More people are living longer than ever and this particular situation will become more and more problematic.
As a minister I deal with this situation more frequently than I wish I did. Only here in the U.S., the separation is not from compulsion but from necessity. One spouse becomes physically or mentally unable to live at home because of the constancy and level of care required. So the healthier spouse finally accedes to the other being moved to a care facility. But this is always a wrenching decision.
In generations past, this was not a big problem because when someone got to "threescore and ten" s/he was pretty close to life's end. My grandfathers both died about then, one at 71 and the other at 72. No one thought they died young. Today when you hear someone died at 71, you ask, "Oh, my, what happened?" One of my grandmothers died at 76. The other lived until 90 but for her generation she was an exception, not the rule.
This is not the case any more. Both my dad and my wife's are still living. Her dad will turn 98 next month, mine 90 in September. My mom died at 87, hers at 86 - well beyond the expectancy of their parents' generation. My generation, the Boomers, is the first in which caring for aged parents is normative even after we are retired from our careers. I know couples in their mid-70s who are both dealing with parents in their 90s.
I know that "dealing with" is a bad way to put it, but many people in their mid- to latter-70s are starting to cope with their own aging issues. The stresses of that plus trying to look after one or two very elderly parents can be pretty stout. And it is aggravated if one or both parents are living in care facilities.
I hope you can understand the impact when a near-elderly child visits an elderly mother or father and the parent has no idea who they are. Or when the parent's mental state is so literally demented that s/he yells and curses at them without ceasing (I have witnessed this). And I hope you can understand when, after this happens for months or even many years on end, the gray-headed son or daughter lapses into depression because they can't stand the helpless, now-unknowable person the parent has become, and because the gray-headed son or daughter had always imagined that their retirement years would be far more "golden" than they turned out to be.
Neither my wife nor I are facing this. While both our dads are somewhat physically handicapped, their minds are still firing on all cylinders, though sometimes not much above idle, and their living conditions are fine. I wish this was the norm for my age peers, but it's not.
What 80-plus people come to fear most of all is abandonment, loss of meaningful decision-making over their own lives, and a slide into dementia. I know that medical researchers are working on those things but as I slide a little deeper into my own seventh decade, I can only urge, "faster, please."
Until about a century ago, large families were normative. It was not only just because birth control was either unreliable or unavailable. Parents wanted more kids, not fewer, for a number of reasons, two of which were the high rates of infant and child mortality and to have someone to care for them in their old age. I sometimes wonder whether that latter will prove a motivation for larger childbirth rates again, for as we Boomers and Gen X-ers push into our 80s and 90s we will lack the family care that our parents and grandparents got because most of us have only one or two children, occasionally three, rarely more, and they live scattered around the country. Will Millennials and post-Millennials up the childbirth ante to compensate?
Frankly, I hope so. But I fear that their end state will be what I read in a Canadian newspaper a few years ago where Margret Kopala said sadly, "Our best hope is a quiet death in a clean facility where the immigrant workers speak our language."
Update: Elderly couple dies holding hands after 62 years together, to which Gerard Vanderleun adds,
Believe me, if all those endearing young charmsWhich I gaze on so fondly today,Were to change by tomorrow and fleet in my armsLike fairy gifts fading awayThou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art,Let thy loveliness fade as it will,And around the dear ruin each wish of my heartWould entwine itself verdantly still.Which is exactly how I feel about my dearest Catherine.
Posts
