A Life Worth Living: Suffering, Aging, and the Legacy We Leave

If you counsel, care for, or minister to older adults, you have heard it. “I’m just a burden now.” “My kids would be better off without me.” “What’s the point anymore?” These words are hard to hear, and harder to answer well.

In this short, clear teaching, psychologist Paul C. Vitz, Ph.D. offers a different way to see the last years of life. Pain is real, he says, and sometimes all a person can do is grin and bear it. But the way we carry our burdens, with courage, with patience, with gratitude for a grandchild’s drawing or a toast with old friends, is one of the most lasting gifts we leave. He tells the story of a grandparent with one year to live and a four-year-old for whom that year is a fifth of their whole life.

Dr. Vitz also takes on a phrase you will hear more often: “a life not worth living.” He traces it to its history in Nazi Germany and shows why counselors should be careful whenever anyone decides that another person’s life has lost its worth. He closes with a hopeful claim you can bring to families and caregivers: suffering can have meaning, both for the person who suffers and for those who learn to give by caring for them.

The lesson pairs the teaching with DMU scholarship: the Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, Titus and Vitz on resilience, and research on meaning, gratitude, and courage as protective factors. Two further readings, one psychological and one spiritual, go deeper, drawing on Adrienne von Speyr, C. S. Lewis, and Fulton Sheen.