I write as an 82-year-old widower who lives a life of comfort in a large and well-ordered community of my peers. Here I dwell among friendly and good-humored neighbors, my age and older. While I and my neighbors are cheerful and active, talkative and engaged, we are aware that we are each in the final act of our life’s play. We cannot help but know because we get weekly reminders, as the stroke, the cancer, the fall, the virus, the dimming mentality, the failing heart, affects another resident, sending them to the nursing wing. And later the memorial card appears on the table in the lobby: a neighbor has gone.
Most of us are widows or widowers, but we have a few married couples. Among these, I noticed as I settled in during my first year, there were a few spouses whose partners had declined — lost their mobility or their memory or the ability to speak, and so needed to reside in the nursing wing — while the other remained healthy and mobile. The healthy spouse, I saw, would spend many hours every day, attending to their wounded partner. At first this seemed tragic, even though I had similarly devoted my time without a second thought to supporting my wife in the year of her final illness.
Belatedly I realized that these spouses were simply working out their vows. Decades and decades before, they’d pledged some version of “in sickness and in health”. Now they were living out that pledge — which was honorable behavior, indeed, truly noble.
This may be inevitable for long-married couples, but it shouldn’t be expected in all relationships. I began to wonder, suppose I were to begin a relationship with another person of my age? (Hey, it could happen.) Would that even be moral? Because we’d know that death or collapsing health couldn’t be many years ahead. Is it truly “better to have loved and lost” when the loss must come a few years after the love begins? I’ve been through bereavement, and I’m not at all sure that a year, or five years, or even a decade of affectionate companionship would compensate for another separation. But either way, it would be wrong to expect a late-life companion to be a diligent care-taker if (when!) I fall into decrepitude.
And what about laying obligation on children? As I have none, I can’t speak from experience, but surely we don’t want to burden our children with our care, nor want them to spend long mourning our passing.
All these thoughts led me to wonder if there couldn’t be a pledge that “flips the script” on the classic marriage vow: a pledge that says, in effect, “I love you while I’m healthy, but when I’m not, you should walk on, singing.” As a retired wordsmith, I labored on it (including taking care not to split an infinitive!) and this is what I came up with; a Pledge of Release:
In our health I rejoice in your companionship, but I want never to hold you back. When I am disabled in body or mind, my joy then will be to know you live on in health; and I mean my final thought to be, a glad “you live!”
The idea is that an elderly person could pledge this to a child or grandchild. From what I hear among my neighbors, they’d all agree heartily in that. And if a couple of older people paired up, they could say it to each other, releasing each other from feeling obligated to attend them when their physical lives become limited. When one partner dies, the survivor’s grief will be at least a little eased by knowing that the other at least intended to think of them, urge them onward, at their end.
Codgerville 