Ask Lola: What Is an Elder?

Question: What is an elder? 

Director/actor/theater entrepreneur Valerie Curtis-Newton posed this on her Facebook page last year, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Short answer: Someone with substantial life experience who is held accountable by community and holds community accountable.

Long answer: Once I reached my mid-60s, more and more people began referring to me as an elder. I didn’t feel particularly old, but I noticed there were certain expectations of me, and I wasn’t sure what to do with them. Just in time, I learned about Stephen Jenkinson’s Elderhood workshops being held in the South Sound. I’m a cult survivor, so naturally averse to workshops that promise to make me better. But this had no such promise, so, with some trepidation, I signed up before I could talk myself out of it. What I learned over that weekend changed my life focus. 

An elder isn’t someone who simply gets past a certain age. An elder is someone with a role to play in community. Jenkinson, a Canadian author and culture activist with a background in providing end-of-life counseling, talked about the role of the Elder in Indigenous cultures around the world and how far Western cultures have strayed from it. Most importantly, he tied the role of Elder to the liminal transition from childhood to what he calls “human being,” a stage of life where one recognizes the fleeting and artificial nature of the material world and recognizes their responsibility to community and nature.

He described childhood as a state of complete dependence and self-centeredness and named the many ways our Western cultures pursue self-satisfaction long past our childhood years: our incessant pursuit of youthfulness; our disdain for the signs of aging; our fear of the one constant in all of our lives: death. Then, he talked about the acceptance and role of death in most Indigenous cultures, and the relationship to rituals they create to signify the transition from childhood to human being. Recognizing the finite nature of our own lives and learning to absorb it, he posited, is the point when the critical life transformation takes place.

As Jenkinson described those rituals, their similarities became apparent. Time and again, young people were put in situations where they had to face actual danger, fear, and the real possibility of death. And in every instance, the responsibility to prepare them for the challenge, as well as design its parameters, fell to a person or group of people marked as elders. 

Those elders couldn’t be parents or family members, because parents had too much invested in the safety of their children and were unlikely to create a true test. In fact, Jenkinson explained, that was exactly where Western cultures failed. What may have once been traditional ceremonies have now become so-called coming-of-age parties with no risk but full of short-term rewards. Young people are not tested. Elders are not needed except, perhaps, as grandparents to lavish gifts on children who will never be required to grow up. 

Several outcomes result. Young people might create their own tests, which are not rooted in wisdom and have no connection to community. They may also create their own sense of community with short-term ideologies and no sense of long-term impacts.

Being an elder isn’t about giving advice or guidance but also includes pushing someone past their individualistic tendencies. Elders, therefore, are responsible and accountable to the community that calls them to serve. In some cultures, a young person can select the elder(s) who will design their test of transition. Those chosen become the ones who will hold that young person accountable to the community as well as the ones who will hold the community responsible for that person once their transformation to human being is complete. An elder has the responsibility of ensuring the community recognizes, adopts, respects, and celebrates the gift(s) being brought by the specific individual.

Someone can serve as an elder to one individual and not be an elder to another. The choice is left to the person who calls the elder to come into their life.

Jenkinson’s framework awoke a restlessness in me. It affirmed my discomfort with the perpetual adolescence of our culture and tapped into my rage at the aspirations of many to never grow up. From men who have never learned to tame their libido to women perpetually appeased by the next shiny thing, we are, and have long been, driven by a dominantly adolescent culture. While many Black and Brown communities have resisted the seduction or were kept restrained from it, I have watched it become aspirational for far too many of us. I watch adults in their 30s and 40s flail around looking for direction and purpose, never having faced themselves and learned their own true nature. 

I have been honored to be called into elderhood by some, and I take the responsibilities to them and to my communities very seriously. 

In writing this column, my South Seattle Emerald community is calling me to fulfill that responsibility: to provide informed guidance when asked; to challenge the community and the Emerald to find, support, and celebrate our gifts; to be open to being challenged. All in service to strengthening our ties to one another and to the nature that holds us in tension together.

So, here is your invitation: Ask Lola.

The South Seattle Emerald is committed to holding space for a variety of viewpoints within our community, with the understanding that differing perspectives do not negate mutual respect amongst community members.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the contributors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints of the Emerald or official policies of the Emerald.