6/19 Aging

So last semester I took a class on aging, sociology of aging.
I’ve spent the past few days with my great aunt and uncle at their retirement home in Lexington, Kentucky. It has been my first long encounter with older people since that class.
They talk about how life moves slower now, she says she is sometimes lonely, she is constantly needing something to do –to date she’s made about 215 baby bonnets for local hospitals (in the past 3-4 months). They say they have less energy. They wish they could travel more—but they can’t.

I see so many of the things we studied in that class played out—ageism against other aging people, the inner workings of nursing homes---the fact that my relatives have enough money to live in such a probably expensive, all-inclusive, well maintained place alone is amazing.

However, aging is sad, there was a blunt talk about how they’ve already bought and paid for the caskets, burial plots—we laugh someone decorated their empty grave on memorial day!

Its also sad to see the way older people begin to lose their prestige, at least in this society, or maybe its something that always goes on—I’ve just never been so close to it. There is talk about how my aunt can no longer do needlepoint—funny though, she’s working on about 7-8 project now, not up to her old quality at all, but she’ll never know people are discussing that and maybe not using her products before severe corrections…they used to be prized treasures in the family, a stocking, a pillow was coveted from her.
There’s the discussion about her memory, her ability to drive. And not to say they don’t talk about him, but he’s already blind and incapable, so its all on her.

I wrote a long paper about the sandwich generation [older generation, my parents generation, caring for their parents and their children simultaneously], made me cry often to think about my parents experiences, often how intimately aware I was of how easily I came to be a confidant as their parents in some sense “lost ground,” I would never want to say they lost respect for their parents, I would instead say there is a definite mode of coping that goes on. I wonder how often the experience, the caregiving, care-arranging experience that is, shapes their own view of aging, whether it induces fear or happiness or ambivalence. For me, right now, it makes me apprehensive. I don’t always want to have the attitude of “I’ll never be like that,” however easy that may be to adopt.