I’ve discovered that you need wisdom and courage to deal with the challenges of ageing. No matter how wealthy or healthy you are, it is hard to fully enjoy the benefits of a long life without these two qualities.  

Five years ago I thought I was more foolish than wise. I considered myself quite fearful – not a total wimp, but certainly not courageous. But around this time, I had two experiences that changed my life – two events that are common to most people over a certain age.  

The Death of a Parent  

My mother lay asleep in the hospice. She was dying slowly. Fighting as she always had done, and not wanting to let go. It is remarkable to witness the person who gave me life, ending theirs. I felt fearful and emotionally ill-equipped.  

 The hospice was like nowhere I’d been before. This was a place devoted to the dying and yet surprisingly, it didn’t feel depressing. There was an air of tranquillity where medics, nurses and volunteers went about their business with calm, good humour as though dying was the most natural thing in the world (which of course it is ).  Although I felt emotional about the end of my mother’s life, I also felt reassured that she had good people caring for her. I waited all morning hoping to connect with my sleeping mother. At lunchtime I went to the shopping centre to get something to eat in the canteen of a department store. After I bought a sandwich and a cup of tea, I noticed the cashier. It was as though all the life had been drained out of this woman. She was on auto-pilot. She was probably in her forties but to me, in my heightened emotional state, the cashier looked as though she had died a long time ago.  

 While I ate my sandwich, I looked around the canteen and what I saw was quite shocking. It seemed as though the place was full of the undead. It felt as though there was no humanity here in the shopping centre. There were just functional efficiencies and bleak transactions. From where I was sitting, the staff and the customers in the canteen all looked like extras in a zombie film. There was neither life nor death in the shopping centre. Just the undead. I wanted to get back to the love and compassion in the hospice – where life and death were acknowledged. Where people were valued no matter what state they were in.  

Retirement  

After my mother’s death, I started reviewing what I had done with my life and what I wanted to do with the time I had left. For the last ten years, I’d put a lot of energy into working with a charity called A Band of Brothers (ABOB) doing rites-of-passage weekends for young men in the Criminal Justice System. The purpose was to help them move on from adolescent behaviour to healthy masculinity. It was powerful and rewarding mentoring work around life-transition. A group of us would go to the woods on a Thursday to prepare the physical and emotional ground for fifteen or so young men to arrive on Friday. Most of the young men went home on Sunday evening with the hope of a new beginning in their lives and a willingness to be mentored into healthy community. I loved the challenge of the work, the processes we used as well as the camaraderie of building a healthy community together.  

However, there was a problem. At the age of 70, I was finding the long days and nights camping in the woods with a demanding schedule that sometimes didn’t finish until after midnight, too much. Of course, I didn’t want to admit it. I tried to keep up with my ‘brothers’ who I generally considered to be my contemporaries, but they were often thirty years younger! What I could do when I was sixty-five, was no longer possible. I would sometimes take on the ‘elder’ role, but the physicality was proving too much for me. I fell over and broke a rib at the start of one session and felt I was failing myself, my colleagues and the young men. There was shame at being too old to fully participate, though I was never going to publicly admit it.  

 I would still turn up for meetings, but I started to feel critical about the work and I would long for the event to end. The feeling of connection and joy that I had had for many years had gone and I felt huge grief at the thought of losing my ‘tribe’. I had spent nearly ten years of my life contributing to the community and now I felt alone and passed it. Like many people who have to retire from the work they love, I felt like this was the beginning of a slow decline to the end of my life. These were dark times for me. The joy of life had gone but it was in this darkness that a new seed started to germinate.  

Fresh Perspective  

What did my growing old mean? Was I passed it? What was my purpose? I could no longer pretend to be middle-aged. I realised how unaccepting I was of the ageing process and how unprepared I was for this stage of life. Why was I surprised to be this old? The idea of fully accepting my age was a challenging one, but I started to explore how I could shed my old skin and move forward into a new stage of life. As luck would have it, I was offered a place on a course with an organisation called Living Well Dying Well.  

 With some work, I started to come to terms with my own mortality. I was able to let go of some of the old attachments and this gave me a new lease of life and a surge of creative energy that I hadn’t felt for decades.  

As I had been involved in helping young men transition from adolescence to healthy adulthood, I started to wonder if there wasn’t a need for another transition in later life. I did some research and talked to some wise elders – men and women who were fearlessly committed to not stagnating in later life. I discovered that within many indigenous communities, the process of marking key stages in life was seen as absolutely necessary for the well-being of the tribe.  

The Life-Stage Community  

 I knew now that the superficial ways of talking about life, ageing and death were no longer working for me. I had a hunger for community and for a deeper form of connection, so in 2020 I started the Life-Stage Community with the belief that later life offers the opportunity to explore our innate  wisdom and courage which are the qualities we need to age well. Having spent much of my working life designing training courses for organisations such as Amnesty International, I was well-place to devise both online and venue-based workshops. We have now had over 700 people attend a Life-Stage event with ages ranging from 45 up to 93 and our subscriber list is growing.