A letter to our youth obsessed culture:

See me not as a “Senior” but as a person.

Don’t cast me aside as if I no longer have any value. Don’t look at me as having passed my expiration date. People don’t have those. There is life, and there is death, and while I have breath, I still have life. I still have opinions. I stll have feelings. 

If you are a health care worker and you are looking after me? When I tell you I have to use the bathroom, don’t tell me when you can get to it. Can you imagine just for a moment how you would feel if you had to ask another person to help you do that? One of our most basic of human functions? Think of me the next time you are rushing to the bathroom when you think you can’t hold it anymore. I have been through a lot in my life, and I don’t deserve that.

Don’t see just my wrinkled skin, watery eyes, see the value of all my years added up.

There is much I can still teach you. Much you still have to learn.

I know it makes you uncomfortable to see me because I am a reminder that you too will be here someday. You will see the rights you once had slowly dwindling away and your friends and loved ones die one by one. You will remember your youth and how you felt, who you loved and how they loved you.

You will remember smooth glowing skin and strong legs that never got tired.

See me. See me with your heart and you will see the value of my soul which is priceless to God.

See that all of us equal here.

Because I have laced my days together with Gratitude, with a big “G” I can be at peace even here. I may look alone to you, but I’m not. I have the best company you can imagine because He dwells with me. Here.

Here in my sunny chair, in my little room, I take comfort in the God who saw me in my Mother’s womb. He sees me the way I was then, a newly born soul.

Soon, very soon I will be born once more and this time forever.

See me.

For you created my inmost being;
    you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
    your works are wonderful,
    I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
    when I was made in the secret place,
    when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
    all the days ordained for me were written in your book
    before one of them came to be.
How precious to me are your thoughts,^[a] God!
    How vast is the sum of them!
Were I to count them,
    they would outnumber the grains of sand—
    when I awake, I am still with you.

Psalm 139:13-18

photo: flickr by Nutch Bicer, some rights reserved