Month: August 2022

Young to Old – Do People Really Change?

It is a perennial question:  Do people ever really change?  The other night we watched Odd Couple II, a good but inferior sequel (1998) to the original movie (1968) based on the wonderful play by Neil Simon.  Neil Simon also wrote the movie versions.  The whole basis of the sequel is, of course, that Felix and Oscar have not changed over all these years.  They have made small adjustments to life, and life has had to make large adjustments to them. This all makes for good comedy.  But, of course, this is just a movie.  Do real people ever change? Are old people different from their younger selves?

People do make major changes in their exterior life.  They change careers, spouses, location.  They give up drinking, take up religion.  But do they really change?  We have all seen many dry drunks and unmerciful Christians.  Is there an age after which our personality loses much of its plasticity?  Everyone has friends who married people hoping to change them – often with disastrous results.  Change is not easy. 

If you have occasion to meet someone after many years (think of class reunions), you might converse with them as if it were yesterday, and remark – as if it were a compliment – that they “haven’t changed a bit.”  High school reunions are full of women who still act like beauty queens long after their looks are gone, and former athletes who have dropped the habit of exercise but retained the bravado of the football field.

Novels have been written about characters who only appear to change.  In Hardy’s Mayor of Casterbridge, the mayor starts out bad, appears to reform, and ends up in the despicable state in which he started.  Shakespeare’s characters seldom change – Iago is Iago until the end, regardless of the consequences.  In Marilynne Robinson’s Gideon novels, the character Jack is a winsome man who makes other people suffer.  Such he is as a child and such he is until the end.  Jack is sorry sometimes, but he does not change.

There is some literature in which characters change – there is even a word for such characters in writer’s jargon.  They are called dynamic.  Some examples might be Pip in Dickens’ Great Expectations or Eliot’s Silas Marner.  We like these stories (or the Hallmark versions of them) because we want to believe that people can change, that we ourselves can change.

I have often thought that in old age certain characteristics refine and crystallize themselves.  A frugal man becomes a tyrant over the purse strings and won’t permit so much as a tablespoon of mayonnaise to be wasted.  A woman who has spent most of her life worrying about how she looks, indulges in plastic surgery and spa treatments as the sags.  Worried young people become fretful elders.  I have a number of friends I have known since they were young; few have changed much and for that I am mostly grateful.

The brain is an amazing instrument.  In it are trapped all we have learned, all the tracks of our habits, and all the memories of the pleasant and painful.  If you have loved anyone with dementia, you know that the brain can change, personality can change – all without the consent of the individual.  AA says that sometimes drunks have to hit bottom to change.  Saints often changed after some kind of mystical experience.  Near collisions with death have known to be effective. But how much change can we control?  Interesting question.

I’ve written many stories about change, including a series modeled after the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which people literally change into other beings based on their just desserts in the minds of the gods.  The introduction to those stories is here; an example is my tale “What Crime is There in Error.”   Most of my stories, though, do not assume that the people change; characters often have realizations about themselves and others, but there are no miraculous conversions on the road to Damascus – or the road to old age. 

The Dagwood Generation

I was recently at a social event with other women in their seventies, and I realized that almost all of us had at least one parent, stepparent, or parent-in-law still living.  We talked about our children and grandchildren, but we spent more time talking about the sometimes difficult and often hilarious process of relating to and helping to care for our elders.  This is a relatively new problem.  When my parents and in-laws were in their seventies, their parents were already gone.  Years ago, they used to talk about the sandwich generation.  This term seems to have been coined in 1981 and referred to women between the ages of 35-54, who had young children and elderly parents (at that point elderly meaning over 60).  Now that sandwich generation has turned into a Dagwood concoction – with great-grandchildren, grandchildren, children, and parents all out there looking for love and support of various kinds.  And the stress is not all on the women.

This is all made more difficult by the fact that most often families are stretched out across the country or the world.  Dropping off a casserole once a week isn’t an option; neither is babysitting regularly so your married children can have a date night.  People of our generation can, and often do, move to be close to at least one other member of the family, but that still leaves others in far-flung places, others we try to keep in contact with, visit when we can, and for whom we feel both guilt and empathy.

And it is only going to get worse as life spans increase.  I have written previously about how much older grandmothers are now than they were a couple of generations ago (“The Age of Grandmothers”).  Our children waited to have their kids; in my seventies I have babies among my eight grandchildren.  What does this all do to the concept of family?  Who gets priority – the nonagenarian or the new mother?  And in such situations, can we even effectively measure need?

I recently read a novel by Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter. It is in the voice of an old woman, a Vollendungsroman about old age and the winding down of life.  She does go back and tell us the story of her life, but from the point of view of the old: “This is the story of my life, that while I lived it weighed upon me and pressed against me and filled all my senses to overflowing and now is like a dream dreamed.  So close to the end now….”

This excellent tale reminded me that some families have been more stable in location and attachments than our generation is.  Hannah Coulter lives in the Kentucky farmhouse where she raised her family, next door to her in-laws and her husband’s uncle.  The sadness of her life is that none of her three children stayed on the farm, and there is a touching scene in which the last son tells his father, Nathan, that he is going to graduate school:

There was nothing more to say, Caleb didn’t need a graduate degree to be a farmer, and Nathan did not say anything.  He went on eating.  He had his work to do, and he needed to get back to it.  Tears filled his eyes and overflowed and ran down.  I don’t think he noticed he was crying.

 The book’s provisional happy ending comes when a black sheep of a grandson returns to the family home to try farming.  I don’t know what the author thought, but the reader is far from sure that the situation will turn out well.

Of course, there was no expectation that our children would stay close.  We educated them, hoped they would become adequately and gainfully employed, and spend at least some holidays with us.  Common wisdom among many oldsters is that it almost never works to move to be close to your children.  They may ignore you; they may move themselves.  But I wonder sometimes.  I love my privacy; I was never much of a baby person.  But as I spend my time among the old, I wonder what we have lost.  Hannah Coulter is sure that she has lost much, but that her children have lost even more.  I am not sure.  There is no way to be sure.

This week’s story is a fairy tale for old folks: “Tale of Two Grannies.”  These grandmothers live in an enchanted village where the children and grandchildren never move far away, but their experiences are not the same.