Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign
[00:00:03] Speaker B: welcome to Unburdening a mountainorth Podcast, where we unburden mental health topics from stigma like a shot of penicillin unburdening an infected limb from a disease that would have killed us at age 25 in the year 1890 but no longer does, therefore giving us the freedom and the abject terror of deciding how we want to live the rest of our lives.
So if you can't already tell, this episode focuses all on aging and the period of life we call old age.
On the agenda Today, we're going to talk about aging well and how difficult that can be in a society that worships the appearance of youth, in productivity, above depth in meaning.
For a lot of people, aging can feel like traveling without a map.
So to help guide our discussion, we'll look at the history of aging in the United States and focus in on stories of older people who embraced the final chapters of their life with courage and authenticity and the ripple effect their lives had on those still living today.
We'll look at old age as a distinct developmental stage with its own vital tasks for personal personal and cultural growth.
So we'll build out the map of old age in this section, but we're also going to look at the devastating consequences of ignoring these tasks of old age, not just for an individual person, but for a society as a whole.
Then we're going to shift into the interview portion of our show with Emily Brick, who is a licensed the therapist at Mount north who specializes in gerontology.
Emily shares her experience and wisdom as someone who has spent countless hours with older adults, and she gives some really good insight into what's most important at this time of life.
So let's get into it.
I want to start with some history on the social policy that that informs American decision making around old age.
My mom was born in the year 1950.
At this time, the life expectancy for American women was 71. For men it was 65.
This was actually up significantly from previous generations.
The 1950 census showed that the aged population in the United States had grown from 3 million in the year 1900 to 12 million in 1950.
And this is almost entirely due to advances in medicine.
The invention of penicillin specifically helped cut back deaths due to infectious disease, and people were living longer and generally suffering a lot less from things that used to kill us young.
Diseases that were previously death sentences such as bacterial pneumonia, syphilis, severe wound infections became rapidly and easily curable.
For context, During World War I, the death rate from pneumonia in the U.S. military was 18%.
But by World War II, penicillin dropped that death rate to less than 1%.
This is a huge drop.
[00:03:44] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:03:44] Speaker B: And infant mortality also decreased dramatically.
Surgery as a medical intervention became much, much safer.
If you're American, you'll probably remember hearing grisly details of the backwood surgeries that happened during the Civil War. It seemed like high school history teachers just relished these tales of old timey doctors just sawing into people who died from surgical infections. And penicillin changed all of that.
I'm harping on this because I think we can, these days take for granted the extent to which medicine has improved our lives.
One of the elders in my family was a World War II veteran who contracted tuberculosis during the war.
When he was alive, he shared with me memories about how awful and horrifying this disease was.
He really thought he would die, and die painfully alone in quarantine. Part of why I have some of the values I have today concerning my own health and public health in general are because of my great uncle taking the time to share his memories and wisdom from the previous century with me.
There was no substitute for his lived experience.
It provided me with a clarity that no history book could replicate.
My great uncle was an example of how an elder can be a source of knowledge for the next generation, how an elder can help us learn from history so we don't forget the past.
And every time we take in the knowledge of an elder and apply it to our lives, we keep them alive.
It's a ripple effect radiating out from that person.
There's a 1965 novel by Alan Sharp called A Green Tree in Gedez, and this novel has a description of a country cemetery with two sections, the remembered dead and the truly dead. The graves of the remembered dead are tended to with flowers, whereas the graves of the truly dead are forgotten. They are flowerless, weed infested. The tombstones are eroded.
These truly dead were the unknown ancient ones, the dead whom no one alive has ever seen.
The point is that every single old person is the last repository of the image of many, many people. When the very old die, they take a multitude with them.
And when we shine a light onto this fact, we shine a light onto part of the map of aging. Well, when we know that our lives ripple out past our lifespan and into the lives of other people, something we can do in old age to dispel some of the anxiety around death is to prioritize our relationships with others so we see that ripple effect and our impact in real time.
And if you are Someone who has a friend or loved one at this stage in their lives, you can encourage them.
So now that we've looked at just a little piece of the map of aging, well, I want to return to the year 1950 again. Remember, Americans are living longer than they did before, and social policy did not know how to keep up with this change.
At the time, 75% of older Americans had an income of $1,000 or less a year.
I did the math, and in today's market, that's around $13,900.
Meanwhile, hospital costs were going way up, and only one in eight older adults had any kind of health insurance that would help them pay those costs.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: So.
[00:08:10] Speaker B: So if it was 1950 and you were an old person in America, you were just praying you did not get sick because private insurance was not helping you at all.
So to address this massive problem, lawmakers start to take action.
There are arguments in Congress surrounding basically, basically what we would call socialized health care these days.
And this goes on for, I kid you not, a decade, if not more.
Finally, in 1965, President Johnson signs into law the amendments to the Social Security act that invent Medicare, AKA socialized medicine for older people. A deep dive into Medicare and its history is beyond the scope of this episode, but I wanted to bring it up because I wanted to show that debates around this are not new. They have been there since the introduction of Medicare into our system, and it has always been a fight.
Maybe in the future we will do a whole episode about Medicare and its sister program Medicaid to just shine some light onto the systems that a lot of us navigate every day when it comes to accessing mental health and health care.
But for now, I just want to focus on what it means to see your access to care debated year after year after year, as if your very life is just some abstract political theory and not the very real pain you feel when you can't afford to go to the doctor and just have to Google online folk remedies.
So when government leaders position the well being of elders and as something that is even up for debate, it sends the message to everyone that the well being of elders is not important enough to be protected.
This is not a sign of a healthy society. This is a massive red flag.
Healthy societies value the well being of their elders because they are aware of the ripple effect an elder has on everyone in their community.
And to be clear, even with the cuts it's endured over the years, Medicare is a much better system than what was in place before, which was essentially Nothing.
If you were old and if you were not independently wealthy and you didn't have gracious family members to help you out, you just went to the poorhouse.
And poor houses were like combination mental asylum, homeless shelter, prisons. Think of the dark, lonely places from the novels of Charles Dickens.
And diseases spread in these places like wildfire, because of course they did. Older people who found themselves on the street could be arrested for vagrancy.
It reminds me a lot of how a lot of people who find themselves homeless and who develop conditions such as schizophrenia can find themselves criminalized even when they've done nothing wrong.
And the same can go for older people who might develop some of the degenerative disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, and find themselves homeless because they just lack the safety net to find stable housing and access to care.
So Medicare provides some of that safety net to many, but sadly not all.
Because once again, in the year 2026, we have seen a huge increase in the population of elders. And once again, we are coping with a social system that has not kept up with this change.
A few facts to drive this point home. As of 2026, the US life expectancy has reached an all time high at an average of 79 years for women and 76 years for men.
So that's up almost 10 years from the average lifespan of 68 that was established in 1950.
And furthermore, between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans who have reached age 100 grew by 50%.
This is wild, y'.
[00:13:20] Speaker A: All.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: People are living to ages previously only heard of in biblical folklore.
Meanwhile, the government remains deadlocked in its eternal struggle to decide if it should honor this fact or not.
And into that void of power rushes the anti aging market.
And this market, folks, it is highly, highly lucrative.
Just to give you a little idea, in 2025, this market was valued at $55.6 billion. That's projected to grow to 107 billion by 2033.
A lot of this is in the area of skin care, moisturizers, the serums you can buy at the store. If you are a woman with a social media account over the age of, oh, let's say 23, chances are you are drowning in advertising content for these products.
This also goes for the injectable market. These are going to be your minimally invasive cosmetic procedures like Botox.
That market has also boomed over the past five years. This is why you see all those med spas popping up on the highways.
The market research I read on Botox indicated that the strongest factor driving this Increase was demand in younger people, like people under the age of 30 even.
Do y' all notice the dissonance here?
Living to old age is a quickly expanding reality in the United States.
But as that reality expands, so does the mass denial of it.
It's like those driving the anti aging market know we are anxious about growing older, that we have no meaningful blueprint for that part of our lives.
So the market tries to copy and paste the aesthetics of youth and sell them to us as we age. And very successfully, may I add.
But these surface level masks of our younger selves do not help us mature to what our soul is actually demanding of us, which is to work with, not against our aging bodies. To let go of our need to control so the next generation can still step forward and for us to finally really grow up inside.
And to be clear, I'm in no way shaming people who participate in the anti aging market.
I myself participate in that market. And gratuitously, I am sure, if you were to add up all my receipts over the years.
That said, I want to be clear about what. What that market gave me and what it didn't give me.
What it gave me was skin that was maybe 20% more smooth than it would have been had I not used moisturizers, serums, or Botox between my eyebrows.
What it didn't give me was my youth, because my youth is gone. It's not coming back.
And to be honest, I don't want it back.
I don't want a second childhood. I don't even want a second adolescence. I want to be the person I am now. With the hard earned wisdom that I have gotten only through the process of making mistakes and making friends and taking on new experiences.
As time goes by, I question more and more my participation in that market. In particular my choice to get Botox, which is not medically necessary for me.
It's just a cosmetic procedure I get, because if I'm real, I have some insecurity about my face as it changes, which is really just the fear of change.
So that's something I am talking about with myself recently when it comes to aging now, despite the efforts of the anti aging market to keep us from considering this change on a deep level.
I think the American unconscious has always been preoccupied with it, has always been looking for a way to make sense of it. And we can see this in our storytelling.
Consider the folk tale of Rip Van Winkle, the colonial story of the man who falls asleep on the Catskill Mountains, only to wake up 20 years later to find his wife and many friends have died, that his children have grown and that the world has changed dramatically.
I think this story channels the bewilderment of compound loss people can experience in old age. And when we get to the interview portion of the show, you'll hear more about that from our guests. Emily.
Then there's the story of Benjamin Button by F. Scott Fitzgerald that was actually made into a movie with Brad Pitt. It's about a man who ages backwards.
And it really shows the role reversals between children and parents that can occur in old age, as well as the snap judgments we can all make about people based solely on age.
And most recently, there's the movie starring Demi Moore, the Substance.
This movie follows a fading 50 year old Hollywood star who gets fired from her fitness show by a lecherous producer.
She gets depressed and then she turns to this mysterious black market product called the Substance and the serum unlocks her DNA to birth a younger flawless alter ego named, named Sue.
This movie is about the cultural pressures we put on women when it comes to aging.
That pressure to act and look young, even though doing this causes a kind of stunted, ridiculous soul death.
This, to me is probably the hardest part of the pressure to stay young. There's no dignity in it. It's just being stuck and frozen in time.
That said, all these stories hit a nerve in our culture. That's why they became so popular.
At this point, I want to finish fleshing out that map of aging well that we were talking about earlier.
And to do that we have to talk about the stages of psychological development.
So according to developmental psychologist Eric Erikson, human life happens in all ongoing, distinct stages.
And each of these stages comes with a unique conflict we must resolve before we can grow into the next stage.
If we do not embrace and resolve these inner conflicts, we may grow older, but we're not going to mature, not really. This is why you can sometimes meet a 50 year old person with the emotional maturity of a teenager.
They did not resolve the conflict from adolescence. They did not pass go, they did not collect $200. And as a result, they have carried that inner conflict into the next part of their life.
To flesh this out, I'm going to use my own life experience.
For a very long time I struggled with trust. And, and this was not just, you know, basic relational trust. It was trust in the world in general.
It was trust of basic reality that there could possibly be a version of reality where I could be okay or okay enough.
And this had intense consequences for my whole life until I started working on it.
If you look at Erikson's eight phases of development, trust versus mistrust is the conflict we must resolve as an infant. Though I should really say it's a conflict our caregivers in our environment is helping us through. Because as infants, we are completely dependent on our environments, our caregivers, for everything.
We are completely helpless and vulnerable in the world.
We have to trust that our basic needs like food and safety will be provided for because that lends us to a sense of hope.
So as an infant, I had not one, but two near death experiences.
And this was by no fault of my parents.
This is just because being an infant is vulnerable.
I almost drowned twice.
And so as an adult, I really struggled with a sense of hope.
And this was kind of sneaky how this spread into every single area of my life.
Hope for the future, hope that there could be a sense of stability in relationships or within myself.
And it wasn't until I started working with an EMDR therapist who took a very, very thorough, very thorough developmental history of my life that we spent some time talking about these experiences from being an infant and how they rippled out into these core beliefs of one, no one is going to come to help me. I'm basically on my own drowning here, right?
And two, I'm going to die alone here.
And it is crazy the way those two beliefs just drove my entire life. Not consciously, I wasn't sitting there literally thinking that, but in a felt sense, these things controlled me for a very long time.
And to work through them, I had my therapist to help me, but I also had to find other people, friends, people in my family who had resolved this dilemma in themselves as well. The best people to help you through a developmental stage, especially if you're going back to try to accomplish one that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do because you didn't have the insight yet, or maybe you didn't have the resources for therapy is to find people who are like mentors to you, you who can show you how to resolve that.
And you can usually tell when you are stuck in one of these stages from the past.
If you keep running into the same problem within yourself over and over again, it'll feel like you're frozen, right? Like there's just this thing that keeps coming up and like the mask it wears might change, but it's the same thing.
Another clue might be you catch yourself ruminating a lot on past relationships or past traumas you might have had, and these things become a roadblock for Developing who you want to be in the here and now. All of those are really good indicators to start looking into your development and what you need to do to help remove those blocks so you can be who you want to be.
So to skip ahead here, we're gonna look at the stages of development that are most relevant to the final years of life.
These are gonna be stages seven and eight. And before we get into them, just to be clear, all of these stages can be relevant because if a person hasn't resolved one from the previous years, it's gonna come up in old age, right?
Like, had I not had a great therapist and community support, I could have grown to be like a 70 year old woman who still had no trust in herself, who still could not have even five minutes where she thought she was going to be okay.
And I am so happy that will not be my future.
And if you're listening to this and you're relating to that, it does not have to be your future either. It is never too late to go back and to resolve these things from our life. And we owe it to ourselves, to each other, to take ownership of this, right?
So, okay, the stages associated with older age, we're looking at stage seven. This is generativity versus stagnation.
So the goal here is to be generative so we don't stagnate.
And in this stage, we want to try to be contributing to society and the next generation through our vocation, through family and community.
This is when a lot of people are asking those big questions. What does work or vocation mean to me? What does family mean to me? How do I want to feel in my family?
Who do I want to be in my family?
And how do I want to participate in the bigger picture stuff?
Could be a spiritual community, could just be the people around you. Okay?
And then the last stage of life in old age, age 65 and up. This is integrity versus despair. And we really want to try to walk into integrity here. This is when we're reflecting back on life and aiming to achieve a sense of fulfillment, fulfillment and wisdom rather than regret.
And look, we're all going to have regrets. That's just part of life.
But it's important to counterbalance that regret with the positive impact we've had on other people.
So I want to give an example of an elder who I feel like resolved this last conflict beautifully and set an example to all of us for how we can walk into our final years holding our head high.
And this is the late, great Dolly Parton. And of Course, Dolly was well known through her life. She was a famous singer, of course, but it's not the fame that was important in her final years.
It was her connections to other people and her legacy.
Both of these things created the ripples into the lives of people who are still living today.
We see this through her charity work to the state of Tennessee.
I don't know if there are people listening who remember the fires, the wildfires that happened in Gatlinburg.
This was back in 2016. And Dolly really stepped up in that emergency.
She donated money to people who were rebuilding or who were just without a home.
And the impact of that is still felt today in the people who remember how that helped them get through the biggest nightmare of their life.
In addition to this, she started a program called the Imagination Library, which donated books and still donates books to working class children.
[00:29:12] Speaker C: And.
[00:29:13] Speaker B: And this is another huge ripple, because every time you gift a child a book, you are gifting them a world.
And then, of course, there's her legacy within music, and legacy is distinct from fame. Someone can be famous with no legacy or with a soured legacy, even.
But I would best describe Dolly's legacy as inspirational.
She showed musicians who did not come from privilege that they too had stories to tell and that these stories were important.
And we all still sing her songs today. In fact, just last week, I saw a beautiful recording of Kacey Musgraves singing Dolly's classic hit, I Will Always Love youe. Dolly's music made her a lot of money and therefore made her very influential in her lifetime.
But you do not have to be a millionaire to create ripples in your life.
You don't have to start a whole charity. You can just read to a younger person or volunteer or share some of the songs from when you were younger and what they meant to you.
And now that we've set the stage for old age and what it looks like in the here and now, we're going to transition into the interview portion of our show with Emily Brick.
And she's gonna flesh out for you guys what it really can look like at this point of life and what some of the challenges are, what some of the strengths are.
So I'm gonna let her take it away.
Welcome, Emily, to the podcast. What's your backstory as a therapist?
[00:30:56] Speaker A: What moved you to take on this kind of work and specifically to work with older adults?
[00:31:02] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Emily. I'm one of the therapists at Mountain North. I'm a licensed professional counselor. One of the things that moved Me to take on this kind of work and to become a counselor. When I was growing up, my older sister struggled significantly with mental health problems from a very young age.
I can't remember specifically what age, but it was even before age 10 that she experienced, like, psychosis, depression, periods of mania, things like that.
And my parents would have to take her the whole way to Pittsburgh. So it was like two hours away to see a good psychiatrist and a good counselor. She wasn't officially even diagnosed with, like, bipolar disorder until she was 18, even though she struggled on and off throughout her childhood and teen years. So basically growing up in Somerset county, where I'm from, I saw not only what she was experiencing, but also how difficult it was to find good support, good counselors locally.
So I think that kind of really made me realize even when I was younger, like I said, that our community really deserved, deserves now to have some good mental health care locally. And I also kind of saw the stigma that she dealt with when she was struggling. A lot of people didn't understand what she was going through, Kind of treated her differently. And I too, kind of took from that. You know, I wanted to be a counselor. I wanted to be that person who can understand what people are going through, kind of support them and also support their families and just educate people about mental health. So I think that was part of what moved me, kind of my backstory. Also. Also, I think this is honestly just who I've always been. People have always kind of felt comfortable, like they could talk to me, even though I barely knew them. My friends and family always joke like they don't want me to go to Walmart with them because I'll be in the line, we'll be checking out or something, and I'll be talking to people for an hour. So I think part of why I want to take on this work and why I want to become a counselor was because of my sister and her experiences, but also because that's just kind of who I've always been.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: I relate to the part of your story where you were talking about wanting to be here for a rural population, because so often this is the case where people have to drive into the city to find the care that they're looking for, which means they have to take off work or they have to go out of school, and it can just be inaccessible.
What drew you to older adults as a population to work with?
[00:33:54] Speaker C: I guess when I was in college, I ended up taking a lot of gerontology classes, and not because I was required, just because it was something that I started doing, and I really loved it. And through that, I kind of just learned all the challenges that older adults had that I didn't really realize. I think in each job I've worked at, I've worked with older adults, and I kind of just naturally always had this, like, connection and, like, easy relationship with them. So, again, kind of like, naturally just fell into working with older adults. But I also have noticed that older adults can often kind of get overlooked, you know, and don't always get the same attention as younger people. So that's something that I felt like, made me want to work with them more, too. You know, I wanted to be the person who could listen to them, take in concerns and recognize that their mental health is just as important as anybody's, and they have a lot of, like, wisdom, you know, and experience that I think people don't even realize.
[00:34:58] Speaker A: What defines an older adult? Is it an age category, or are there other aspects to this identity?
[00:35:06] Speaker C: It's varied. Usually it's 65 and older, but sometimes it will be.
I've heard people say, like, 60 and older, but, yeah, generally it is like an age category. But I think it's. It's other things that come into play, too. You know, like even just thinking about, like, being retirement age, I could see
[00:35:25] Speaker A: older age can start earlier for some people, depending on their health or ability status, and maybe it starts a little later for others. But generally, I'm hearing it falls around that transition where working people start to step back a little from that aspect of their identity. Can you explain a little bit what happens to the human brain as we age?
[00:35:51] Speaker C: So as we age, there's some natural changes that happen to the brain. Brain volume can decrease somewhat over time, and some of the connections between our brain cells might not work quite as efficiently as they used to. And because of that, we. We kind of notice that our processing speed might slow down a little. You know, it might take us a little longer to recall information, find the right word, and even sometimes it can be more difficult to, like, multitask.
But I think something important when we're thinking about the brain, too, is even though there's some changes as we age, our brains are still super capable of learning and adapting as we older. It's not. I think sometimes when people think of, like, aging in our brain and older adults, it's like, they often go to, like, dementia or, like, a significant cognitive decline. And I think, like I said, there's some changes, but definitely not all of the time or even maybe most of the time. Do people always have those, like, significant cognitive declines or struggle with dementia?
[00:37:01] Speaker A: So I heard you say earlier, our processing speed gets impacted, which might be tough because we live in a society with a very high expectation when it comes to multitasking and when it comes to capturing our attention overall. What are some of the challenges people often face in this stage of life?
[00:37:26] Speaker C: So some of the challenges that older adults face, some of them are similar to what we face as we're going through life and younger adulthood, too. But some of the challenges would be loneliness, physical health changes, challenges, medical issues.
Again, not always, but sometimes grief and loss.
And I think just thinking about grief and loss a little bit, again, we go through that when we're younger. Some people do, but it can be a little different in older adulthood. It's often like multiple losses or within, like, a short period of time, you know, so it could be siblings, parents, spouses, that kind of stuff. And again, like, with. In a short period of time, sometimes for people, another challenge, not for everyone, but again, for some would be caregiving, you know, taking care of their spouses. And I think sometimes people get in that caregiving role even before older adulthood, like, they'll take care of their parents, and they kind of just stay in that as they become an older adult, caring for a spouse or a sibling or somebody else, relationship struggles.
And that can be, I guess, with anybody, but sometimes with children, because the dynamics can change as we age.
With grandchildren, too, I think financial struggles, because a lot of older adults are now living off of retirement or Social Security and have more of, like, a fixed income.
Retirement is another one. I feel like there's so many, as I'm like saying these, but retirement is another one which can be such a positive change and like a happy thing, but it can also be just hard to adjust to. You know, it's like finding a new routine. Your sense of purpose could change that kind of stuff. But I think, and I may have said this a little bit earlier, but there can be so many different changes and transitions happening at once. Someone might be dealing with changes in their health, their mobility, but they're also potentially adjusting to, like, retirement, losing friends, loved ones and things like that. So any of the changes are difficult, but when they happen all at once, it can really impact a person's mental health. And again, I think sometimes that happens when we're younger, but it's just. It's more common, I think, in older adulthood for it to all kind of be happening at the same time.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: As you're talking about This I can't help but think of the late, great Dolly Parton. I think she was in her 80s when she passed away, maybe a year after her husband, Carl Dean, and how she had all these challenges that you brought up.
She had health concerns, grief and loss. Her husband had died, and yet she was still so generative late into her life.
And we just talked about what's challenging about that time of life.
But what are some unique strengths that people bring to their communities when they're in this age bracket?
[00:40:32] Speaker C: I think older adults, they have a lot of strengths, and they bring a lot of strengths to their community. But I think one of the big things is, you know, they bring so much life experience and wisdom to their communities. You know, they have so many stories. If we actually sit down and listen. Something that I really wasn't thinking about until just recently either.
This is strength, is, I think that older adults help to preserve, like, family traditions and, like, values within communities, you know, and just the history that can be passed down.
They're also mentors to a lot of younger people, which I think is a strength.
And if you think about, like, volunteering and, like, you know, maybe different places where people are able to volunteer, if you think about it and, like, look around, a lot of our volunteers are older. Older adults like older people because they're not raising families anymore and they're not maybe working and things like that, so they have more of an opportunity. So I think that's a really big strength and something that, you know, older adults bring that maybe is different from when we're younger. But I think sometimes I hear people focus a lot on, you know, what older adults need from others in the community and not as much about these strengths and the things, you know, that the older adults really do give to our community. So I'm kind of. I'm glad you asked that question, because I think we should shift our thinking a little bit. You know, they bring a lot to us and our community with experience and just being volunteers and just their perspectives that I think we often forget about.
[00:42:16] Speaker A: I agree wholeheartedly with that. I recently started intentionally having conversations with the older adults in my family, and it has been incredible just to see how much of the struggles of my generation are universal. When you talk to someone who lived through the Cuban Missile crisis, for example, you start to see that existential threat is not new.
You start to see the bigger arc of history, and there's a lot of resilience there, I think, and a lot of strength that can be taken from these stories. Of survival, how they pass down these blueprints for us.
Right. And the family traditions as well. I started talking to my great aunt, who was a Catholic nun for many years, but she actually wrote to the Pope for permission to leave the church.
Just talking to her has been so enriching for me. This elder in my family, she has this mission to prove to people that you can live happily without a smartphone. And she's doing it, which is amazing.
Yeah. She lives on a farm, and if she needs like a Google, she will just call someone to Google something for her, which is great. And I love being one of those people who can be that for her. And as she is doing this, it makes me reflect on my relationship with technology and how little I actually need it.
That's just one example of how an older adult in my life has given me a feeling of strength and resilience and validation for what I'm capable of.
So at this stage of life, a lot of us, we start to develop some health problems, or the ones we already had become harder to ignore.
Right. So what advice do you have for elders, navigating the healthcare system in 2026?
[00:44:24] Speaker C: I think my biggest piece of advice for older adults, navigating the healthcare system is to advocate for yourself and don't be afraid to speak up. I think what happens sometimes is, I've actually heard this, like, from older adults, is they'll go into, like, a doctor's office or like any professional, I guess, for that matter, within the healthcare system, and they'll say that they're having, like, a lot of intense pain, you know, or they're having some new symptoms. Excuse me, that they've never had before, and they kind of get told, like, it's just a normal part of aging.
And then I. I've seen these older adults kind of just let it go. Then it's like, oh, this is something I have to deal with. They said it was just a normal part of aging. I'm just going to hurt, you know, forever, and I have to kind of just handle it. And I. I've always said, you know, to those people, like, you need to say something, stand up for yourself a little bit. Because I don't think. I really don't think we should just have to accept that. You know, I think that there's probably at least something, you know, that a doctor could do or more tests that could be ran or something like that. But I think that's important. Be an advocate for yourself, which, it can be challenging sometimes, but I think just ask a Lot of questions. Don't be afraid to speak up. Just a couple little things, too. I think it's helpful just to be prepared, you know, because sometimes I think for any of us, it can be a little overwhelming, the healthcare system in general. But when we actually have, like, appointments and things. So just write things down, like questions that you have, bring your medication lists and things like that. Kind of be prepared.
Also potentially bring someone with you, you know, to help you advocate for yourself or just be a, you know, a second set of ears. The only thing with that is, is just remember the appointments about you. You know, I think sometimes what happens is like, we'll bring someone with to advocate, or older adults will bring someone with to advocate for them, and it'll. It'll become like the doctor or the whoever it is in healthcare kind of talking just to that person and not acknowledging the actual person who needs help and who's having the problems. And, you know, so again, like, even if that would happen and you bring someone, don't be afraid to speak up for yourself, even if someone is there to support you.
[00:46:41] Speaker A: Yeah. What you were saying just now reminds me of how sometimes when someone's sick in the hospital, the doctors will talk to their loved ones like, that sick person isn't in the room.
They'll use the third person, like, oh, he or she is this or that, and that person's right there. We can turn to them, you know, and talk to them and include them in this conversation about their body. There's a question that some physicians with experience working with folks who are 65 and older will ask sometimes. Which is what is most important to you right now? Is it most important to you that you are able to get up at a certain time of day to day, walk the dog?
Is it important to you to be able to drive or to be able to cook?
Right. And I think as our bodies develop these more complicated or conflicting health problems inside what matters most is a really great question a physician can ask. But if your physician isn't asking that, you can also ask yourself that and then tell them, and then they can help you determine what path to take to help you preserve the way of life that you want at that stage.
So what advice would you have for family members who are helping their elder loved ones, either as support people or even as caretakers themselves?
[00:48:16] Speaker C: I think one of the big things is to just listen before trying to fix things or kind of like take over things for the older adult. I think often any of us, but again, especially older adults, just want to feel heard, you know, more than sometimes they need a solution.
I think also just be patient.
It can be frustrating for an older adult. Again, specifically, just like all of these changes, the losses, just the aging process in general. It could be really frustrating, you know, so be patient, take your time with them, those kinds of things.
This is something that.
It's a little bit random, but I think a piece of advice that I have given family members in the past when I was working with older adults, is to remember that your loved one, and I guess this might tie into what we were just talking about a little bit. Your loved one is still an adult and they need to be treated with respect. I think sometimes family members and professionals, kind of like we were talking about before, just kind of do, like, forget that an older adult is an adult because they're needing some more care or some more help with things.
But there's been times where I have seen family members kind of treat an older adult as kind of like a baby, you know, where they're kind of like using different language, kind of like, oh, sweetie, you know, honey, let's do this. Or I've also been around family members of older adults and professionals too, who think they need to talk, like, really loud, you know, to an older adult, because they kind of have that, like, stigma in their head that, oh, older adults can't hear and things like that. So I think, like, it's important, you know, if you're helping your loved one to just remember, like, they are still an adult, you know, they maybe things have changed. They can't do everything that they used to do. But we should treat them, you know, with respect and show them that they're valued. You know, I think that makes a big difference for them. But I think a couple other things, it's just check in on them and ask them, like, some of those questions even that you were talking about before Claire, like, just, you know, what do they need? Because often they have trouble asking for help, partly because of the generation, I think, that they're in. You know, they are very independent or were very independent. So it's hard to ask for help later on when things have changed.
Otherwise, I think just include them and things that you're doing, you know, and really listen to those stories because they'll appreciate it and they have great ones.
[00:51:03] Speaker A: It's a win, win situation to sit down and take the time to listen and get those stories. I was thinking too, about how important it is for the children of older adults to manage our own anxieties around the Life of our loved one and I'll open up. This was something I struggled with when my mom had a stroke. All I could think about was how do I keep her safe?
And safety is important, but it can get in the way of a life well lived if that's all we're valuing is safety.
And there is so much that my mom does in her day to day that's meaningful for her. She gardens, she feeds the animals, she's very independent, and that to her is what's most important.
And I had to step back and manage my anxiety and sort of let her have that because that was her happiness.
And so one piece of advice I just add for people in this position is acknowledge your own anxiety as well. What generally do you see as mattering most to people at this time of life?
[00:52:18] Speaker C: So I think multiple things, but I think some of the things that matter most are family and relationships, just having some kind of connection, you know, with a group of people, whether it's family or friends or something in the community.
I think health, peace, comfort, things like that. But I think like I said about the relationships, I think it can become especially important because of the loneliness, kind of like what we talked about earlier and with, with health needs and things like that.
I think it's important and it matters a lot to people in older adulthood because they want to be able to manage, you know, their health needs, and they want to have the best quality of life as possible for as long as they can have it. I really think, probably, like I'm saying all these different ones, but I think when I said peace, that that's probably the biggest one that I have heard from the older adults that I've worked with, you know, they want to live a life that doesn't have a lot of unnecessary stress or chaos, drama like things like that, but they also just want to feel secure, you know, because even sometimes, again, with all the changes, people are worrying about their finances, are their basic needs being met, you know, maybe they're having to move because they can't live in their house anymore. So I think that security matters a lot to people in older adulthood.
I didn't say this, but I think too just having a sense of purpose is a huge thing, you know, feeling that they have something meaningful to contribute.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: I'd agree with all that. And I could see how peace is important because this last stretch of life is important for taking stock of life and seeing what matters most, you know, are there relationships we want to strengthen because something that people in this later age bracket tend to be more of aware of is the proximity of death, which it's proximal for all of us. Right. But because they usually have friends passing or family members passing or are reckoning with their own health, it's more present.
And the presence of that is going to make someone look at how do I want to be spending my time? So useless drama is going to go. You know, we really just want to look at purpose, meaning and the folks who matter most. Which I think is again a lesson that younger folks can take from older
[00:55:01] Speaker B: adults because they're closer to death.
[00:55:04] Speaker A: They might have insight on what actually
[00:55:05] Speaker B: matters in life, what has changed, if
[00:55:08] Speaker A: anything, in how this generation handles the final stages of life. And what I mean by this generation is the folks who would now be 65 plus, so we're looking at baby boomers.
[00:55:25] Speaker C: I think this generation is more active, I guess, than other generations before them.
You know, they're working longer, they're staying more involved and getting out and doing things maybe than like prior generations.
I think something, I guess that I was thinking about that has, that has changed in how they handle this stage of life or the final stages of life is that they're willing to talk about it more and about everything more. So like you just said a little bit about like death and dying and the proximity of death and things like that.
I think in prior generations and even probably in the older adult generation still a little bit, everything was kind of hush hush. You know, they were kind of expected to just keep things to their self, not talk about their feelings or again, like death and dying or even prepare for any of that. But I think, you know, that's kind of changed now. People are realizing that it's okay to talk about their feelings, ask for help, and it's also okay to kind of, you know, talk about some of those things like death and dying. That might be a little bit scary to talk about or uncomfortable to talk about. But I really think that's probably the biggest change that I've seen. People are talking more about their feelings and just being more willing to open up about, I guess, everything really.
[00:56:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I see that as well. And I think sometimes that can take us younger folks by surprise because we say we want our older loved ones to open up about what's real to them. Well, what's real to them is the proximity of death. And maybe we don't want to talk about that. I remember one day my mom just turned to me and said, just so you know, I'm at peace with death and this was like a Wednesday afternoon out of the blue, and I was feeling very not ready to talk about it. And I have since recalibrated myself and become more comfortable and open talking about it. And I thought about it, and I was like, of course she wants to talk about this. It's proximal.
I'm going to talk about what's proximal in my life. Right. And she should have a space to talk about what's real and proximal for her.
Death being a taboo subject in our society makes that a little tough. But I think we owe it to ourselves and for our older loved ones to sit with them in it and be there with them as they're figuring out what this looks like for them.
So, you know, we're all. If we're lucky, you know, we're gonna age.
So what are some things we can do to set ourselves up for aging well?
[00:58:15] Speaker C: So I think aging well, it starts with taking care of ourselves throughout our life.
I think we should obviously focus on our physical health. But I think when we're younger, at least for me, sometimes it's very easy to just keep going, you know, and not pay attention to our physical health. We can put off some of those medical appointments, ignore some of those things that are bothering us, and just kind of deal with it later. But I think we should probably deal with those things now when we can. So it doesn't affect us as much when we're older.
Also, I think to set ourselves up to age well, it's taking care of our mental health, obviously, that's really important, too.
There's going to be a lot of changes and losses as we get older. But if we have learned how to talk about our feelings and manage stress, just kind of cope with some of those things when we're younger and ask, like, learn how to ask for help, it can help us, you know, age better and help us to deal with aging in general when we get there.
I think, again, kind of a random one, but having relationships, you know, and taking time to focus on those things, because when we get older, sometimes that's. That's kind of what we're left with. That's like the last thing that we have. And again, I think we're just. Our generation is so busy and just running and doing things all the time, and we forget sometimes about those things that are important. So I guess it's a little different than, like, focusing on our health. But I think that piece is important, too. And I think, you know, if I was thinking, too, about what older adults would kind of tell us, you know, about what would help us to age well, it would definitely be taking care of ourselves, staying connected to people.
But I think too just like slowing down, you know, like you mentioned about technology and things and things earlier. And I think we're not always living in the present. We're always multitasking. We're always running places and doing things a lot in, in this generation. And I've actually, I think had older adults say that to me, you know, slow down, take your time, just focus on what's important and focus on the present a little bit more.
[01:00:42] Speaker A: Something that my great aunt would tell me is that she's living in the present moment because she's not sure how much time she has left. That's true for her, but it's also
[01:00:53] Speaker B: true for all of us.
[01:00:55] Speaker A: It's just that it's more obvious for her. As you were talking about these things that are so important for aging. Taking care of our bodies, our minds, but also our spirit, spirits and our relationships. I'm thinking about how grieving well is in there and how you don't have to wait until you are an older adult to learn how to do this. Because each stage of the lifespan we have something to grieve, we have change, we have shifts in our identity, we have losses.
So I think older adults in our life can really help us learn that important skill. Is there anything else you'd want to add before we close up?
[01:01:39] Speaker C: I just think it's super important for people to reach out to older people and like I said earlier, just kind of listen to them, be there for them because they're not always going to ask for help because again, they kind of learned we should be independent, we should be able to do things by ourselves, that kind of thing. But it's super important to kind of remember to check in on them and be a part of their life.
Yeah. And I'm just so thankful that I get to be a part of a lot of older adults life, lives, excuse me. And that, that's kind of become my specialty.
[01:02:15] Speaker A: I have some friends who work in nursing homes and something they are always saying is please visit the older folks you care about. It makes such a difference.
Or you know, call, show that you're there, all of that stuff.
Okay, well, thank you for your time. This was a great conversation.
