Exploring Elderhood in Troubled Times

In constellation work we are accustomed to the presence of ancestors - their experiences and untold stories or histories may lead to a turning point that allows a resolution to begin to unfold. When we place ancestors as representatives in a constellation it becomes clear that they are the ones who have the capacity to offer support and help to the younger generations. Somehow in their own lives fate allowed that they were able to develop that capacity and strength; and it can be nourishing and unexpected to connect with it.

Yet what about Elders in our every day world? Do they exist in our lived experience? In our “modern” world? Can we name any? What does it mean to be approaching the final decades of our life in the absence of their presence? Or to be younger and looking for them? Had we even noticed? Or have we just been feeling despair about our world, combined perhaps with aloneness and deep anxiety for those younger than us?

Co-facilitator, Clare Crombie shares some insights into what led her and Sheila to wish to delve deeper into this subject, after both had been reading and talking together about Stephen Jenkinson’s book - “Come of Age” 

I don’t recall the word elder being used to name a representative. Recently I find I am hungry to find out more about what happens when we consciously invite elders in.

In my 74th year I no longer know words to describe myself. If I tell people my age it is often I confess, in order to hear what they almost universally tell me “but you don’t look it”. And yet however eager I may secretly have been to hear this, each time when I do, I feel uncomfortable and a bit more alone. What - I wonder - would change if I began to think of myself as an elder…

Who amongst us, young, old or “elderly” has had an experience of the presence of elders in our lives - of beings to whom we could take our questions -who didn’t necessarily know more than us, but who lived the questions, were “animated by wonder” and allowed for the uncomfortableness of doubt rather than the illusion of certainty. What has it been like to miss them in our lives? Can we feel their absence as a loss to be grieved? There could be a different story than the one in which we become older until we are elderly; a story in which we learn what it would mean to make ourselves available as elders “worth claiming” in which we take our full place as elders, and give what we still have to give, to our wounded and weeping world; crucially to those who are younger and will have harder days to face than we have had”.