Book Review: La Riqueza de los Annos

Title: La Riqueza de los Annos 

Author: Johann Christoph Arnold

Translator: Juan Segarra Palmer

Date: 2014 (English), 2016 (Spanish)

Publisher: Plough

ISBN: 978-0-87486-576-9 (PDF Spanish edition)

Length: 177 e-pages including promotional front and back matter

Quote: "Espero que las historias en este libro les animen a seguir adelante."

Old age, as Art Linkletter was not the first to say, is not for wimps. It generally happens to tough and resolute people. Still, even tough and resolute people can benefit from having made plans for what they are likely to need to be tough and resolute about. Hence this book, written by a great-grandfather, about the physical infirmities he and his friends had already coped with and how they were helping one another cope with the others, about bereavement, and about the fear of death itself. 

Yes, being a Christian is a great help with the fear of death. Yes, although the author and his religious community believe that God can choose to deal with people where and as they are, where and as God will, this book does contain a short passage of guidance for those who want to become Christians. 

This book narrates a pivotal time in the history of the author's religious community, the Bruderhof. As regular readers know by now, this is a growing Christian denomination, not merely a church-owned furniture factory. The group started with a single congregation in Germany, after a succession of reformist pastors had urged people toward a closer imitation of Christ and those people had decided they could not participate in wars. Hitler threw them out of Germany and their descendants, and many others attracted to their faith, have formed new Bruderhofs around the world. Members of the church live in self-supporting communes and take vows to allow reassignment to different communes, or new ones, where their abilities may be needed--or their disabilities cared for. Bruderhofs have particularly good records of finding ways for physically "less abled" people to be useful to their communes, working part-time in the group's business and caring for one another. The 2010s and 2020s are the years when the generation who really established the groups in the Americas and Australia are fading away, when it's of greatest importance that their message be handed down/ 

So in this book the great-grandparents, Johann Christoph and Verena Arnold, affirm that they want to spend their last days within their tradition, within their group. They share stories of other senior members of the group describing how gradually reduced responsibility, fellowship, faith, and prayer helped them survive illness and bereavement and prepare for death. 

Probably nobody under age 50 will really appreciate this book, although elders may try to share it with them. Even between ages 50 and 75...well, I received a copy of the book a year ago and it's taken me a while to sit down and read it. While enjoying middle age we don't particularly want to think about old age. Beyond trying to live like those of my elders who just carried on enjoying middle age into their nineties, I don't often think about old age--at least not in relation to myself or people I like. We jollywell intend to be "forty-five with [however many] years of experience" when our hearts stop in our sleep at some age over ninety. 

Yet, as Arnold observes, the great blessing that many people can in fact look forward to extending an active middle age beyond age ninety has not come without its perils. Some people aren't prepared to deal with the possibility that that blessing might not reach us. Some aren't even willing to cope with the reality that our loved ones may reach old age. 

Is there a baby-boomer who doesn't know someone, our age or older, who has callously abandoned a parent, sibling, even a spouse because "I can't deal with what person is going through"?  My husband's initial cancer scare and his older brother's diagnosis of Parkinson's Disease occurred around the same time, when they were about 55 and 70 years old. Both were married when they became ill. Both wives were still active and healthy, and both filed for divorce, saying callously "Maybe you can find someone who has time to stay home and look after you if you start looking now, before you're too old and sick." My husband did, and then his ex-wife had the gall to want to inherit his estate--and she had literally bankrupted him the year before she divorced him. 

How many baby-boomers have "ghosted" away from friends who've developed disabilities or chronic illnesses? Maybe in some cases our friends felt relieved. Maybe their only interest in us had to do with some job or some kind of sport, and when they have to give up the job or the sport, they're just as well pleased not to see us any more. Then again, maybe they actually thought more of us than that. Or maybe they didn't, but still, we might have been what they had in the way of friends. 

So we do need to think about old age, as something to help parents and then friends endure, and then as something that may happen to us. We need to accept that reading about, thinking about, and actually talking to, and working for, those who reach old age may help us if we reach it ourselves. Arnold was as good a guide as any, for those who may need to approach this kind of thought, warily, through a book. Still writing, still teaching, still the head of his clan and of their church, he had serious medical conditions and, as of 2014, had to reduce his work hours to half a day. 

I think most who read this book will agree that Arnold has succeeded in his intention of showing that old age is preferable to the alternative. A steady practice of love and loyalty, faith and courage, can even give old age a beauty and dignity of its own.

The posting of this review was delayed by a not entirely unexpected call to go out and help a slightly older friend--still with a project that wanted extra hands, thank God, and not with a disability. Somehow I suspect that Arnold, if still living, would have approved.