Tag: Baby boomers

Models for Aging?

The Baby Boomers were a generation that suffered from lack of models.  It wasn’t that our parents and grandparents were not admirable people, heroes even, but they did not live the lives that we lived in the times that we had to live them.  Many women who worked their entire adult lives grew up with stay-at-home moms.   Even if our moms worked, the model out there was the carefully coiffed young mother with an apron and a roast in the oven.  Think of June Cleaver or Lucy Ricardo.  Men of our generation did not learn what it meant to have a working wife, not to have dinner on the table when they got home from work, how to handle demands for assistance with domestic chores.  The result was that not only did we work ridiculously hard at home and at work (we did have models for a work ethic), but we were always feeling guilty about not being able to be the kind of parents, husbands, and wives that our parents were.

Then there were relationships.  When I was a child, divorce was never discussed – and even if it did happen, no one talked about it.  And yet, even today, baby boomers divorce more than any other age group: Another life event that we had no template for, and, again, that nagging guilt if it happened to us. 

We must remember that, as children, we soaked up so much unconsciously.  We learned the complexity of language – the words, the grammar, the pronunciation.  We absorbed social norms – ways of eating, sleeping, interacting.  And now we are getting old. We surely absorbed something about what it means to grow old, and – whether we are conscious of it or not – it is affecting us now that we ourselves are old.

When we were children, our models for growing old were our grandparents, who often did not live to be as old as we are now.  They might have been stern (my Dutch paternal grandmother) or doting (my maternal Nana and Papa).  I did not think much as a child about how they lived, but it surely had an influence.  There were other elderly relatives, most of whom seemed like another species.  Surely, we would never look like that!

And our culture provided few positive templates in our formative years for senescence.  Coming of age novels (Bildungsromans) and movies abounded – from Little Women to Catcher in the Rye – but coming of old age stories (Vollendungsromans) were scarce on the ground and rather scary.  There were tales like Heidi, in which an old person gets rescued from isolation and depression by a younger one.  But novels about old people who were interesting in themselves, potential models, were few.

Think of fairy tales.  The protagonists (often princes and princesses) were always young and beautiful.  The evil stepmother was old.  The witches were old.  Consider Arthur Rackham’s illustration from Hansel and Gretel with a very scary witch of advanced years (here).

The stories usually ended with the witch in the oven, the adventure complete, and a wedding, with no note about what happened as the characters aged.  The Grimms’ classic telling of Cinderella ends like this:

And now her two sisters found her to be that fine, beautiful lady whom they had seen at the ball. They threw themselves at her feet to beg pardon for all the ill-treatment they had made her undergo. Cinderella took them up, and, as she embraced them, cried:

That she forgave them with all her heart, and desired them always to love her.

She was conducted to the young prince, dressed as she was; he thought her more charming than ever, and, a few days after, married her. Cinderella, who was no less good than beautiful, gave her two sisters lodgings in the palace, and that very same day matched them with two great lords of the Court.

There are many things to be noted here, but generally, marriage is the end of the story.  Cinderella is always beautiful and bountiful and young in our imaginations.  We wanted to be Cinderella and have no model of an old Cinderella.

Songs of our youth assumed that “forever young” was the way to be.  Even songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Circle Game” or Peter Yarrow’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” assume that upon adulthood, all magic is gone.  Old folks make no appearances.  The movements of the sixties didn’t trust anyone over 30, and it never occurred to us that we would someday be old.

So here we are trying to work out the best way to be old.  The aged folks in Washington surely have not figured it out.  The drunk crowd in Margaritaville don’t seem to have the answer.  But there are clues out there.  And the first step might be to be more aware of our ingrained assumptions.

Around me, there are various models – positive and negative.  There’s the “let’s see the world and spend our money before we die” folks.  There are those kind souls who sacrifice their time and resources to take care of grandchildren so that their kids can avoid daycare and afford a house.  There are those who spend their time and resources in keeping fit mentally and physically, and have a weekly array of classes and therapy sessions.  There are those who secluded themselves during Covid and never fully emerged.  And everything in-between.

While I was writing this, I heard that Jane Goodall had died – at age 91 and while out on the road doing speaking engagements, active and with a project to the end.  An article about her in the NYTimes (What Jane Goodall Taught Us About Living a Long Life) which extols her for staying active, having a purpose, and having an optimistic view about things in general, including the afterlife.  Of course, Jane Goodall was no ordinary woman and we all need more relatable models.  Or, of course, we could structure our own.  I’m just trying to encourage myself and all of us to do it consciously.  Any suggestions are welcome.  And we must remember that – although they could not seem to care less – our grandchildren are watching.

For me, reading and writing are ways to explore alternatives. I have written several reviews of novels about old people (see here and here).  Many of my short stories involve older people trying to come to terms with where they are in life.    You might try my short stories “Closing Time” or “Snickerdoodles” – or write your own.

Old Marriages/Grow Old Along with Me

I have written about long marriages, old marriages, before (see my blog on romance in old age, “Old Folks and True Love“), but I recently ran across this quote worth sharing from Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez

It was as if they had leapt over the arduous calvary of conjugal life and gone straight to the heart of love.  They were together in silence like an old married couple wary of life, beyond the pitfalls of passion, beyond the brutal mockery of hope and the phantoms of disillusion: beyond love.  For they had lived together long enough to know that love was always love, anytime and anyplace, but it was more solid the closer it came to death.

Is love more solid the closer it comes to death?  Shakespeare addresses age in Sonnet 73, beginning with a trope comparing age with the coming of autumn and winter:

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

The bard finishes with a couplet addressed to his lover:

This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare is assumed to be writing about a relationship between a young person and an old one; I would say that his sentiments are even more true when both participants are old.

And it is not just each other that we old folks love; the marriage itself becomes a valued object.  The marriage contains history (good and bad), a moral code (carefully crafted over the years), and a full set of rituals and traditions.  It even has a liturgy.  My husband, for example, ends every meal by sighing and saying it was “the best meal he ever ate,” (even when he was the cook).  I can be relied on for the morning weather report promptly upon sitting down for breakfast.  And so it goes – you long-married folks doubtless perform your own liturgies on a regular basis.

When we were wed over three decades ago, dear friends gave us a sun dial which has traveled with my husband and me to four different states.  “Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be” is inscribed on the top of it.  It is a line from Browning.  We thought we were already “old” when we got married in our forties, and here we are in our seventies.  For us, Browning’s prophecy proved true – the latter years have only gotten better.  Part of it is that the family/stepfamily responsibilities have diminished, but mostly it is that we started with some trust, and worked hard to remain trustworthy to each other in every way.

John Lennon loved the quote from Robert Browning.  In the last year of his life, he used it as a basis for a song.  At the same time Yoko Ono wrote a companion piece based on Elizabeth Browning’s “How Do I Love You, Let Me Count the Ways.”  Before either song could be released, John was gone. John and Yoko were not allowed the chance to see how and if their love matured.  John thought about it in his song, however:

Grow old along with me

Two branches of one tree

Face the setting Sun

When the day is done.

Divorce was common in our generation; there are few of my childhood friends who are still with their first spouse.  And baby boomers are still getting divorced at a high rate. While divorce rates have declined ever so slightly over the past two decades, one cohort has been bucking the trend: baby boomers. “Research shows that boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—are divorcing more than any other generation.”  This is from a generation whose parents – no matter how much they bickered and sulked – rarely got divorced.  In some ways, I envy those of my cohort who were able to stay with their “original spouses.”  But by the time I made the choice for the long haul the second time, I apparently knew what I was doing.  May it be so for you.

I have written many short stories about old marriages.  You might look at “The More Loving One” or “Slip Slidin’ Away” for a couple of examples.

Covid-19 and the Generational Wars

There has always been a generational divide. In our hippie days, we called it a generation gap, but it was more than that. We didn’t trust anyone over thirty. As our baby boomer generation came into adulthood, moved into jobs, then into better jobs, and finally into collecting pensions, social security, and artificial hips, our children and our children’s children started to worry about who was going to pay for all this. These economic fears were on top of the more individual problems of who was going to go stay with Mom when she had her cataract surgery and how to get Dad’s driver’s license away from him.

In some ways, this is nothing new. When Jonathan Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels, he included the incident of the Struldbruggs, a select group of people who would never die. Their culture did not see them as a source of wisdom, but rather as an economic problem. Their society finally decided to declare them “dead” at the age of eighty, allowing heirs to inherit, taking away their right to vote, and leaving them alone to age while the world went on without them. This just as longevity was starting to increase in the Early Modern world. The younger generations first saw the “baby boomers” hold on to the limited upper-level managerial and professional positions. Then they realized that the retirement of the older generation (us) will be funded by the younger (through the Social Security system, Medicare, and other ways). The economic gerontophobia (yes, there is a word for it!) that Swift outlines is alive and well.

Then, as now, the elderly represent at least three threats. There is the threat that the old will not relinquish control and that their inability to keep pace with change and to release capital will impede progress. Then there is the seemingly contradictory threat that they will have to be supported (both economically and emotionally) in their old age. And finally the very presence of the aged is a memento mori, a threatening reminder of decay and mortality in a culture which does not want to think about these things. This unease is fueled by endemic expectations of scientifically produced and ever-increasing longevity, and juxtaposed with the hopes of the youth that technology will mean that they might, themselves, live long but never get old.

And now we have Covid-19, which is more of a threat to the old, but less of an inconvenience (we mostly don’t have jobs anyway and everyone knows we don’t go out much), and less of a threat to the young and more of an inconvenience (who mostly do have jobs, and may have young children in the house, or could still be looking for partners). I know the young can get Covid-19 and suffer greatly from it, but in Italy 95% of the deaths have been in those over 60 and 84% in those over 70. In the United States, 78% of the deaths have been in those over 65 and 92% in those over 55. Those are alarming statistics for the old, but perhaps empowering for the young.

When these younger folks were our children (or grandchildren), we gave them curfews and told them they couldn’t go to Florida on spring break. Quarantine rules must feel like déjà vu to some of them. How does this all play out? And back to our youthful distrust of anyone over 30. Are we reaping what we have sown?

I wrote an earlier post about whether the old could teach the young anything “(Teach Your Children Well?”), or whether everything had to be learned anew with every generation. Still a good question. In old England, even before Swift’s time, there was an instructional story of a man who made the decrepit old grandfather eat from a trough. One of the young children in the family starts building something, and the father asks what it is. “It’s a box for you to eat out of for when you are old like grandfather,” says the observant child. Thereafter, the old grandfather is treated better. But I am not sure that young people really believe that they are going to get old. Maybe, like our own death, it is too hard to believe. Or maybe we have all gotten too used to thinking in the short term.

Over a decade ago I wrote a novel, The Last Quartet (nod to Beethoven), about a situation that is the exact opposite of what we are facing. In a horrible epidemic, it is the old who survive and have to carry on with the world. I have posted the “Prelude” to this novel here. It is a thought experiment which might be of interest at the moment.

To start thinking about how our view of the aged has changed in the modern world, you might look at the abstract of a dissertation I wrote about the changes that started about the time that Swift invented the poor Struldbruggs.

 

Failed Generation?

A while back, I was listening to Krista Tippett interviewing the Italian physicist, Carlo Rovelli (author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, which I can recommend as a good primer for those of us who learned our last physics in high school). In talking about his past, Rovelli said this (in his charming Italian accent):

I spent my youth traveling and being a little bit revolutionary in the Italian politics of the time. And at some point, we wanted to change the world. I’m of that generation; we failed. And at some point, I just fell in love with physics…

Now, Rovelli is a little younger than I am, but apparently he saw himself as a child of the sixties – those days when we were going to “change the world.” He says “we failed.” And I thought that was worth thinking about.

And then in Sunday’s NY Times in an article about movies of the sixties, I read this:

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” Mao Zedong said, but this revolution was also a party, and left behind a legacy of hedonism. Rather than tearing down the consumer society, the ’68 students helped to open it up. Their generation is remembered more for its embrace of sexual freedom and personnel fulfillment, for a social transformation enacted in the realm of the personal.

We were the children of the “greatest generation” that fought the wars (World War II or Korea or both) that saved the world for democracy. Big shoes to fill and we tried to fill them in a way that often pitted generation against generation. Fights over the dinner table about draft resistance and whether girls should wear “dungarees.” Protests at the state house about civil rights and women’s rights. And, in many of these crusades, we did not fail. There were new civil rights laws, the Vietnam War came to an end, women wore jeans and entered the workplace in huge numbers. And yet.

We did not seem to learn any lessons from Vietnam. Black Lives Matter is not a given for many of our citizens. The ERA was never passed. Women went to the workplace, but still did most of the work at home. And the president who was most recently elected could not be more different from the young president who inspired us.

Rovelli is right; at some point we grew weary with taking on the world and fell in love – with our partners, our children, our careers, new technology and avocations. And here we are looking out over the environmental and political wasteland that somehow happened when we were paying for our children’s education, learning to use a scanner, and scouting out retirement locations. We had to make a living; we had to start trusting people over thirty when they were us. We let things slide.

And there was something we forgot (if we ever really knew it). There was another part of the boomer generation; these were the people who went to Vietnam willingly, who felt that integration and the sexual revolution were forced on them. While many of us gloried in what technology could bring us in the way of iPads and cell phones, many of them were losing jobs to robotic technology. While some us saw increased globalization as a way to have cool cars (remember the VW buses?) and exotic vacations, other saw their livelihoods move to Mexico or the Philippines. These members of our own generation – and their parents and children – would seem to have elected our current president, to have pressed the brake on change – hard and with the force of resentment. Read Hillbilly Elegy. Listen to Fox News (but don’t listen long).

When we rebelled, our parents did not agree with us, but they eventually came around. They loved us. But there was a big part of the boomer generation that found the change too hard and too fast. It hit at their basic values. Some took solace in religion, some in patriotism, and others in their own kind of rebellion, their own kind of Tea Party. Why couldn’t we win them over? Did they see that the college kids were just going through a phase and then returning (with their degrees) to a secure middle class life? How did we fail to connect?

Our generation accomplished much and we are still kicking. Old ladies in tennis sneakers are a powerful force and provide the backbone of many good causes. But somewhere we failed.

Many of us lament the fact that the younger generation does not seem to feel the need to change the world that some of us felt. Yet, we see the murmurings begin with the students from Parkland, from the persistence of Black Lives Matter. And, to be honest, our generation had the impetus of the draft at our back threatening our brothers or boyfriends or selves. But, you say, the young have an environment that is crumbling around them. It’s their world they are watching lapse into environmental and political chaos. I still believe they will act. But, whatever they do, let’s hope they do it in an inclusive way. Including all members of their generation. And us too. We still have our tennis sneakers.

This week’s story, “Common Enemy” (from the Sam Levenson quote “the reason grandparents and grandchildren get along so well is that they have a common enemy”), is not about politics, but, well, I’ll let you decide what it’s about….