Welcome to my blog on aging, also known as...

Today my father and I did not kill each other.

A hard, inescapable fact of life is that dying is the only way to escape aging. Basic common sense, then, would suggest that as a society we should make sure the elderly are well taken care of physically, mentally, and financially out of sheer self-preservation, even if we do not feel any compassion or social responsibility. However, that’s not how America and much of the world works. It is a bizarre and horrifying reality that most Americans don’t even think about aging and have very negative biases about the elderly when we do, until, eventually, we all suffer from agism and the lack of social nets and care as a result when we get older. I want to explore these issues in this blog.

When I was young, I was guilty of agism, too. My parents annoyed me for most of my childhood, all of my adolescence, and much of my young adult years with their rules, punishments, advice, and cautionary tales. When we are young, older adults can seem like obstacles to our own desires and ambitions. They can seem too cautionary, too rule-driven, too judgmental and too mired in their own hang-ups and experiences. This is often true even as young adults in the work place. We often mock and/or are terrified of physical changes that occur with aging: cellulite, wrinkles, fat, sagging arms and breasts, menopause, aching joints. We are sure that won’t ever be us; we are terrified that will be us some day. Then, hopefully, we grow up.

As older adults, we want to spare the young from making the same mistakes we made and want them to hear our advice, which is based on years of hard-earned mistakes and successes. We’ve learned just how important experience is, but ironically, the young often don’t want to listen any more than we did. They tend to ignore us or even treat us as though we are no longer relevant or useful. This is the irony of middle-age, especially for women. When we are in our prime and finally have vast experience and knowledge, we tend to be overlooked, ignored, or even taken for granted. This gets worse the older we get. If you go to Google Scholar and search under “agism,” “workplace,” “bias,” and similar search terms, you’ll find an overwhelming amount of research and data that supports all of this. Much of it blames the media, which is fair, but fear, ignorance, and arrogance are also a big part of this.

When young, we rarely imagine what we will look and feel like in old age. It’s too distant and seems like something that happens to other people, like our grandparents, whom we rarely knew as anything but old. We tend to be arrogant and blissfully naïve about our own knowledge and experience in comparison to older people’s. Frankly, we often think we know everything—or at least what’s important. I certainly did. I cringe now when I think back to some of what I said to older people with whom I worked. I’m grateful most were patient and mentored me, anyway. I was sometimes impatient with their frailties even when I tried to help them. I didn’t—couldn’t—understand what they were going through. In my mid-forties, I found myself on the other end of that dynamic, trying to be patient with young people who were sure they knew more than I did, even when they were interfering in my area of specialty, which they really didn’t know much about. People stopped listening or asking for advice in committees or meetings. People stopped listening, and even refused to help when I needed to work remotely to take care of my elderly parents, though it would have been easy to let me do so. I got angry and angrier. I became invisible, partly because my looks had changed, but also because they all thought they knew better than I or anyone my age or older, and just didn’t care what I had to offer. This is why middle-aged women, in particular, have to deal with a lot of anger and frustration. It made me bitter and cynical. That’s not a good place from which to descend into the next stage, when something really weird happens.

As we grow older, we watch our parents and their generation of family and friends become so old that their bodies and minds begin to fail, and sometimes that becomes a horrible, uncontrollable spiral that puts us in the position of being the adults, children having to make decisions for parents, often as we are beginning to experience the debilitations of growing old, ourselves. (Actually, it’s more complicated than that—they never stop being our parents even in the throes of dementia.) The problem is, there aren’t enough social nets to help with this. In my experience, there aren’t enough good gerontology medical experts or institutions to help anyone in those last few decades of life, let alone in the last year or months, either. Even hospice care isn’t good enough or doesn’t exist in many places, though that’s a growing industry. Most hospice and elder-care organizations are about making profit, and good care often gets sacrificed. Even non-profits struggle with finances and sometimes end up sacrificing care. Our society rarely talks about aging in helpful ways. We’re not prepared when it happens to our parents. We are even less prepared when it happens to us. This has become a crisis in America, one not enough people are paying attention to; ironically, most of us will regret that eventually--unless we die young.

Recently, I blew up my life so I could spend most of my time living with my 95-year-old father, taking care of him, though he’s in such good shape for his age that it’s been relatively easy compared to the kind of care most people in their 90’s need. It’s a privilege to spend this time with him, listening to his stories of his life and ensuring he’s safe and eating well. In this blog, I’ll be discussing this and all of the issues I raised here, as well as talking about my mother’s final year, which is how I learned so much about how difficult it is to get good care for the elderly in our country. Please share this blog-journey with me.