My 100-year-old father-in-law commented one day, with a thoughtful look on his face, that he felt no different than he had as a ten-year-old boy. At that point he was on a walker, was being helped with all his daily functions, and was being fed with help from a nursing aide. Yet, inside he was that boy with the curly red hair, who said he got a spanking every day of his life and deserved every one. He was the young man who claimed he ate one dozen eggs for breakfast and twelve sandwiches at lunch as he strung telephone wire in the cold Minnesota winters. It was not so much who he was, but who he felt he was.
A similar distant family member grew up in a difficult situation, and left home at eighteen to join the military. He then put himself through college, followed later by a master’s degree, but was pilloried in the press years later for describing himself as blue collar. He was certainly no longer in that category, but that is what he still felt like.
I once read somewhere that a daughter placed a picture of her aging father as a young man next to the hospital bed to which he was tied. The dashing young man looking out from the picture then, was him as much as the declining person in the bed was now. She commented that the level of care and compassion shown by his aides became elevated after that picture took its place on his nightstand. And in all probability, deep in his heart, he still felt just like that young man in black and white, smiling out at the world.
My grandmother was very dear to me, and I never really noticed that, of course, she aged. She was always the same dynamic, interesting, and interested person she had always been in my life. I remember the shock I felt when one of her children, who had not seen her in a while, commented to me that she had aged. I was startled for a moment, and then really took in the wheelchair which now defined her days as well as the careful progress she made when not in the chair. To me she was, and had always been, just herself. But I realized something in addition. For an active woman who always walked three miles day, she had taken her decreased physicality with the grace and courage she had always shown.
Perhaps we all ought to remember while out in the world, that while a person may age in the flesh, that is not all there is to them. In their hearts they are forever, for better or worse, the person they have always been. Gray hair, stooped posture, hesitant steps and wrinkles do not define who they are.