When you talk to Erica Sender about aging, you notice that she does not use the euphemisms that most people use. She does not say "golden years" or "senior moments" or any of the other phrases that are meant to soften what people fear. She talks about aging the way you might talk about breathing or walking, as something that is simply happening, all the time, to everyone. "We do not start aging at 65 or 75," she says. "We are all aging every day." This sounds obvious when you hear it, but most people do not live as though it were true.
Sender came to gerontology through feeling rather than logic. She had always been drawn to older adults in a way she could not entirely explain. It was not pity and it was not fascination with the macabre. It was something else, something more like recognition. When she took an introductory gerontology course as an undergraduate, the feeling acquired a framework. The course taught her to think about aging through what is called a bio-psycho-social lens, which means understanding a person as a body, a mind, and a participant in systems all at once. This was the kind of complexity that matched what she had sensed intuitively. She decided to pursue a master's degree in the field. What had begun as curiosity became commitment.
Her first job was as a case manager for older adults, which meant that she helped people navigate systems that were not designed to be navigated. One of her early clients was a man with terminal cancer who was about to lose his rented room in a shared apartment. He was dying and he was about to become homeless. Sender worked with him to secure housing in a senior building through the City. It was not a large intervention in the sense that doctors or policymakers might measure interventions. He did not get more time to live. But he got a place to die that was his own. "I was just one piece of a larger puzzle of support," Sender says, "but ensuring someone had a roof over their head at the end of life was profoundly meaningful to me." She understood that dignity at the end of life could mean something as simple as a door that locked from the inside.
What Sender learned from cases like this was not just that older adults needed help, which was obvious, but that the help they needed exposed something broken in how society thinks about age. Most people, she realized, treat aging as though it were optional, or at least postponable. The anti-aging industry exists because people believe, on some level, that aging is something that happens to other people, later. But aging is not later. Aging is now. "If we are not aging, we are dead," she says. This is not meant to be morbid. It is meant to be clarifying.
Sender thinks that there is an opportunity in this clarification, if people can bear to look at it directly. "There is an opportunity to make aging something that is celebrated and approached with dignity," she says. But seizing this opportunity requires what she calls facing aging head-on, which means rejecting the language of anti-aging and the shame that comes with it. "Everyone who lives long enough will become an older adult," she points out. "We have a chance to help shape what that experience looks like." Shaping it, though, will require more than individual goodwill. It will require policymakers and helping professionals and many others working together to change not just services but perception.
When you ask Sender what a gerontologist is, she does not give you a dictionary definition. She says, "To me, a gerontologist is a helping professional who sees more than what is immediately visible." What she means is that a gerontologist sees time in a different way than most people do. Most people see an older adult and they see only the present, which is often a present of limitation or decline. A gerontologist sees the life course that brought that person to this moment. They see the accumulated experiences, the roles that person has played, the knowledge they have gained. "We celebrate their wisdom, honor their experiences, and approach their care with respect and curiosity rather than assumptions," she says. This way of seeing is not automatic. It requires training yourself to resist the cultural instinct to look away from age, or to see it only as loss.
The systems Sender works within are not designed to support this kind of seeing. Healthcare and social services operate on a model where the client is not the payor, which means that the person receiving care is not the person deciding what good care looks like. Reimbursement stays the same regardless of quality. Power is in the wrong hands. "From a systems perspective, I hope to see more power placed in the hands of patients and clients," Sender says. She also wants to see social workers and direct service professionals earn a living wage. Right now the people who provide care on the front lines are often struggling themselves, which means they cannot provide the kind of care they know people need. The system survives by underpaying the people who make it function.
But Sender is not fatalistic about this. She thinks the next generation has a chance to do something different. They will watch their own loved ones age. They will see the failures of the current system firsthand. "They can innovate, advocate, and demand dignity for all older adults, especially those who are most vulnerable," she says. She is excited about the range of fields where change is possible. Healthcare, law, social services, residential care, caregiving, technology, public health. "There are endless roles to be played," she says. "That breadth of opportunity is what makes this work so exciting."
What is striking when you talk to Sender is that she does not separate her professional insights from her moral convictions. She believes that how we treat older adults is a measure of who we are as a society, and right now we are failing that measure. But she also believes that failure is not inevitable. The man with terminal cancer who needed housing was just one person, and helping him was just one small act, but it was the kind of act that accumulates. Enough of those acts, supported by enough systemic change, could reshape what aging means in this country. Sender is working toward that reshaping, one case at a time, one policy conversation at a time, one student or colleague she influences at a time. She knows she will not see the full result in her lifetime. That is the nature of working on something as large as how a culture understands time. But she also knows that the work matters whether or not she sees its completion. The man in the senior building had a place to live out his final days. That was enough to keep going.
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