Eldering is a verb

Surviving your own bullshit

Jody Day - self-portrait with eyes closed, 2021.

Something the wise and irascible Stephen Jenkinson said in a recent interview stuck with me, and I paraphrase: you don’t get to ‘be’ an elder by dint of age, but by showing up as one. And that ‘Elder’ is a title only Youngers can give you—it’s about what you do, say, offer and mean to younger generations; about how you show up in their world.

Elderhood is a function, not an identity.

My mother was eighteen when I was born, and I am the latest in a line of unmothered daughters. There were no elders around me when I was young and barely any grown-ups, frankly. Now that I’m in my foothills of my sixties, I look back over watershed moments in my life such as as my mother’s disappearance when I was thirteen (I was told she was dead, but a year later found out she’d left with another man); the career-ending injury in my late-twenties that left me with lifelong chronic pain, the toxic combination of my unexplained infertilty and my then-husband’s addiction issues which consumed my thirties and ended our marriage—I look back at such times now and realise how very differently things could have turned out, had there been an Elder in my life to offer the long view. Not to comfort me, or perhaps even to offer me counsel, but simply by the depth of their presence and their truthful example of what it takes to grow up, they could have given me clues as to how it was done.

It’s quite sobering to imagine what a massive difference such eldering could have made to the course of my life.

However, it would have required something of me too, to bear the weight of their testimony—humility, for a start, which I didn’t have a lot of back then—do any of us when we are young? But now it’s a sediment that deepens with each shedding layer of bodily youthfulness, each terrifyingly unflattering photograph, each realisation that, ‘Oh, I’m probably never going to do that now’, each death in my circle, each shocking revisting of a place woven through with precious memories only to see them wiped off the map.

Living with loss seems to be the secret sauce of eldering—if you’re prepared to endure that kind of alchemy—and it seems very few of us are. As a society, we’ve never had so many old people amongst us, and yet where are the elders? It seems we’re hungry for wisdom in a famine of elders.

My mind alights on the memory of when one of my nieces came to stay with me in London for a few months when she was nineteen. With the learnings from my own time as ‘fresh meat’ to the city at the same age, I was able to offer her much more than just a bed—and had the wisdom to let her make her mistakes without judgment. Now in her early thirties, she recently said to me, ‘I hope you realise that I wouldn’t be me without you?’ (As a childless non-blood aunt, cue a big lump in my throat!)

Humaning takes a lot of practice, and much of that practice is about learning from fucking things up and living with the life-altering consequences. Wisdom isn’t some lofty zero-sum game; it costs—a lot.

Skin in the game

Something I’ve often found challenging in modern eldering rhetoric, particularly that focused on climate change and other activism, is that it’s so often about ‘doing it for their grandkids.’ And indeed, that focus is often referenced explicitly, like with Canada’s For Our Kids and For Our Grandchildren; the US’s 1000 Grandmothers for Future Generations, Climate Grannies and Moms Clean Air Force, the ‘Green Grannies’ highlighted in this UK newspaper article, or the Finnish Aktivistimummot (‘Activist Grannies’). And there are plenty more where these came from.

And whilst this is an understandable focus, as a woman aging without children it can trigger a real sense of exclusion, as can blanket statements such as, ‘What makes these grandmothers remarkable is an unwavering sense of responsibility, a quality shared by grandmothers worldwide,’ or that ‘Grandmothers possess a unique perspective as women and elders, offering a form of influence that transcends generations.’

When I was still grieving my involuntary childlessness, such statements might have alienated and shamed me, and I could have read into them a harmful intent I no longer do. And while I can be compassionate towards their aims, as all marginalized groups know, intent and impact are not the same thing. And with an average of 1 in 5 women in Westernised countries ageing without children (some by choice; mostly not), and with a rising tide of many more non-parents to come in younger generations, this is an awful lot of people to exclude from efforts to make the human future on this planet more bearable.

I may not have children and grandchildren, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about future generations!

I guess it’s just another manifestation of the lazy pronatalist trope that says that women without kids are selfish, despite people without children bequeathing more to charity than any other group, as well as being more involved in the lives of others through work and volunteering. Indeed, a study of 10,000 Australian women in their seventies quoted by Bella DePaulo found that ‘lifelong single women with no children were more likely to provide volunteer services than any of the other groups they studied.’

So, when people say it ‘takes a village’, they often forget that there are probably quite a few people without kids in that village.

Perhaps the fact that I don’t have children gives my desire to support younger and future generations in our collapsing ecological, economic, political and societal world a different flavour? Without the instinctual urge to look out for my own descendants, perhaps my care can be seen as something broader, and maybe altriustic in a different, and equally necessary way, in that it spreads across all the younger generations alive and those to come, and to both the human and more-than-human inhabitants of our beautiful and hurting world.

A moment of Eldering

I was at a wedding of a young couple recently. A man in his mid-twenties came to sit with me for a chat; he was curious about my work as a psychotherapist and writer. He told me that when he’d left college, he’d had a couple of very lost years as he couldn’t see the point in investing in a career when the world was falling apart; he’d found his way to counselling and had been diagnosed with ‘eco anxiety’ and, using that framework, had found a way to make sense of his distress and had pivoted into work that felt meaningful to him.

I shared with him that supporting younger generations in this time of collapse was very important to me and that, ‘Although I might not be on the barricades with you, I’ll be behind them with soup, support and care.’ It was a genuine remark, if a bit of a throwaway one, and I did not expect his response. He looked me directly in the eyes, his charming social mask falling away to reveal a much more flinty young man. ‘Why don’t more people your age think like that?’ he said. ‘All they care about is how they look and the size of their old arses!’ I nodded. As someone who does indeed worry about the size of her old arse, I get how pathetic that must seem; I find it pretty sad myself. And so I asked him something I’d been wondering for a while: ‘How does it feel when you hear that ‘‘Gen Z will sort it out!?’ He looked even grimmer. ‘Well, let’s just say those aren’t the ones we’ll be saving,’ he said, and I received it with the seriousness it deserved. And then a song by a band I’d never heard of started up on the dancefloor, and he transformed back into a young wedding guest. As he stood up to join his friends, he put his hand briefly on my shoulder. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

I think that was a moment of Eldering. A moment to witness his generation’s pain without dismissing it, and to bear it without defensiveness. A moment of intergenerational connection and solidarity I will never forget.

And the fact that I am not a mother and will never be a grandmother was irrelevant to both of us.

As our world's natural and social structures continue to unravel, steady hearts, minds and souls will be needed to hold us. This has always been one of the roles of Elders. But in a society that lionises youth and demonises aging, what does it mean to be or become an elder? How much ‘apprenticeship with sorrow,’ as Francis Weller calls it, might it take until we are filed down to the bone and can reveal both the beauty and grief of humanning, and with enough grace and gallows humour for it to be palatable?

What if part of being an Elder, is surviving our own bullshit?

Perhaps once we accept that we’re not getting out of here alive, no matter what we do or don’t do for our health, and that our appointment with death is written in invisible but indelible link—we can finally loosen our egos grip on life, lighten up and finish (or start) growing up so that we can be of meaningful service. Because surely the point of wisdom is not to hoard it; it’s to give it away.

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