Life Review Paper – C.W.

C.W. is a 72-year-old Caucasian male who lives with his wife in Port Arthur, Texas. He was born in Groves, Texas where he was the middle child of three children. He graduated from high-school but didn’t go to college instead he enlisted in the navy where he served for six years and after he got out of the service he became a pipe fitter for a few years then was a construction supervisor until he retired.

He had a very good childhood with few stresses and a lot of friends. He grew up worshipping the ground his father walked on but wasn’t so fond of his mother because she could be a little intolerant of things that he did as a child. They grew up in a very religious household and went to church every Sunday rain or shine. They were enrolled in catholic school until the seventh grade. As a child he had the mumps and measles but was never really sick until he became older, around forty-two, when he had to have a quadruple bypass surgery and eventually get a heart replacement.

He started working in the tenth grade of high school at a department store called “Barker’s” when it was first opening up. He was never very good at school and hated going to it because he said, “there were a lot of more fun things to do outside of school”. His family and home life were pleasant, and they had dinner every night as a family. They were allowed to go out and play with their friends until the sun went down and sometimes even later than that as they got older.

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When he got into adult hood, right at 18 he joined the service and was there until he was 24. When he got out he met his wife and married her less than a year later. He worked as a carpenter for a while when he got out of the service, then he became a pipe fitter for a long time after that. Lastly, he got a job as a construction supervisor where he worked at Texaco for a multitude of years and finally ended at Huntsman where he eventually retired. He has been married to his wife for almost 50 years. While he has been married to his wife the only time they ever argued was over money in their early years of marriage and the only times he ever had accidents was when he was drunk driving. He said he got a couple of DUI’s back in the 70’s but he never ran into another automobile only into stop signs or ditches. His father and brother both died at the age of 42 from coronary artery disease and he had his quadruple bypass surgery at 42 as well. They have not moved very much since being married. They moved into a small apartment when they first got married, then they rented to own a house, then they bought the house that they currently live in.

The purpose of performing this life assessment interview is to empower older adults and those facing end-of-life issues to find hope, value, and meaning in their lives. Therapists also use life review therapy to treat depression in older adults. And a doctor may use life review therapy to accompany other medical treatments, such as medications to reduce anxiety or depression. Life review therapy can promote improved self-esteem. People may not realize the significance of their accomplishments from raising children to being the first person in their family to earn a college degree. Looking back can help many people feel proud of what they have accomplished.

The difference between life review and remembering is that ordinary reminiscence often refers to a more informal, more so spontaneous process that can happen at anytime, anywhere. Ordinary remembering does not require any kind of analysis of past failure or need for reconciliation. The point of the life review is to give the older person a chance to confront those feelings in a healthy and therapeutic way to, in a sense, give them closure on how they have lived their lives. For example, me asking about if he had any brothers and sisters or who he thought he was most like in his family would be an example of ordinary remembering that he could have done with anyone anywhere at any time. But when I asked him what the biggest disappointment that he had in his life or how he thought he has made out in life better or worse than he would have expected. Those kinds of question require more serious thought and require more introspection and can at sometimes make them feel uncomfortable talking about those hard to talk about subjects.

Erick Erikson examined aging as a collective of 8 stages. inability to achieve these stages results in inadequate development of the human personality and inhibits further development of the personality. The final of these stages is called “integrity vs. despair”. This stage is described by the person developing a sense of life and death for example through the loss of a loved one or a realization that the individual is mortal and will eventually die. Regardless of how the subject comes to the realization of his mortality, this realization preludes the final life stage. This means that he or she will review their life and career to decide whether or not they see it as a success or failure. With my particular subject being interviewed, from what I gathered, I would say he has reached a level of 9/10 in fully reaching ego integrity.

I came to this conclusion because when I was interviewing him and I asked him how he thinks he did in life either better or worse he responded with “Oh I am way better than I had hoped for. I didn’t think I would live as long or make as much money and I didn’t think we would be married as long as we have”. Also, I asked him what he fears will happen to him as he grows older and he responded with “I don’t worry about anything that will happen to me life is only borrowed. When I get to where I can’t do for myself that will be terrible. I don’t want Johnny to have to do more than she needs to for me. At some point your body starts turning on you and shutting down”. This showed me that he was accepting that he will eventually die and that he has lived a life that he feels he did a good job with what he was given and didn’t have many regrets if any.

This interview was very enlightening for not only me but for my subject as well. Up until this point he had not really tried reflecting on how his life has turned out because he felt that he wasn’t old enough to start thinking about death just yet. Further elaborating on death, when I asked him how he felt about the interview after we had finished he said that he didn’t particularly enjoy it because there were some hard questions that he hadn’t had to think about in a long time like him losing both his father and his brother as well as the drinking and driving both being particularly unpleasant parts of his life. The most significant part of this interview was when I asked him his fears he had for getting older. He had the perfect answer or at least what I hope my answer will be when I am his age which was that he had done what he had set out to do and more, that he loved his wife dearly, and that he got to see his kids do better and have more than he did when he was growing up.

He no longer needs to worry about things and he can just focus on doing what he loves and spending time with his wife for however long they may have left together. This interview kind of proved what I had already assumed which is that older adults have so much wisdom to offer we just have to take the time to listen and we can learn so much from doing so. It shows that we need to put more emphasis on treating elderly people more like a treasure rather than a burden. With getting older, there comes a point where you will have to look back on what you have done with your life. This includes what you did for yourself, but more importantly it involves looking back and seeing what differences you made to the people around you. It is just as important to judge yourself based on what you accomplished in life as it is to judge yourself based on how you impacted others too. A person’s legacy is a complicated multifaceted construct that is not only established through personal achievements but collectively what they did to make the world a better place

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