Pages tagged "Aging"

My mother, Clare Sinclair, chose to stop eating and drinking at the age of 92. She died nine days later. Her whole life had led up to this courageous step – a life full of optimism, deep feelings, adventure, and stubbornness.

Dear Friends: I believe that the decision to hold PYM at Mount Madonna this year was not made in good order. That haste has been rewarded with a larger price.

Yesterday morning at 8:20 AM, the last batch of residents at the simple buffet breakfast was discussing the future of capitalism. Only at Friends House!! By 8:35 several of us were remembering fragments of Russian from college fifty-five years ago. After breakfast, laughing and admiring the beautiful morning and the colorful gardens, we dispersed. Clare took her seeing eye dog for her morning walk while I went off to hang my laundry on the line. Joan headed for the daily exercise class (she is also in the yoga group) and Lizzie wheeled herself towards her apartment, where there are gorgeous roses and a tiny tree bearing huge oranges near her front door.

Over the last few years, I have been clarifying a spiritual practice that has been a part of my life for some time, but which I have only recently been able to articulate. My time as clerk of my monthly meeting these last couple of years has helped me to understand it as a necessary part of what I do to keep myself spiritually balanced and present.

I was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) four months after I completed a 150-mile bike ride for the American Lung Association. I was thirty-one years old. Two years later, I had to stop working. Soon, I could no longer identify with anyone I knew. It seemed like everyone was either having babies or working. I was doing neither.

 

Excerpts from the keynote presentation to Pacific Yearly Meeting; June 18, 2016; Walker Creek Ranch, Petaluma, California

Paranoid, a 2016 British conspiracy thriller available on Netflix, has Quakerism as one of its themes. In this eight-part series, a team of detectives investigates a murder and a deadly conspiracy. One of the detectives is a man in his sixties who becomes romantically involved with a Quaker, also in her sixties. Another character calls her a “Quaker sex bomb” (three words that are not often heard together). After the start of this relationship, the detective begins attending meeting for worship. The show presents a nuanced perspective on older adult sexuality, and portrays Quakerism sympathetically and accurately. The scenes of meeting for worship were shot in the Frandley Quaker Meeting House in Cheshire, England, and members of this meeting were used as extras. Only three reviews of Paranoid have appeared on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, but they are all positive. ~~~

I began attending Quaker Meeting at a time of darkness – it was both Winter Solstice, and I was struggling with life transitions. My husband and I had recently moved to Washington from my hometown in Missouri. Six months prior to our move, my grandfather had passed away. I struggled with my sense of family in the face of loss, and home in the face of moving.