Category: Uncategorized

Addendum to “Old Parents and Prodigal Children”

After I wrote “Old Parents and Prodigal Children,” I recalled two other great portrayals of prodigal sons and older fathers in recent literature.  The first is the wonderful Atticus, by Ron Hansen.  Atticus, in his sixties, has an older son who is a successful politician.  And then he has Scott – who was recklessly driving the car that took his own mother’s life, who cannot seem to stay stable in body, mind, or place.  Whom Atticus loves deeply.  And who keeps coming home. Hansen parallels the Bible parable with a twentieth century family drama, even making real the phrase from Luke: “It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.”  Scott is indeed thought to be dead, he himself conspires in this cruel deception, and yet Atticus, when he finds out that his son still lives, rejoices and welcomes him back, he “rushes out to greet him.”  Again.  And the reader is fairly sure that this will not be the last time.

The other story of a prodigal son spans all of Marilynne Robinson’s books about Gilead, Iowa (Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack).  Jack is the always disappointing son of the town’s Presbyterian minister, named for and godson of Gilead’s Congregationalist minister, and an enigma and a challenge to all who know him.  As he is dying, Jack’s father tells his son, “So many times, over the years, I’ve tried not to love you so much.  I never got anywhere with it, but I tried…”  And therein lies the problem.  Real love is not easily undone.  There is a nobility in the parents of prodigals, but I just wish it was not so hard on them.

In an interview with the New Yorker in 2020, Marilynne Robinson explains how she sees the parable of the Prodigal Son.  “I believe the parable is about grace, not forgiveness… the father loves the son and embraces him right away, not after any kind of exchange or apology.  I don’t think that is forgiveness – that is grace.” 

And what is grace?  I have seen it defined as the opposite of karma – rather than getting what you deserve, you get an undeserved gift.  But it would seem that, at some point in life, grace might fall on the shoulders of the parent, as well as the child.  But, again, grace is not something we can earn, even though it is something we can bestow.

 

Old Parents and Prodigal Children

Perhaps the story of the Prodigal Son means something different when we are old.   Will we take our children back when they fail or falter?  How many times?  With or without their children in tow?  In the story of the prodigal son, we are left to think that everything ends up ok – except perhaps, for the resentment of the older and more responsible brother.  The story (from Luke 15) ends with the father telling his “good” son why he has killed the fatted calf for his wayward sibling:

 And he said to him, ‘Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  It was fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.

But in real life, this is seldom the end of it.  Does the prodigal son stay on the straight and narrow or does he wake his father coming in drunk every night?  Has he sired children that are looking for support?  If he runs away a second time, will he be taken in again? In “Death of the Hired Man,” Robert Frost said that: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /They have to take you in.”

How many times?  How many fatted calves? How much money?  How much heartache?  Surely, parenthood is a lifetime job, but we protected them when they were vulnerable – who is protecting the old couple who have frayed their nerves and spent their nest egg for the prodigal son or daughter who just keeps returning?  It is surely a question for our time.

Recently, I mentioned the story of the prodigal son to a parent who has had to exercise some tough love with an adult child, but seems to feel painfully guilty about it.  She pointed out to me that the father in the story represents God, not a typical parent.  Ah, I sighed, you are surely right.  But don’t we all see that gracious parent in Luke as the model of the endlessly forgiving parent?  Killing those fatted calves whenever there is a glimmer of light?

Because, here is the thing.  It is terribly difficult to renounce parenthood.  Harder than divorce, harder even than becoming estranged from your parents.  Your children can cut you out, but it is extremely difficult to cut them out – even when you have run out of energy and fatted calves.

There was a grand essay by Rebecca Solnit in Harpers entitled, “The Mother of All Questions.”  The question she poses is whether to have children.  (She has none.) And, of course, this is a weighty question, particularly in these days of economic distress and climate crisis.  But, when most of us made the decision to procreate (or neglected to make it and just let nature take its course), we were not possessed of our full maturity or even our right minds.

So here is the harder question: “Is it ever too late not to have children?”  To cut yourself off from your children?  Or, less extreme, is it ever too late to not make parenthood a primary identity?  Not to feel like we have to have the patience of the prodigal’s father, of Job, of God, in the face of the relentless demands of adult children?  It is not a question I have had to answer in any but the most minor ways, but I have watched the anguish that prodigal sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, can cause.

Here is another strange thing.  There are few novels, plays, or poems about good parents with bad children.  There is Balzac’s Pere Goriot, William March’s The Bad Seed, and a few other horror stories – however, novels and poems about bad parents abound. (Think of Philip Larkin’s wonderful “This Be the Verse.”)  Culture is on the side of the children.  While our offspring are children, that is the way it should be.  But what about when they are fifty and we are seventy?  There is no right answer to this question, but I find myself with great empathy for those who are asking it.

For a view of differing attitudes toward parents, you could try my story “Tale of Two Grannies” or look at “Snickerdoodles.”  Neither of these tales, however, depicts the extreme situations I am discussing.  It is probably no accident that most of the stories of “bad children” are tales of horror.  Again, I empathize and only hope it is never a situation I experience.

New Year’s Re-Solutions

Those of you who have been following me for the past six years, know that I have written many times about old age and the New Year – I recommend particularly “Baby New Year and Old Father Time” and “New Year’s Resolutions in Old Age.”  This blog – When I Come to Be Old –  is titled after a list of resolutions that Jonathan Swift wrote in 1699 when he was a young man; one of them, of course, is “Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people.”  So I will refrain from repeating my previous comments about the year becoming new as we continue to get old.

However, I did have some thoughts about New Year’s resolutions.  Every January, I fill a page of my journal with new resolutions.  I falter on some, but I keep many.  I haven’t missed a day of French on Duolingo since last January; I have read the books I promised myself to get to.  But even re-solutions kept are not solutions.  It is right in the word.  Resolutions are things we have to do over and over again, trying to find a way to make life better (or longer or more fun).  Maybe the most effective resolution is to come to a sense of peace with our life as it is.

I did write a new story for the new year, “Hallelujah, It’s a Mouse,” which is – in a way – about new beginnings.  Happy New Year to all.  I wish us all peace and solutions.

Looking Back on Childhood’s Eden

There is much debate in Buddhist circles (at least among the unenlightened) as to what enlightenment or nirvana would look like.  There is a similar debate in Christian circles about the nature of heaven.  Carl Jung had no doubt that it consists of going back to the childlike wonder we had about the world when we were very young, and Jung maintains that this is particularly important in our elder years.  “Proper development in the last part of your life is to rediscover the child you left behind when you commenced your apprenticeship.”

Who is the “child you left behind” before you embarked on your apprenticeship of fear and sophistication? How far back do your earliest memories go?  Psychologists used to say it was four or five years old, but now have pushed it back as early as two and a half.  Lots of us have what we think are very early memories, but turn out to just be recollections of experiences we were told about in our childhoods.  A more important question might be: what did your earliest memories consist of?  For most of us, the world of our childhood was full of bright colors and smells and fascinating experiences. While childhood is a world that fades, it is surely worth recalling.

Wordsworth famously struggled with this in his “Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:”

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

       The earth, and every common sight,

                          To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

            The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

                      Turn wheresoe’er I may,

By night or day.

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

Novelists too have tried to grasp what has been lost in the accumulations of time.  In the beginnings of both Great Expectations and David Copperfield, Dickens has his main characters struggle to recoup old memories:

This may be fancy, though I think the memory of most of us can go farther back into such times than many of us suppose; just as I believe the power of observation in numbers of very young children to be quite wonderful for its closeness and accuracy. Indeed, I think that most grown men who are remarkable in this respect, may with greater propriety be said not to have lost the faculty, than to have acquired it; the rather, as I generally observe such men to retain a certain freshness, and gentleness, and capacity of being pleased, which are also an inheritance they have preserved from their childhood. (from David Copperfield)

Then there is James Joyce at the beginning of Portrait of an Artist, talking about memories of “moo cows” and recalling his earliest sensations: “When you wet the bed, first it is warm then it is cold.”  Recently, I read Donal Ryan’s Queen of Dirt Island, which begins with the major character’s earliest memories, when “she was four…, or maybe just turned five.”  The memories then presented are technicolor scenes of grass and cherry blossoms.  Early memories are often magical in sight and sound.  The world was new to us.  In many ways, children are all Adams and Eves waking up to the delights of Eden.

And then there is a story in Sigrid Nunez’s new book, The Vulnerables, about a mother who started to act differently just before her totally unexpected death, in her premonitions acting in a childlike manner:

Whenever I [her daughter] came to visit, we usually took an afternoon walk, and that’s when I noticed something else…Mother kept stopping to point things out – Christmas lights on a neighbor’s house, clouds, squirrels scampering – as if she had never seen such things before.  It reminded me of going out with the kids when they were small and all the world, even the most ordinary things, made them gape. (31)

How wonderful to return to a world where everything can make us gape.  But how to do it?  We all, sometimes, want to return to our childhood Eden, but it is not easy.  James Baldwin puts it best in Giovanni’s Room:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden.  I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword.  Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it.  Either, or: it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both.

Jung says it is worth the effort to remember. He claims it is the way we were meant to live – not in childish ignorance, but in child-like wonder.  As Wordsworth goes on to say:

 Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;

                      We will grieve not, rather find

                      Strength in what remains behind…

It is there, this child-like wonder, in all of us.  It sometimes surfaces in dementia, sometimes a brain injury loosens the gears.  I knew a middle-aged physics professor who had a bad bicycle accident and suddenly began singing the Polish lullabies of his very early youth, before Hitler’s Nazis drove his family out of Europe.  But it is not entirely a matter of memories, I think.  It is a matter of attitude, of what stance we take in this world.  Or refuse to take.

My story, “Like Heaven,” is about an old woman conflating her childhood with her current situation.  Perhaps, in her case, childhood turns out to be the better place to be.

A Last Transitioning

I just returned from visiting a ninety-eight-year-old relative who, although she is weak and has been under hospice care for many months, has never spoken of her own death in my presence. She has never acknowledged her mortality in any way.  However, since the last time we were with her, she has learned a new word for what she feels she is going through: transitioning.  She affirmed quite emphatically that she was in the process of transitioning, that she would be transitioning soon.  There was never any discussion of what she would be transitioning to, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I guess transitioning seems less terminal, more transitive.  For whatever reason, it is a concept, a term, that she is comfortable with.

This terminology, however, made for some humorous conversations. I heard her, for instance, leave a phone message for a financial manager telling him that she wanted to talk to him because she would be “transitioning” soon.  In this day, when “transitioning” is usually used in a different context, it might make people who don’t know her well wonder if she is having a deathbed gender conversion.  But I don’t mean to make light of it; I am grateful that she has found a word to describe her experience, a word that she can be comfortable with.  And the end of life is surely an ongoing transition which must be borne, appreciated, accommodated.

Our culture has many euphemisms for death; Wikipedia can give you more than fifty.  Many have religious connotations: “going to heaven;” some are earthy: “kick the bucket;” some are transactional: “checking out.”  But we are loath to look at death directly.  Irvin Yalom, my favorite psychiatrist/author, wrote a book entitled Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.  The title comes from a quote from La Rochefoucauld: “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”   Yes, and despite the optimistic title of Yalom’s book and the advice he provides, facing our mortality never seems to get much easier.

Literature gives us many images of death, with deathbed scenes ranging from the horror of Tolstoy’s Ivan Illich to the sweet demise of Dicken’s Little Nell.  But, today, I am more interested in poetry, and no one can confront the truth like Philip Larkin.  He wrote an aubade, a poem about early morning hours in bed, in which he talks about lying in the dark facing “the dread of dying, and being dead,” thoughts which “hold and horrify.”  Aubades are usually romantic poems, about lovers having to leave each other at sunrise after a blissful night.  Larkin fixates only on his fear of having to, inevitably, leave life.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

I have known people who claimed they had no fear of death; I never believed them.  I know other people who say they are afraid of the process of dying, but not death itself.  I can almost believe them.  Clearly my skepticism is deeply colored by my own fear of annihilation.

There are other views of death in poetry.  Stevie Smith calls death “Black March” in her poem of that title; she thinks of death as an “old friend,” “a breath of fresh air,” “a change.”  She looks forward to thinking of a visit from her old friend; she seemingly cannot face life without knowing he is somewhere, cloaked in grey chiffon, waiting for her.  “I have a friend/ At the end of the world. / His name is a breath/ Of fresh air.”

And then there is Robert Louis Stevenson, who spent most of his life struggling gallantly with tuberculosis, but has no intention of resisting death when it comes:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

I may never have Stevenson’s openness to death, but I sincerely hope to have Stevie Smith’s confidence that, at some point in my life, death will be a friend.  And I will lose my fear about a final transition.

If you want to contemplate death through some of my fiction, you might try “And Now, A Word from Dead Barry,” or “Tale of Two Grannies.”

Old Age, Jonathan Swift, and Me

When I was in my fifties, I decided to finish my doctorate in English literature.  I was working in college administration as a Chief Financial Officer, and had accumulated a BA and MA in literature, an MBA, and completed various coursework and other prerequisites for a PhD but realized that I would need a year or two of full-time effort to complete coursework and a dissertation.  I had the good fortune of being able to do this, and I joined a small cohort of much younger students in trying to complete this hurdle (more on that cohort later).

I decided to research the changes (as I perceived them) in the portrayal of old age in literature during the Enlightenment era (sound impressive?), and I elected to do this through the lens of a writer who experienced an infamous old age himself, and who wrote his most famous book at about my age – Jonathan Swift.  During Swift’s lifetime, science was turning old age from a theological phenomenon to a pathological one; statistics of life expectancy were just beginning to be accumulated, and increasing literacy was displacing old memories as the source of history and information.  It turned out to be an interesting study (abstract found here).  Now, almost twenty years later, I find myself revisiting some of my conclusions and wondering if I would have a different perspective now.

I might have been middle-aged when I finished graduate school, but being thrown in with a cohort of twenty-somethings made me feel older.  I never felt that they were that much brighter than I was (although some surely were), but I was massively more effectual.  I turned papers in on time while my classmates had a sea of incompletes.  I got my dissertation chapters and rewrites to my committee faster than they probably wanted and had no problems ticking off the hurdles to getting to my final defense.  I researched all my own citations and even word-processed my final document myself (in compliance with the University’s picky standards).  Research and study were so much easier than working that it was during this period of time that I also started writing fiction.  It was a happy time.

The issues of aging I identified in Swift’s writing and in his life are still with us.  Gulliver’s episode with the immortal but aging Struldbruggs depict what happens when longevity outraces competence, when technology, language, and culture leave the long-lived behind.  The Enlightenment era saw the first spate of self-help books on extending one’s life span and the implied assumption that, perhaps, the length of your life span was within your control and not necessarily the total prerogative of the Almighty.  Swift himself lived to be 77, and before he died, he lost most of his friends, his lady-love Stella, and just enough of his mind that he had trouble communicating but seemed to be aware of that sad fact.  Swift was a difficult character all his life, but, as I age, I have more sympathy for him. When he was sixty-four, he wrote his own humorous elegy in almost 500 lines of rhyme, “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift.”  The poem is hilarious and humbling.

Besides, his memory decays:

He recollects not what he says;

He cannot call his friends to mind:

Forgets the place where last he din’d;

Plies you with stories o’er and o’er;

He told them fifty times before.

How does he fancy we can sit

To hear his out-of-fashion’d wit?

Swift was not overly lovable, but how can you not have a soft spot for a man who looks so calmly into the face of the eccentricities of his own old age?  I ended up being fond of the pompous old geezer and was loathe to part with him when my academic work was over.

I turned some of my knowledge of Swift into a draft novel, What Shall I Say First?   In it, a middle-aged academic is visited by the ghost of the old Dean himself.  But again, this was written a number of years ago.  I may revisit that manuscript and my dissertation to see if, twenty years later, Jonathan Swift, Dean of Saint Patrick’s, has anything new to teach me.  Can old dogs teach old dogs? Stay tuned.  Meanwhile, read the Struldbrugg episode in Gulliver’s Travels (Part III, Chapter X) and see if you don’t relate to their feeling of being “foreigners in their own country.”

Puttering Around

When I was a child, my father “puttered” in his free time.  This had nothing to do with golf; it had a lot to do with a form of relaxation we don’t see much of anymore.  The extinction of puttering has a lot to do with some fundamental changes in our lifetimes.  Let me explain.

To putter is defined thus: to busy or occupy oneself in a leisurely, casual, or ineffective manner: e.g. to putter in the garden.  Leisurely, casual, and especially ineffective.  In his puttering, my father considered many projects and chores; few of them materialized. Puttering was not meant to be productive; it was meant to be an antidote to hard work and productivity.

My father had special clothes for puttering.  He wore, for years and years, the army fatigues he had brought home from his stint in the military sometime between WWII and Korea.  Those clothes lasted forever and were eventually stained by every kind of oil and paint known to our household.  Long after the shirts fell apart, the pants remained.  Dad called them his “putter pants.”  Now, there are “putter pants” on the market, designed with an elastic waist for old guys.  It would have been anathema to my father to buy something special to putter in.  When the last of the “military” putter pants bit the dust (probably disappeared by my mother), he started buying putter pants at tag sales – castoff military wear if he could get it.

Dad puttered on weekends and most of the summer.  (He was a college professor.)  He made no lists, but just wandered from one thing to another.  It was therapeutic rather than effective.  He would do it alone or with a child.  His grandchildren enjoyed puttering with him until they reached puberty, then they had “better” things to “do.”  So, Dad went back to puttering alone.  Such puttering is a lost art.

Dad sometimes did more than putter – in his younger days, he built two houses and repaired our cars and boats.  But when there was not something special and demanding on his plate – he puttered.  You could tell he enjoyed it because he sang or hummed the whole time.  Frank Sinatra and Patti Page hits when I was young; later it was Roger Whittaker.

I thought of this recently when I came across an article about Jeff Bezos and his habit of rising early and “puttering” until 10AM.  Good for him.  But the gist of the article was that Mr. Bezos was sure that his puttering made him more effective and more creative.  The author of the article tried it, and, sure enough, it helped him get things done.  I guess everything has to serve the Goddess of Productivity.  But that is not what puttering is supposed to be all about.  It is not supposed to be scheduled or weighted for effectiveness or participated in wearing specially designed pants.  Thoreau (one of the great putterers) would certainly assure us that there are not supposed to be new clothes for it.

Men of my father’s generation puttered.  What do they do now?  Is surfing the net or watching nonstop sports or playing video games the new form of puttering?  Do women putter?  I do it on occasion, but not with the joie de vivre and lack of purpose with which my father did it.  Even in retirement, I find myself pondering whether there is something specific I should be doing, somewhere I should be, some news I should catch up with.   Even if I am willing, even eager, to be decadent, there are many alluring alternatives calling to me – funny videos, silly text exchanges, countless errands.  I hope we have not lost the art of puttering – for it is an art.  And art is done for art’s sake.  It is not supposed to be a productive activity in any way – Jeff Bezos notwithstanding.

Perhaps this piece of writing is an example of puttering.  You might also look at an example of my puttering at fiction.  Talking about Thoreau and the advent of autumn reminded me of “Again and Again and Again.”

Heraclitus, Change, and an Elegy for Netflix DVDs

There was an article in the Opinion section of last week’s Sunday New York Times entitled, “Stop Resisting Change.”  Presumably, the author used the imperative tense to try to shake his readers loose from their attachments to things, rituals, schedules – you name it.  The essay was written by Brad Stulberg, who appears to be some kind of “performance coach” and wants to tell us that change is a “force for growth.” He reminds us that, even 2,500 years ago, Heraclitus knew you can’t step into the same river twice.  Stulberg asserts that “adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or even try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it.”  Allostasis/allostatic is apparently a new coinage for our times and posits “a healthy baseline as being a moving target.”  Sounds too much like dodge ball to me.

This is what performance coach Stulberg says in the end:

To thrive in our lifetimes – and not just survive – we need to transform our relationship with change, leaving behind rigidity and resistance in favor of a new nimbleness, a means of viewing more of what life throws at us as something to participate in, rather than fight.  We are always shaping and being shaped by change, often at the very same time.

I’m guessing that, in my case, it might be too late for a “new nimbleness,” but I certainly admit that change is a constant challenge.  Recently our smart TV lost some of its smarts, and I had to figure out how to reboot it and wasted almost an entire day before I decided it was a hopeless endeavor.  Like most baby-boomers, I have spent years of my working life learning new computer systems, trying to figure out the best way to use email or social media, and remembering that my cell phone needs to be charged.  I have been forced to change, but I am not convinced it has done good things for me.

Lately, I have been wondering whether society would be better served if we didn’t assume that change is good and that we should learn to “cope” with it.  Isn’t “coping” how we ended up with climate chaos and mechanical voices on the doctor’s phone line?  With children who hold conversations with one eye on their cell phones? Perhaps continued “nimbleness” is a mistake.  Perhaps a little resistance is in order.  Perhaps a lot of resistance is overdue.  Maybe we should just enjoy sitting by Heraclitus’s river and feel no need to wade into it.

I am particularly thinking about change today because I am mourning the passing of the Netflix DVD program at the end of this month.  For many years, we have spent many Saturday nights with a DVD movie, espresso, and dessert.  And yes, I have learned to stream movies over the past year, but there was something about that red envelope arriving in the mail and waiting on the counter to be inserted into a simple machine for Saturday night watching.  Once in while the disc was defective, but we never missed our movie because I didn’t know how to work the technology.  On the envelope was useful information – who was in the movie, how long it was, and whether it was too sexy for 17-year-olds.  It was, as far as I was concerned, a perfect technology.  When I went out to get the Sunday Times in the morning, I put the disc in the mail and waited until Thursday or Friday to discover what from our wish list would arrive for the next weekend.  Such are the simple date nights of seventy-somethings.

Plus, Netflix had a good selection of old movies including our favorite Powell and Pressburger productions and the silly 1950’s comedies that have picked up our spirits at the end of some hard weeks.  Our generation has seen the demise of tube televisions, rotor antennas, VCR’s, 8 tracks, cassettes, Walkmans, and I fear, eventually our CD’s and DVD’s.  In our lifetime, we learned to type on mechanical typewriters, then electric typewriters, then word processors.  We have learned to make our own travel reservations online and print our own boarding passes.  And those are only minor examples.  Make your own list of how you did things in the 50s or 60s.  Reflect on how life has changed, the new technology you had to learn in order to cope with that change, the continual upending of the patterns of daily life. I know I sound like the old lady that I am, but old people are supposed to have garnered a little wisdom over time.  My learnings include this:  some technology and related change was for the good, no doubt – but none of it was unalloyed good, and we should keep that foremost in our minds as AI creeps up on us.  How do we even know that so much change is good for us?  This assumption that constant adaptation is a good thing seems to be a social experiment on a grand scale (without a control group), and we are the white rats being encouraged to keep up with the program.  (Now I sound and feel like a grumpy old lady.)

It often seems that it is only when I finally learn to adequately use the new technology that it disappears.  I am sure we will not be the only ones who will be desolate at the end of the month when our last movie arrives.  The good news is that, rather than destroying their inventory, Netflix will empty its warehouses by sending multiple DVDs to their subscribers.  I hope they include our favorites.  And I hope someone keeps making DVD players.

To think about ways to resist change, you might try my story, “Nothing New.”

Bad Grandmothers and Wallowing in Old Age

Good grandmothers, society’s traditional grandmothers, have been defined by Hallmark: they bake cookies, love their grandchildren above all else, and are always available to babysit.  There are plenty of these good grandmothers in literature, but it is a welcome change to read about bad grandmothers.  Some bad grandmothers are selfish, some are just self-protective, but they all warm my heart.

First, the disclaimer.  I have eight grandchildren and I love them all.  But there are limits.  When they visit us, we put them (and their parents) in a hotel.  We refrain from birthday gift wish items of which we do not approve.  We almost never babysit.  On the other hand, we have traveled a lot over the years in order to have an opportunity to know them, for them to know us, and to watch them grow.

In our neighborhood, where there are many grandmothers, we sometimes take note of those grandmothers who stay home for Christmas instead of visiting progeny during the most hectic travel season.  Sometimes I am in that group and sometimes not.  We joke about it and call ourselves the “bad grandmas” as we sip our holiday eggnog, but it is humor tinged with guilt.  Aren’t we supposed to be hopelessly devoted to our offspring once and twice removed?  What is Christmas without greedy children hanging their stockings, crowded airports, and airlines losing your luggage?

But, back to fictitious grandmothers.  I just finished Margaret Drabble’s Witch of Exmoor.  You guessed it – the “witch” of the title is the grandmother, Frieda.  Frieda, who never had an excess of maternal feelings, has increased her distance from her offspring by buying a big, gothic, hard-to-get-to seaside house and then disappearing into it.  Her three adult children are angry, confused, and worried about their mother and about her will.  While Frieda does not have much in the way of traditional motherly love, she does appear to have money.  She published some successful books in her day, one of which is being turned into a movie if only they can find the author to sign the contract.

Frieda’s grandchildren see her disappearance as just another example of adults acting in inexplicable ways.  As Drabble explains, Frieda’s adult children have a more personal view:

…Frieda has turned the tables on them this time.  They are surrounded by friends who complain at length about the burden of visiting their aged relatives, their aunts with Alzheimer’s, their fathers grumpy with cancer or heart conditions or gout, their mothers whining about the treacheries of the past: none of them has a mother who does not want to see them.  It is against the natural order.

Frieda has made clear that she is fine on her own, and they pretty much leave her that way.  She is a delightful character, and it is a pity that she disappears in the middle of the book. (It turns out she has fallen off a cliff and drowned.) She has not stopped being a bad actor, though, as she leaves her fortune (not as large as her children suspected) to only one of four grandchildren.  Not only does this arouse outrage in the children, but it almost ruins the life of the one member of the family it was designed to benefit.  No one is happy.  (There is a lesson there.)

Frieda is a more malicious version of my very favorite “bad grandmother,” Lady Slane of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  After years as the wife of a statesman, Lady Slane becomes a widow.  She has had it with adult children, big houses, and social obligations.  She remembers a lovely little house she once saw from a train, goes back to find it, buys it and moves in with her maid (of course, she has a maid).  She tells her family to stay away unless invited.  And then she spends her time entertaining a small circle of elderly men and sitting in deep revery about the life she has led.  It is one of the most delightful books of old age.  A fairy tale of senescence.  As in the Witch of Exmoor, we read much about the consternation of the adult children.  Who does their mother think she is anyway?  Doesn’t she know she owes them something?  No, Lady Slane acknowledges no unpaid debts; she has raised her children and now she is done, thank you very much.  After offers from her daughter to visit frequently and bring the grandchildren, Lady Slane answers firmly:

“…that is another thing on which I have made up my mind.  You see, Carrie, I am going to be completely self-indulgent.  I am going to wallow in old age.  No grandchildren.  They are too young.  No great-grandchildren either; that would be worse.  I want no strenuous young people, who are not content with doing a thing, but must needs know why they do it…. I want no one around me except those who are nearer to their death than their birth.

“I am going to wallow in old age.”  I love that woman.

But let me say this.  In these days when so many grandparents end up raising grandchildren because they have no other choice, perhaps it is unfeeling to exalt selfish grandmothers.  I honor the sacrifice that is made when old people do not have the luxury of carving out some space for themselves at the end of their lives.  There are many such grandparents, and I commend them.  They may not be blessed, but they are a blessing.

I do not really want to emulate Frieda or Lady Slane, but they are fun to read about.  There is something heady, especially for older women, about protecting the space we have finally “earned” after a lifetime of careers and child-raising.  When I look back on my days of rushing from work to daycare to the kitchen to feed my brood, I don’t know how I did it.  I’m enjoying a rest and some space in which to contemplate what has been and what is.  Children read about superheroes, even though they cannot really emulate them.   I read about feisty old women who have thrown guilt out the window.  It is a vicarious pleasure.

I have written about grandmothers many times before – you might look at “The Age of Grandmothers” or “A Grandmother’s Despair.”

Old People and Artificial Intelligence

I have just finished reading Stacy Abrams’ new mystery, Rogue Justice; among other cultural and political trends, she tackles Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and she has made me ponder what it means when reality starts to warp on us.  In Abrams’ novel, people are threatened with videos of themselves saying and doing things they never did – created images which pass all reality tests.  The targeted people actually start to question their own memories.  Is this what AI will do to us – make us doubt our very sense of reality?  It occurred to me that old folks (maybe all folks) have their own experiences with bent realities.

There is, of course, dementia.  When my mother called me to tell me that little boys had ransacked her apartment overnight and put her milk in the freezer, she was sure it was true.  In fact, she was indignant when I suggested that perhaps she absent-mindedly had put the milk in the freezer herself.  So we know the mind is capable of creating realities that are not real, not true.

And alternate realities are not just a problem for oldsters.  I can remember trying to convince my young son that the monster he saw in his nightmare was not hiding in the house somewhere.  We all know those moments after a bad dream when we have to convince ourselves the nightmare is not true – we didn’t really miss that train or that exam, we aren’t naked at a podium with nothing to say.  Our brains are capable of fooling us.  And such delusions scare us in more than one way: we are twice scared – once in the imaginings, and a second time in the realization that our own brains could do such things to us.

For instance, there is the more malicious process of gaslighting, where we are convinced by someone (or something) else that what we thought was true was wrong.  Mean teenagers and abusive spouses practice it, and we have all been the victim of this at one time or another.  It is just another example that our grasp of reality is not absolute.  There is even a more subtle form of gaslighting when the myth of a happy family is superimposed upon a family or situation that was anything but happy – something that can happen in real time or in retrospect.

And then there are false memories or suppressed memories.  We all have them.  Who hasn’t been around the table with relatives telling stories about old times and not found out that there are as many versions of past reality as there are individuals?  “That’s not what happened…” responds my brother.  Sometimes there is a way to prove or disprove battling conceptions; more often we have to accept that realities bend in the process of becoming history.

Freud had a lot to say about human limitations in the face of unpleasant realities – he posited, of course, that bad memories were often suppressed and said that none of us really believed in the reality of our own mortality: “No one believes in his own death. In the unconscious everyone is convinced of his own immortality.”  Le Rochefoucauld said, “You cannot stare straight into the face of the sun, or death.”  (I might recommend here Irvin Yalom’s wonderful book about death, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Fear of Death.)

Of course, we sometimes accept artificial realities on a temporary basis.  Coleridge used the term “suspension of disbelief” for what we do while reading a novel or watching an engrossing movie.  For the moment, we let ourselves believe what we know is not true – which is why we jump if someone taps us on the shoulder during a horror movie or cry over the death of an actor who assuredly has not died in real life.  But, as in dreams, we can pause, recalibrate, and know the difference.

But now, here comes the latest version of artificial reality, in which we will not always be able to tell the difference.  AI is a form of gaslighting, in that it is being done to us – and usually not for our own good.  We know we can be tricked, but we don’t know when we are being tricked.   What do we do – disbelieve everything?  Surely, this would be no way to live our lives.

We must remind ourselves that we all use AI everyday – to remind us to take our pills or go to appointments, to spellcheck our messages or documents, to verify prices on an item or hotel room, to get directions.  But, in those cases, we know what is happening. We know that the calm voice giving us directions is not real, nor is Siri our friend.  But my point is that we all have accepted AI to one degree or another – and this makes it even more difficult to draw the line.

And let’s not kid ourselves that we will be able to tell the difference between AI and reality.  We won’t.  But in our latter years, we have (hopefully) had enough experience to know that things can seem to be true that are not. We are going to have to trust ourselves (resist gaslighting in all forms) and arm our minds with a healthy skepticism, especially as to what seems too good or too bad to be true. We need to verify our sources.  It is bad enough when it is our own minds playing tricks on us, but it is even worse when something outside is orchestrating an alternate reality.  Am I worried?  Yes.  Am I scared?  Yes.  And we all should be.