There are at least two groups of people who, in my acquaintance, have been particularly blunt with regards to talking about issues of their extrusion of bodily matter. One of those groups of people, perhaps surprisingly, has been women, which we will discuss separately and relatively shortly. The second group, which will be the subject of this discussion, is elderly people. It is perhaps unsurprising that elderly people would be particularly interested in regularly talking about their poop for several reasons. For one, elderly people know that their time on this planet is limited, and one of the most obvious ways to know that one’s body is still working relatively well is to examine the flow of their food. A good morning poop that leaves the intestines clear and leaves one feeling good can be the start to a very good day, and this is especially true when one’s health is in a gradual state of decline and any evidence of the body’s systems working well is to be celebrated. To this reason, we may add other reasons why it is that elderly people are so free to talk about poop, one of them being the way that like children their brain’s operation tends to lead to a declining filter and a growing willingness to express truth that is suppressed during one’s peak years of life from adolescence to middle age. During old age, one does not have the time and energy to restrain what one wants to express, and if the elderly are not always accurate in their judgments (quite the opposite in many cases), they feel free to express themselves at any rate. It is perhaps unsurprising that the desire to see greater flow when it comes to defecation also occurs when one thinks of defecation of the mouth. The two processes are interconnected.
It is deeply interesting to note that the elderly often take somewhat dramatic steps to ensure that their bowel movements will be somewhat regular. The declining normal function of the bowels and the loss of taste buds with age often leaves many elderly people particularly fond of extremely spicy food. This has the effect of stimulating the few taste buds that are available to separate an ordinary elderly person who wants to find some joy in eating from someone assumed to have Covid-19 as a result of the lack of taste of food in one’s diet. Similarly, the same spicy foods, often pepper or some variety of peppers, that make food spicy enough for old people to find some enjoyment in eating often spur the bowels to work harder to process food and eliminate it rather than letting it remain stuck inside the bowels. This too appears to be a matter of trying to rig a system that is not working as well as it used in order to do what one wants it to. Many of us who are at least in our middle age or younger find ourselves having no trouble eliminating foods and find spicy foods to exercise the bowels too much, but when one’s intestines are not working very well, a bit of a spur to working harder can be the difference between painful constipation and what feels like a good elimination, at any rate.
In many ways, the situation with the elderly and poop is precisely the opposite of what we find with infants and small children. Just as we find both babies as well as old people to be interested in poop and sensitive to how the body eliminates food, and just as we also find babies and old people to prefer open expression without a filter to the burden of more precise and well-targeted communication that is the aim of people “in the middle” of life, we find several other relevant similarities between babies and elderly that reflect their position on either side of a spectrum that nevertheless shows those on both ends to be closer to each other than those in the middle. Birth and death are both messy affairs. We will discuss this in more detail very shortly, but it is important to note that both birth and death are often awkward and unpleasant and involve the body’s workings in a particularly messy way. Similarly, babies and old people frequently find themselves to be respected and honored to the extent that human beings are valued more than human doing. Neither babies nor old people can do very much as far as physical activity is involved, and all too frequently mental limitations are present at both the beginning and end of life as well when it comes to communication. However, while babies find themselves working hard underneath the surface building the connections and capabilities that will serve them over life, we tend to find that the vacant expression characteristic of sundowning elderly people struggling with memory loss and mental impairment is a sign of the loss of mental capabilities that cannot be replaced under heaven.
In bygone ages, people often sought a good death. The search for a good death is one that divides many cultures, based on what it entails. There is no widespread societal agreement as to what a good death involves. Most of us, if we are asked, would probably prefer a sudden and painless death “in our sleep” to a lingering and painful decline that destroys us in body and mind. It is perhaps unsurprising that our societal desire to avoid pain and difficulty creates end-of-life problems just as it creates beginning-of-life problems in the struggle over the rights and protection that are due to unborn children. As is the case with the fight over beginning-of-life issues, there are certainly ulterior motives that often lead people to terminate life at its end just as they seek to do so often at its beginning. Taking care of people in their decline is often unpleasant, painful, and expensive. There are kind souls who seek to comfort those who are in decline and to provide an ending of life that is gentle and comfortable, but there are many people who seek to reduce the expensive and difficulty of caring for people at the end of life and who see no value in prolonging a life that has become inconvenient and unpleasant, as well as expensive.
Yet the beginning and ends of life, thanks to their similarities, remind us of the cyclical nature of life. The Bible says that from dust we are born and to dust we return, but it may also be said that we are both born and end our lives in a great deal of poopiness. Throughout our lives, we must eat to survive, and what we take in as nourishment to fill our bellies and provide our brains and bodies with the energy needed to accomplish life’s tasks involves the death of others. To be sure, in the contemporary world we often seek to distance ourselves from an intimate knowledge of what must die so that we may live. People frequently wish to be unburdened by the reality of what life requires for its maintenance, so that we can live blissfully unaware of the messiness of physical existence. Yet when we die, this process is reversed, and unless we are hermetically sealed in a state where our physical decay is prevented through chemical means, we tend to find that just as we ate thanks to the death of others, so too other beings live off of our death. We feast during our lives and become a feast in our demise, as our flesh and organs are devoured and our bones decay so that others may be nourished by what we provide to the earth that takes us in once our time in this life is done. If we have lived well, our existence may serve to make the world a better place, and our physical decay may also enrich the lives of others as well. Not everyone is so fortunate, alas.
