How Will You Be Remembered?

David Solie, MS, PA
December 10, 2004

David Solie, who was trained in developmental psychology and medicine, is an insurance broker specializing in the needs of the elderly. In the course of his work he's been confronted by repeated episodes of "elder frustration", which results from the inability of professionals to interact effectively with this age group. He has developed considerable insight into the problem, and distilled his experience in a book "How to Say It to Seniors". With his permission, we reproduce here a third set of excerpts from his book.
Robert Griffith, Editor.

Conflicting with the need to exert control, the need to create a legacy ferments beneath the surface of our seniors' awareness. While they feel a subconscious urge to hang on tight, they are also faced with the daunting task of discovering how they'll be remembered. How do these two needs conflict? If seniors feel they do not have enough control over daily events, they spend all their time fighting for it. That fight leaves them no physical or psychic energy to relax into the reflective mode needed to review past events, the preliminary step necessary to form their legacy. Fulfilling this aspect of their developmental mandate is the opposite of maintaining control: It is the ultimate process of letting go.

The Life Review Process

Through this life review process, a person's legacy may emerge in several different forms, but only one is heartfelt and meaningful. How successful the elderly are in discovering any aspect of their legacy depends on how successful we are in helping them through the process.

[But] if we're fortunate to live long enough, we reach a stage where our strength ebbs, losses accumulate, and the main event we face is the end of life. Most of the people who have known us for decades are no longer around: Either they've moved, or we have, or they are no longer living. It's at this stage that we pause to reflect, to look backward, perhaps for the first time, and try to assess what our lives have meant - to us and the world. Because no previous developmental stages were reflective ones, most people don't have the skills to tackle this job. In order to prepare it, we must resolve our need for control with our need to let our energy, thoughts, and emotions go to have the strength and clarity necessary for what we are compelled to do.

Most people, if they think about it at all, assume this life-review process is an end in itself, serving no real purpose other than to help seniors pass the time. But based on the work I've done with the elderly for the past quarter-century, I understand life review as a tool to accomplish a job very different from any we faced as young or middle-aged adults. It is a continuous and involuntary retrospective in which senior adults weigh everything they have done in order to build understanding and acceptance of the life they lived. Suddenly they are called upon to shape out of the mists of their life experience a legacy that is not just politically correct, but also heartfelt and meaningful.

Winding Up Empty

When we start to realize that we're not going to be here forever, we become aware that it's not clear what it meant to be here at all. That awareness is the developmental task looking for airtime and triggering our desire to deal with our legacy. Discovering legacy implies two things: (1) we've arrived at some understanding of our life, and (2) we want to pass along what we've learned. Although we may not know the shape of the legacy we're going to lay down, we're clear about the desire to do so.

When understood as a developmental need, legacy insists on being addressed, either consciously or unconsciously. Yet because seniors are old doesn't mean they understand this process. When faced with it, most people do not have a clue about how to accomplish it and need to be facilitated. A lucky few are focused and have it all figured out. They have clarity about their life and its purpose. The rest of us wind up fuzzy since we don't know where to begin.

Here are a few statements or questions that can spark the recontextualization that can lead to legacy.

How to Say It:

Son to elderly father: "Tell me about the winters you experienced growing up in Wisconsin."

Young CEO to chairman emeritus: "How did you recognize that the company was ready to leap up to the next level?"

Health-care aide to elderly patient: "What made the 'Good Old Days' so great?"

Baby boomer to elderly aunt: "Why are you thinking about your prom date now?"

We shall post further extracts from David Solie's book "How to Say It to Seniors" on HealthandAge.com. You can buy his book at Amazon.com; click here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0735203806/healtharticles/

Source

• David Solie, MS, PA. How to Say It to Seniors: Closing the Communications Gap with our Elders. (2004) Prentice Hall Press, New York.

Related Links
How to Talk With Your Elders
The Life Review Process According to Butler
About: Reminiscence Therapy

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