Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
This is the last paragraph of the first chapter:
Freud taught our generation the importance of parental love. We know that parental love is formative, but no one has taught us about the importance of grandparental love. Especially as we get older, the bonding and nurturing go both ways. Connections help our children, our parents, and us, now and in the future. Only by caring for our parents will we be able to ask our children for help later. And only because of our children’s love of the old will they be able to say yes.
The other night, my husband David and I stopped at the local big-name bookstore for a browse. I was intent on finding books about the topic of eldercare – in other words, I was taking the typically Boomerish tactic of consulting a how-to book. Reading the frickin’ manual, in other words, might help me figure out Life, the Universe, and Everything.
I went up and down the aisles, looking for books that I vaguely knew must be there. Nope, not in Self-Help. Not in Relationships. Not in Psychology. Not in the Various Diseases for Dummies section, either, not that many people consider old age a disease, exactly. Glanced at the Health section, but that mostly looked like “how to stay healthy” books. After a third pass, I finally spotted the small subsection within Health (surprisingly small, I thought) that pertained to my subject of interest.
I picked up Another Country and recognized it as one of those books on my “I’d like to read that, but I’ll wait until it comes out in paperback” list. The author, Dr. Mary Pipher, also wrote Reviving Ophelia some years back, parts of which I’d read when I was hanging out in a Seattle bookstore. The latter book is about the problem of why adolescent girls in this country go from being confident, carefree children to self-doubting, depressed, image-obsessed young women when they reach puberty. I remember then that I was trying to make sense of my own adolescence, which wasn’t great and not the stuff of happy memories for the most part. Now I’m more interested in somebody else’s major life stage, and the difficulty of talking about it. Which is probably much more healthy and worthwhile.
Pipher is a psychologist whose work with her clients has resulted in several major books about relationships, life stages, and family connections. I’ve only read 2 or 3 chapters thus far in Another Country, and already I’ve found a lot of helpful insights. She uses a lot of clients’ stories to illustrate how they see things, and how the people in their lives relate to them and try to help them cope with the difficult transition to old age.
Actually, the concept I’ve found most illuminating is the distinction she makes between people she calls “young-old” and the folks she calls “old-old.” The young-old are those lucky elders who are still healthy and vigorous, but they have the time and resources to travel as much as they like, or to volunteer, or to pick up and move to a nice retirement community in a warm state. But then the inevitable transistion from young- to old- looms, and the young-old find that something can happen to make them old-old pretty damn quick, like a broken hip, or the loss of a spouse that carried most of the load.
Another idea from the book that’s making the light bulb go on is the idea of how important connectedness is to people – even more so to the people of the generation now in its 80’s and 90’s. They grew up at a time before television, air conditioning, and electric garage-door openers served to isolate neighbors from each other. They grew up at a time when entire extended families – grandparents, adult children, grandchildren, and cousins lived within a few miles of each other, or even within walking distance. People grew up in a comforting network of interlocking family ties, with memories of holiday dinners gathered around the table, and they were in and out of each others’ houses and visiting over at the neighbors’ houses. Children spent all their time wandering the neighborhoods, making their own empires and shifting alliances of “kids from our street” against the kids from a couple of blocks away (but not in the gang-turf sense). I used to think a lot about how different my own childhood was from that of kids today (and my own lack of interest in kids doesn’t prevent me from feeling sorry for them, with their over-scheduled, over-protected lives).
So far, the book makes a persuasive case for the importance of connections between the very old and the very young – and that the lack of these connections leads to a variety of social ills. I think there might be something in this, but have yet to finish the book to find out more. The examples used in the book are case studies that are compilations of real people’s stories, in order to protect their privacy.
In my own life, I had a distinct lack of grandparents. Although I’ve heard stories about them all my life, the big age difference between me and my older sisters meant that all the grandparents were gone, or nearly gone, the day I was born. I remember asking my dad on a family car trip where all the grandparents were, because I’d recently become aware that the other kids in the neighborhood we lived in in Albuquerque had grandmas and grandpas, and I wanted some, too. Thus Pop had to explain about how my his parents were in “heaven,” which sounded very nice, except you couldn’t call there on a telephone. I remember thinking this seemed like a very old-fashioned place to live if there wasn’t even a phone. My maternal grandmother died soon after I was born, or just before (can’t remember which) but I think Mom told me that her mom knew I was on the way, at least. I do have very, very faint memories of an older couple called the Sodes who looked after me when I was very, very small. I called them Mr Grandpa Sode, and Mrs. Grandpa Sode. They lived in a big old house with an old-fashioned yard out back, and there were funny old toys that belonged to their own grandchildren that I got to play with. The rooms inside included an old parlour with a foot-pedal organ that seemed to spark a memory, and a bathroom upstairs had a huge old Victorian bathtub with big lions’ feet. I can’t remember for sure, but I think the Sodes lived in Grand Junction, which meant that I would have known them when I was about… 2? 3? They were neighbors, and when I was a baby Mom still owned the hair salon, and she would leave me with them. We went back to Grand Junction often enough for visits, though, that I might have seen them every year, so that I might be remembering long-ago visits, rather than remembering thing that happened to me before I was walking and talking.
There were some older great-uncles that I remember meeting, and I had a pair of elderly aunts (Mom was the baby of her family, along with her older brother). That was about it for family connections with the aged. As for neighbors, though, we had quite a collection to choose from. We spent a lot of time with an older neighbor lady who lived across the street for years, Mrs. Boyce. She was a kind thing, but the sort of older lady who never learned how to drive, never learned how to handle money, never worked outside of the home. Which, of course, did not prepare her at all for widowhood; she was also a diabetic and was losing her sight, so we took it upon ourselves to visit with her, and take her out with us for big-time jaunts to the burger joint and to the store. We often used to set up aluminum lawn chairs and sit on Mrs. Boyce’s tiny concrete stoop, which was surrounded by wrought-iron railings. Her house and my mom’s house date from that post-war era when large, comfortably shaded porches were thought to be old-fashioned; Mom’s porch is little more than a large bare square of cement, with one step down to the driveway. Mrs. Boyce’s porch was a bit larger, but still crowded if there were two chairs on it. However, this didn’t stop us from gathering there and visiting with her in the cool of the evening (neither of our houses were air-conditioned). One happy, hilarious evening, one of my nieces somehow got her head stuck in between the railings and was left standing there like a convict, with her head on the wrong side of the iron bars from her body. We laughed ourselves into hysteria trying to figure out how she’d gotten her head stuck. It took a while, but eventually we realized she was small enough to slip her entire body through, but her head was too big and stuck like a cork. This is no doubt a painful memory for her… I shall accept tributes and bribes at my usual mailing address. Anyway, we enjoyed spending time with Mrs. Boyce and tried our best to help her become more independent and self-reliant, qualities that my mom always had in abundance that Mrs. Boyce had in any great degree. Later on, her daughter-in-law was one of my favorite teachers in junior high, another connection that I remember enjoying a lot.
After Mrs. Boyce died and I moved away from Salt Lake, Mom and I would still have conversations about her immediate neighbors – who was still there, who had died, who had moved in to take their place. She told me just today that the little girl who moved in to Mrs. Boyce’s old house all those years ago recently returned for a visit, all grown up and with a child of her own. As you might think, she made a point of stopping at Mom’s house to see if the kind, funny old neighbor lady was still there, and introducing her to her child.
Contrast that with my own neighborhood: I know the names of a couple of the neighbor dogs, but have to introduce myself to the neighbors because I see them so seldom – usually about once a year or less. In spite of, or perhaps because of my childhood spent exploring other people’s yards in an area two blocks on either side of my mom’s house, plus all the yards along either of my two possible routes to school, I speak pretty sharply to kids who wander into my yard uninvited. For one thing, we don’t have anything of interest – no good trees for climbing, no interesting rock gardens with ponds, no droopy honeysuckle bushes to sit near. Only last night some kid was riding a bike down the sidewalk as I returned from a night event at 9 o’clock, when it was fully dark. He rode up onto my driveway as I was about to turn, so I stopped until he was well clear. He wasn’t wearing reflective tape and didn’t have a light, and he wobbled off toward the corner. As I pulled into the driveway, he turned around, and rode back right over my lawn. I had the presence of mind to roll the window down and call out “Do you mind? Please don’t ride your bike over my lawn.” All I got was a sheepish “sorry,” from him. He was barely visible in the dark. I called out, “Well, ride safely – you need a light.” And then I pulled into the garage and lowered the door – that was my first neighborly encounter in… several months, I think. I occasionally talk to the people next door, because they have a lovely big old golden retriever. And there’s a new family across the street that seems friendly. Perhaps if we’d gotten a dog instead of a cat we might meet more neighbors – but we had already decided that a dog was harder to leave alone all day with our hours, even if crate-trained.
I don’t have a lot of other “connections,” other than David’s family; most of my friends from college are scattered all over, and I’ve lost contact with quite a few people because of moves. My connection-less, socially isolated life probably mystifies David’s parents no end, because they have a large circle of friends and are often scheduled months in advance. That’s another example of a generational difference of experience when it comes to connecting with people over the length of your adult life, I guess. I do have some ties to the people at Holy Moly – I’ll see them again tonight as I have seen them several nights this Holy Week (tonight is the Great Vigil, our big celebration of Easter, so I’ll be there until fairly late).
One thing I’ve noticed, that I’d love to photograph, is the relationship between one of the oldest parishioners, and one of the youngest. Billie is about my mom’s age, lively, feisty, with white hair and paper-thin, translucent fair skin, and she’s also fiercely independent. She still drives, but is a bit wobbly when she walks. I gave her an arm last night as we made our way down the steps of St Columba’s after the Good Friday service. Joshua is about 7, thin, quiet, sensitive, loves serving as a junior acolyte, and he has black, close-cropped hair and skin like coffee with cream. The thing about Billie and Joshua is that they love each other so much, that when Billie arrives, Joshua lights up and goes over to get her. He likes to sit next to her and lean his head on her shoulder. It’s such a beautiful thing, and of course impossible to photograph.
I’m going to try to get to know some of the older members of Holy Moly better, if only because it’s good practice for learning the language of another country. A second (or third) language is always handy to avoid miscommunication.