the moment the kids are born until they are grown and moving out. It was when the last one finally made their way into the world that you actually knew what is was to be alone, at least the two of you.
A full life such as this makes the adjustment to senior rentals status, your retirement, and the time alone or time on your hands, a bit of an adjustment. The adjustment is even more profound if you enter your senior years solo and you find yourself alone much of the time. But being alone does not mean being lonely. The problem of loneliness is chronic in senior citizens so it’s good to get out ahead of it so it doesn’t cause serious problems in an ongoing way.
The negatives of loneliness in senior citizens are well known. Excessive loneliness can easily lead to a sense of isolation, desperation and depression. This can result in substance abuse, or worse, if the senior citizen doesn’t find a way to fight back against that feeling of being alone. It is easy to feel abandoned if you are in your house that used to be filled with children, and resentful when your day passes with no human contact. If you have relocated to an assisted living center or nursing home, the problem may be even worse as you don’t have the comfort of familiar surroundings.
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For most of us, our senior citizen years are a time to relax, maybe pursue a hobby, travel or just relax and let life go by. But, for many, retirement isn’t just a time to lay down the goals of life. It is a time to look back over life at the unfinished challenges and then go back and finish them. And for many, an unfinished goal in life is to go back and get that diploma or degree. Whether it is finally graduating from high school, finishing your bachelor’s degree or starting and finishing a masters or PHD, it’s a big challenge to go back to the classroom and get that certificate, especially when you do that as a senior rentals citizen.
So why do we do it? This may be a question your children ask when they see your going after such an ambitious goal so late in life. But when you think about it, we as senior citizens have a right to be a bit offended by the question. Where is it written that we are denied the right to better ourselves just because we are in the later years of life? Implicit in the question is “What is the point of your getting a degree since you are not going to do anything productive in retirement and so close to death?”
The last thing we as senior citizens want is to be seen as people who are just sitting around waiting to die. Many a senior citizen has started an entirely new career and accomplished great things after 60, 70 and 80. With the advances in medical science today, it’s quite likely that we could live 20-30 years or more “in retirement”. That is plenty of time to accomplish great things. And starting out this era of life with a good education makes just as much sense as a youth doing so as they start out at 25 on their 25-year career.
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Most people in this day and age consider that they can be totally independent. Modern society is built on the interaction of cooperative exchange of skills and goods so that we can specialize on our strengths and abilities. But that also means we need the goods, services, and skills of others in order to maintain a standard of living that is above subsistence.
As we age we lose some of the capacity to produce or exchange all that we need. However we still maintain the expectation that we can be independent or at least not too dependent on others, especially for the things that we used to be able to do with ease.
Fortunately, hundreds of communities are now operating programs and services to provide aging populations a certain degree of self-reliance and independence that we desire. Senior rentals homes, independent senior living and other assisted living facilities are in high demand. These provide seniors help to live a life on their own, a life that needs no extra assistance from any member of their family.
The independent living senior rentals centers built for the elderly usually offer services that are all designed to provide a degree of independence to those they assist. The good thing about them is that they make these services available with an intent of being customer controlled. This means that to allow the senior adults to live on their own, they offer full authority and responsibilities to those they help. Although members of the facility are there to assist senior rentals occupants, they provide all the services done without breaching any of the seniors’ private lives. They prefer to help adults to realize their own worth and confidence by allowing them to succeed on certain challenges by their own.
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