Living With Loss and Limitations

When you experience a loss, it changes you. You can adapt to it, you can absorb it and move on—or you can dwell on it and become embittered.

As you age, losses come in many guises, a friend or loved one may die, you might lose your financial power, or you might lose your independence. These losses are major, and your recovery may require considerable effort, such as going for counselling or retreating from life for a while.

But for the most part, losses are gradual, appearing in our lives as a nuisance, or an inconvenience, and are generally manageable—or we think they are. One day you might notice that you need to strain to hear conversations at a gathering, so you have your hearing checked, and are told that yes, your reception of lower tones is changing, but not enough to need a hearing aid. So you begin to avoid noisy social situations.

While using your computer, you notice that your shoulder aches after prolonged use of the mouse, so you consult your doctor, and do the required exercises, but your shoulder still aches. So you cut down on your time at the computer. Or while taking your regular walk, you decide to go on a different route and are confronted with a set of steep stairs, which you take, and spend the next morning icing sore knees, and vowing to avoid those stairs.

These are not crucial adjustments, but over time, they culminate in limitations to our lives. How we perceive these limitations, and how we behave around them will determine the direction and quality of the remainder of our lives. Every loss, no matter how small, chips away at our sense of well-being. If we let it, it settles in and becomes our mindset. Fear creeps in. “A short while ago”, we think, “I could read this book perfectly in this light. Now I need to move the lamp closer, and use a magnifying glass—I wonder how long before I won’t be able to read at all?”

We might experience anger, and think it just isn’t fair. If we begin to lose our mobility, we look at others who are still able to walk without a cane or walker and feel furious that we have to limit our activities. We may need to accept help from others, which some of us view with guilt and distaste. We were always so strong and self-reliant. “What happens now?”, we think, Am I going to have to depend on others for the rest of my life?

Gain Perspective:

Allowing thoughts like these is self-defeating, and make the situation more awful than it really is. Psychologists have a name for it—catastrophic thinking. Elders are usually good at controlling such thoughts, having already faced many difficulties and setbacks. But sometimes, if changes are sudden, or appear when we are already dealing with other issues, we give in to them. Whatever else is occurring in our lives and whatever new demands we now face, we need to come to terms with our reduced ability to perform. How we view our new situation depends on our perspective.

Thomas Ryan, in Remember to Live!: Embracing the Second Half of Life says:

“We live in a health-obsessed society, and see disease as something that shouldn’t be happening. When actually its just a natural part of being human, of finding ourselves in a body that is changing and not entirely under our control.”

Letting Feelings Flow

Having perspective doesn’t mean reasoning our feelings away. Loss is real, and our feelings around it are real. It’s important to to allow ourselves to feel these emotions— burying or stifling them will only cause them to simmer and erupt at a later time, in another form. But once this grieving period is over, wise elders know they must move on to the next stage, which is gratitude.

Practise Gratitude

Enormous benefit comes from being grateful for the good things that remain. We elders know about the power of gratitude—we have long learned to give thanks for the good in our lives to help us cope with what has been taken away. In times of loss, being grateful might become harder—it’s easier sometimes to slip into negative emotions. You may have to consciously return again and again to what you have to be thankful for. Like everything else worthwhile in life, it requires practice and persistence.

Establish Priorities

This is the time to think about what really matters. For some, this means maintaining (and improving) relationships with family and friends. During the busy times, when health and mobility wasn’t a concern, we may have relaxed connections with these important people. Now is the time to renew these relationships.

Assess Your Situation and Get the Help You Need

Remain open to adaptations. We live in a time when technological advances have provided seniors with aids and equipment that can enormously assist us in maintaining independence—think grab bars in a bathroom, high tech hearing aids, scooters, electronic monitors. Recent studies have focused on how seniors adapt to the limitations they face. One study, by Dr. Linda Fried, (Columbia University) discovered that 56% of all American seniors on Medicare have successfully adapted to a disability with the use of aids. She says,

“It’s extremely important for us as a society to understand that getting older and losing some degree of functioning does not have to be equated with loss of independence.”

Recovering from a loss is not simple. It’s a process that may take months or years. Being aware and pro-active throughout this process, and not just hoping it will happen, will do much to help you be where you should be—living the rest of your life with energy and intention.