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Aging and Coping with DeathAging and Coping with Death Welcome to our website, we are glad you are here. We hope we can give you some concrete answers to aging and coping with death. We want to give you some inspiration and encourage you in this very sensitive time in your life. Beginning in our mid forties, we all begin to see life in a new perspective. We all begin to do what we call ‘embracing our own mortality.’ By that, we mean beginning to see our life as a finite book; we realize it is not a serial show without end. We come to realize our life is finite, and eventually it must end. Aging brings us wisdom and seeing the finish of our lives makes us take our feelings, and those feelings of others more seriously. That is a good lesson to learn. As we age we grow more compassionate, and doing that we realize others are growing more compassionate towards us. Aging is like icing on the cake of our lives. When younger I worried about aging, now I would not go back to being young again for anything! The deepest wisdom is that being aged is the place to be! Our original youth view of life is we have all potential and unlimited time. As we age, we may still feel the unlimited potential, but we realize our time to complete our goals is limited. There are several incorrect realizations that come with our finding of our own mortality as well. The first realization is good, but it brings mistaken realizations that can cause us unnecessary guilt and pain if we do not understand them properly. The first is the good realization that we begin to see the value of human life in general. We begin to value the persons around us more than the jobs that they do or the roles they play. This sense of their value comes as we live with these same persons for decades out in the business world. Over time, they undergo victories, change, overcome hardships, face trials, and encounter disasters, and loss, as we do ourselves. We see ourselves and them aging, growing older, weaker, and lose the strength of our youth. However, we also see something else, and that is they become more aware of us, and concerned with our welfare and feelings as we go through our everyday activities. We begin to cherish each other’s value. That is a good realization, for we see in the end that those journeying with us are more sacred than all the activity of our journey. Aging and coping with death means learning the intrinsic value of ourselves and that same value of others. However there are some, possibly painful mistaken realizations as well. If we do not understand these things in the highest sense, we can carry much pain and suffering which we do not deserve. That second mistaken realization is ‘We grieve the lost opportunities we missed.’ All of us have things we dreamed of and hoped to achieve as we grew up. We all dreamed of becoming a firefighter, or cowboy, or an astronaut, or something. We humans naturally have a high expectation of ourselves. While this may be okay when we are young, it can be emotionally fatal in later adult life. If you or a loved one is experiencing sadness, as you are an aging baby boomer, please take heart. You may have done more than you think you have done! What we wanted to become is just our view of that good that God needed, done here on earth. Because you did not become a movie star or President of the United States does not mean you did not contribute to the good as much as if you had become that. For every one great person in the spotlight in life, it takes a hundred others to get him or her there. It takes their parents, all their teachers, many good neighbors, and an army of relationships with others who inspire them to get them to that point. You have been around a long time, and over all that time, you have helped many people with your inspiration and encouragement. Many of those people could never achieve what they have in life today were it not for the strength you gave them. You gave them their success, either by direct financial and informational assistance or indirectly through your example as a person. If you had become that great person you wanted, you most likely would not have helped as many people as you have where you are. In the high places, more cosmetic and showy people can do fine, but in the trenches is where only authentic people will work. You cannot notice if an actor is a phony and not genuine, but you sure can tell if your loved one or a close relationship is not loving or inspiring! When we grieve the lost opportunities we missed, we are only seeing the top surface of the ocean of all the good you could have done in humanity. You have hit on far more opportunities to love and inspire others, who otherwise would not have made it, than you will ever know! As we are aging and coping with death, we need to trust in God to have put us where our personalities did the most good after all. Do you want proof that God did make good use of you and you were a celebrity and a movie star in your own right? Think about all the people who loved and inspired you, and did things for you. Perhaps there were some good things a loved one did for you that you neglected to say thank you to them for doing. Alternatively, perhaps you hurt someone whom you never went back to them and apologized. The one who did a good deed to you never got feedback from you of how much they meant to you, or the magnitude of their deeds, but that does not lessen the greatness of their deed. This happens a lot because at the time they do a good deed to us, we are not aware of its greatness until years later, oftentimes after we are grown. Those same people are saints in our eyes, and we will never get a chance to tell them that. Do not feel bad about that, for it is a part of life. Those people are far greater in your eyes that they will ever know, and you too are far greater in other’s eyes than you will ever know. Do not regret this, for it is a wonderful lesson we are here to learn, and should never be a cause of your pain, once you have learned it. Remember, we are only here on earth to do three things, to grow, to learn, and by doing that, to serve. This brings us our next mistaken realization, which can be our next obstacle to our aging and coping with death, if we do not see it correctly. We grieve the unspoken and the unexpressed thank yous and goodbyes and I am sorrys. This is the greatest source of pain and causes the most people difficulty in seeing ourselves as successful. We call it ‘unfinished business.’ This happens because we project perfection backwards instead of learning the lesson and carrying it forward. Life is about learning, and until you learn the lesson of responsibility and caring for other’s feelings, you cannot have the behavior of completing all your emotional business on a daily basis. If you are caught up in this ‘I could have, or should have, or would have done this or that, then you are projecting perfection backwards. That is a definite no-no in emotional maturity. We need this self-forgiveness and it is a necessary ingredient for our aging and coping with death. Do not focus on the missed thank yous, goodbyes, and the I am sorrys. What is important is that you must forgive yourself, and use that as an incentive to make your thank yous, good byes, and I am sorrys today. Accept yourself in the present as you are, and keep that as a lesson learned and growth achieved. This will help you to finish this business for the last time, and move on to higher things. The last mistaken realization we make as we embrace our own mortality is we do not forgive ourselves for our cruelty to others. This can be emotionally fatal if we do not understand a few things. If we caused someone pain and suffering, if we withheld love from a child, if we held someone back somewhere in life, we must trust God to have made the correction later for our harshness at the time. Remember life is about learning, and the settings in which we were in to learn those lessons are classrooms. Those classrooms are the realm of God and all that is good. What that means if you think about it, is God was the teacher and supervised in that classroom. God uses your frailties to teach someone something, like forgiveness, as God uses other's frailties to teach you something, like love for all others. If you have feelings of guilt for unresolved misdeeds in your past, you need not have them. You need to look carefully at all the mistakes you have made, and extract all the lessons and wisdom from those situations you can, and move on. Self-forgiveness is again the key here. Aging and coping with death means in the final analysis to accept yourself as you are and more profoundly, to accept your life as you have so far lived it. We do not fear death and dying so much as we fear the life we did not live. Make the most of your todays in the most positive manner you can, and rest assured that God is very proud of you. I am not a Christian man in the religious sense, for my background and upbringing made me tolerant of other religions as well, but I worship God outside of religion, or a Loving Mother Universe whose wisdom is far greater than to sit in judgment. If you will look within you at the deepest dreams and fascinations, you had as a child, you will see the bosom of God or the Loving Mother Universe to which you will someday go. When you finally enter there, you will see your life and perhaps other lives you may have touched, in all their glory. It will be there, where you will get a chance to finish all your missed opportunities, and to say all your 'goodbyes', your 'thank yous', and your 'I am sorry s'. For help with addressing any of life’s obstacles as we travel on our Soul’s Journey, please consider our first in series book Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind. In it, we take you through your spiritual journey back home to your Original Self. We talk about God's purpose behind that soul’s journey, as we follow our heart’s dreams to our ultimate destiny. We answer many questions about selfishness, prosperity, psychotherapy, and finding our dreams and happiness. We share much about boundaries. We also talk about the spiritual controls we have within to bring our good to us. Those controls are our Sincerity Switch, Spontaneity Switch, and lastly our Feelings and Dreams Switch. In the book, we talk about God's real intent behind our lost opportunities, and why we must forgive ourselves, for it is our birthright. God bless you as you begin your new life today. We would love to hear from you. Please tell us how you are doing in your search for answers, and to share your trials and victories with us! We answer every Email personally.
Thanks for visiting. Shayne and Lori North in Aurora, Colorado
Overcoming Depression from Emotional Abuse/The Tools of Your Mind The Book
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