I’ve been reading about and researching the challenges of helping others and getting help as we age. I am 77 and my husband is 86. My original goal in this research was to write about getting help with exercise appropriate to our age, housing appropriate to our physical needs, and other relatively minor but important needs we have as we age. But that is not what this has turned out to be.
It has turned out to be about one generation helping or trying to help the older generation. My husband and I have lost both of our parents, mine within the last twenty years, my husband before I met him more than 20 years ago. When I started on this research, I assumed, as I said, that I would be presenting to an audience of my peers about our own challenges. However, a younger professional colleague wrote to me and suggested that the greatest challenge of older middle age (50–65+) is helping our parents through the last years of their lives. Further, one of the greatest challenges after 65 is allowing our children to help us age well.
Elizabeth Berg, one of my all time favorite novelists has just written a memoir about the difficulty of helping her parents in the last years of their lives called I’ll be Seeing You (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/books/review/elizabeth-berg-ill-be-seeing-you.html). It tells roughly the same story as the cartoonist Roz Chast’s 2014 memoir Can’t We Talk About Something More PLEASANT?, her own story of helping or trying to help her parents in their last years. Both women describe frustratingly hard conversations in which they offer advice and concrete assistance when age has moved their parents into dangerous territory (memory loss, physical frailty, driving incapacity and falls).
My second daughter (of three daughters) comes by our house to help my husband with exercise two or three times a week. My youngest daughter is not close, either geographically or emotionally. My step-daughter offers verbal support and trips to Costco. I’m surprised, as I do more research, that my oldest daughter (57), who lives in the midwest and works for a large university health system, has not suggested that we make more changes than we have. We downsized our housing five years ago. We’ve altered the way we travel as my husband can no longer walk more than a few blocks. We are near public transportation so we can get around relatively easily when we can no longer drive. We eat meat, but less than we used to, and vegetables, more than we used to. We see our local children (3) at least once a week and our grandchildren slightly less often. In a wild moment earlier this year we decided to go on a cruise. To that my oldest daughter asked, “Are you nuts?” We didn’t go.
Murray, my husband, took care of his two older sisters as they became frail. One moved from Los Angeles to the Bay Area and a nursing home 15 minutes from our house. The other stayed in her condominium in San Diego with round the clock care. I never had to try to manage my parents. My dad died at 74 of heart disease. My mother cared for him until the end. My mother died in 2012 at 92, with most of her brain cells intact. We were lucky.
My younger colleague suggests that we were extraordinarily lucky, that her contemporaries complain constantly about trying to help their parents, or aunts or close older friends, with only hostility on the part of the older adults as a result. We older adults are independent and want to remain so. We are stubborn and don’t want to be seen as needy. Many of us take risks we shouldn’t take. I, for one, hung my newly cleaned linen curtains over a nine foot bay window and did a backward somersault off of the ladder when my foot caught on the hem of a curtain panel. I hit my head, which, thank the universe, turns out to be harder than I thought. I know I should have waited until my daughter could help me, so I’m as guilty of this foolishness as anyone. I’ve also rejected grab bars in the shower (I was overruled), and a bannister on our front steps (again, overruled).
My colleague further suggested that we ask ourselves “What kind of role model can we be for aging well?” Thinking about this might include an imagined conversation a daughter or son would have with his or her peers, expressing frustration that all offers have been met with either “We don’t need that,” or “Can’t we talk about something more pleasant?” For the most part, I believe, our children want to protect us, want us to live as long as we can comfortably, and want to encourage us to have or get help before we desperately need it.
Ask yourself, “How can I be a role model to the next generation for healthy aging?”
