By Scott Stephen
Sigmund Freud once wrote that the only feeling that doesn't lie is anxiety. This is a hard thing for us to hear, because few feelings terrify us more than anxiety. Anxiety is the way we are affected by the things that we can’t change. We might try hard to suppress it, deny it or ignore it, but deep down, it never goes away.

As Freud explained, anxiety is immutable because, ultimately, it is the chill of death’s own inevitability. So what happens when we try to do to death what we do to other, more contingent sources of anxiety? How do we try to forget our own mortality? The answer is devastatingly simple: nursing homes.

While there are, no doubt, wonderful aged care facilities that provide community and dignity for those who have entered their twilight years and need additional care, this is not the experience of the majority of our elderly. Increasingly, the elderly have become ritual sacrifices that we as a society offer to the most implacable of our modern gods: what Hervé Juvin described in his mordant masterpiece, L'avènement du corps, as a kind of provisional immortality, a death-less existence realised in unlimited consumption.

Precisely because they are painful reminders of our mortality, many of our elderly are consigned to substandard, often degrading care as a way of classifying them as not really alive, but ‘not yet dead’. Institutionalisation has become a mechanism of our desire to forget death and to go on living unperturbed in our capitalist nirvana.

Our failure to care for and honour our elderly degrades us all. The systemic forgetting of the elderly is one of the great causes of weakness and moral impoverishment in our culture. Lives tempered by age and shaped by hardearned virtue are gifts from God.
It is to our detriment that we ignore them.

Perhaps it is time to revive the long Christian tradition that regarded old age as a theatre of virtue and courage. Ageing was imagined as a kind of final transaction, whereby the elderly show what the good life looks like, having reached the point where they can drop all pretence and start telling the story of their lives honestly. But the elderly also bear witness to what good death looks like: how to face the completion of one’s life with courage and faith. Those gathered around in loving community express their humble gratitude for these lives well lived, and urge the dying not to waver in their faith as they sprint toward their final prize.

There is a surprising fictional counterpart to this Christian tradition in the final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The children, Lyra and Will, have made their perilous journey to the world of the dead on the pretence that Lyra must apologise to a friend she betrayed, and for whose death she was responsible.

Once there, it becomes clear that their destiny is much grander than that: it is to defeat death itself by, quite literally, cutting a hole in the other side of this cavernous Sheol and thereby allowing the atoms of the ghosts of the dead to disperse into the benign indifference of the universe.

When one of the harpies — whose role is to torment the dead by hissing and spitting venomous reminders of failed lives — objects that releasing the dead would negate their very reason for being, one of the children’s traveling companions makes a remarkable suggestion: ‘Let’s make a bargain with you. Instead of seeing only the wickedness and cruelty and greed of the ghosts that come down here, from now on you will have the right to ask every ghost to tell you the story of their lives, and they will have to tell the truth about what they've seen and touched and heard and loved and known in the world. Every one of these ghosts has a story; every single one that comes down in the future will have true things to tell you about the world. And you'll have the right to hear them, and they will have to tell you.’

Could not this purgatorial vocation be a model of the community’s care of the elderly? To listen with humble gratitude to lives that have finally learned to tell the truth about themselves, that have stripped themselves of every last shred of pretence, and that now simply need a loving community to hear.

However much our deathdefined culture may wish to deny it, there is life before death. It may be weak and frail, but so are the other gifts that God has given us in order to demonstrate his grac and confound our supposed strength. As the apostle Paul put it, ‘the weakness of God is stronger than human strength’. — Eureka Street

* Scott Stephens is the minister at Forest Lake Uniting Church and lecturer in theological ethics at Trinity Theological College.  The Sunday Observer has been held back for this issue.