Introducing Aging Into Wholeness
Hello, friends.
I am Gary R. Uremovich, and I am pleased to join the Groking Wholeness community as I begin a new monthly series entitled Aging Into Wholeness.
For most of my adult life, I have been interested in a discovering the answer to a simple question: What helps people continue to grow when life changes?
That question has followed me through several careers and many seasons of life. I served for twenty-six years in the USAF, spent more than four decades in clinical practice as a physician assistant, and later worked as a university educator and program director. Over time, my professional interests widened to include psychology, counseling, health promotion, spirituality, pastoral care, grief, caregiving, and the role of community in human well-being. My wife and I have only been married for 6 years. So I guess you can say I'm an elderly newlywed!
Today, I also serve as a Community Educator for the Alzheimer’s Association, helping individuals, families, caregivers, and community groups better understand Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, brain health, caregiving, and the resources available to support people through cognitive change. That work has reinforced something I learned many years ago in medicine: a person is always more than a diagnosis.
We may measure memory, mobility, blood pressure, cognition, and function, but none of those measures tells us who a person is. Human beings remain shaped by relationships, memories, values, hopes, fears, humor, faith, and the basic need to know that their lives still matter.
That conviction has become increasingly important to me as I have grown older myself.
I am also a prolific author, although “prolific” may simply be the polite term for someone who has difficulty leaving a keyboard alone. Writing has become one of the ways I bring together medicine, education, spirituality, human behavior, and the lessons gathered from ordinary life. Small groups have provided another kind of classroom. Over the years, I have had the privilege of sitting with people as they talked honestly about marriage, illness, caregiving, grief, aging, faith, loneliness, purpose, and hope.
Some of the most important things I have learned about human beings did not come from a medical journal or university lecture. They came from conversations around tables, in classrooms, in churches, in support groups, and over cups of coffee when someone finally felt safe enough to say what was really on their mind.
There is also another part of my life that has shaped this series.
I am what I like to call an elderly newlywed.
After a long marriage, profound loss, and a season of life in which I could easily have assumed that the major chapters had already been written, I discovered otherwise. My wife, Viveca, and I married in our seventies. Our life together has reminded me that age does not cancel the possibility of new beginnings, new relationships, new work, new laughter, or even new adventures.
Love, it turns out, does not ask to see your birth certificate before showing up.
That experience has caused me to think more seriously about the way we speak about aging.
Too often, aging is described almost entirely through the language of decline. We talk about what weakens, what slows, what hurts, what is forgotten, and what can no longer be done. Certainly, those realities exist. A lifetime in medicine has left me with no desire to romanticize the physical challenges of growing older.
The body changes. Recovery takes longer. Strength and balance become more important. Chronic illness becomes more common. Memory may not always cooperate. Our joints occasionally make announcements we did not authorize.
But aging is not only a story about loss.
It can also be a story about integration.
As we grow older, we have the opportunity to bring together experiences that once seemed unrelated. We may become more reflective, more compassionate, and less interested in performing for other people. We begin to reconsider priorities. Relationships often become more important than accomplishments. Time becomes more valuable because we finally understand that it is not unlimited.
And new questions emerge.
What matters now?
What should I hold onto, and what can I release?
What am I still capable of learning?
What do I still have to contribute?
Who am I becoming in this season of life?
Those questions form the foundation of Aging Into Wholeness.
The central idea of this series is that aging is not simply something that happens to us. It can also be a developmental process through which we continue to become more fully ourselves.
In the articles ahead, we will explore the aging body and what it means to maintain strength, mobility, nutrition, sleep, and function while realistically adapting to physical change and limitation. We will consider the aging mind: memory, learning, curiosity, creativity, cognitive health, Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, and the importance of continuing to engage intellectually.
We will also look closely at emotional well-being. Aging brings losses, but it can also bring resilience, gratitude, forgiveness, perspective, and humor. We will talk about grief, loneliness, anxiety, regret, and the challenge of making peace with portions of life that cannot be rewritten.
Caregiving will be another important part of the conversation. Many of us will care for someone we love, and many of us will eventually need care for ourselves. Both experiences raise profound questions about dignity, independence, vulnerability, patience, and the meaning of love when life becomes more complicated.
Relationships and community will also be central because I have become increasingly convinced that aging well is not an individual accomplishment. We need friendships, family, meaningful groups, intergenerational relationships, service, affection, and opportunities to belong. Longevity without connection is not the same thing as wholeness.
We will also explore our purpose. Retirement may bring an end to a career, but it does not have to end usefulness, creativity, or calling. One of the most important questions of later life may be less about what we can still achieve and more about what we can still give. That reality is probably more important than everything we have ever 'achieved.' These are important years for our finding purpose.
And we will talk about spirituality and meaning. Aging has a way of making philosophical questions deeply personal. Faith, mortality, consciousness, hope, forgiveness, transcendence, and the meaning of a life all take on a different quality when we begin to understand that the years ahead are drawing to a close.
That realization should not diminish life. It can help us to appreciate it more fully. We need to live each day more fully than the day before. That is accomplished by being more of who we are, not by how much we do.
This is what I mean by wholeness.
Wholeness does not mean that everything works perfectly, that every relationship is healthy, or that every question has been answered. Wholeness is the ongoing work of integrating who we have been, who we are now, and who we are still becoming. I believe that each day we have the opportunity to become more of who we truly are.
It is learning to hold together strength and vulnerability, independence and dependence, memory and forgetting, joy and grief, faith and uncertainty, accomplishment and regret. It is refusing to allow age, illness, disability, or diminished capacity to define what it means to be human.
Through Aging Into Wholeness, I hope to bring together research, medicine, psychology, education, spirituality, Alzheimer’s and dementia education, the wisdom found in small-group communities, and the perspective that comes from having lived long enough to reconsider some earlier assumptions.
I will bring professional experience, but I will also bring deep questions.
I hope to bring compelling research and profound stories. And I know that I will bring the perspective of someone who is not observing aging from a safe academic distance. I am living it.
My desire is that this series will help us move beyond the question, “How do we avoid getting old?”
That is one battle none of us will win.
A better question is:
In what ways can I become more whole as I grow older?
That seems to me a much more interesting journey. I am glad to be taking it with you.
Gary R. Uremovich, DMin, PhD
Check Gary's Websites and blogs:
and Growth University
So many thoughtful and insightful observations written in these words! As many of us baby boomers are navigating this season of our lives, you are a guiding light directing us to acknowledge without resistance our continued instinctive desires to grow and contribute,or better still, be still and know. Thank you, I look forward to more of your sharing.