Old age has been called a “roleless role,” a time when it is no longer clear what is expected of the elderly person or where he or she can find the resources that will make old age successful.
For earlier life stages, the expectations are clearer. Children are expected to attend school; in fact, they are legally required to do so. Able-bodied adults are expected to be employed or to be actively seeking paid employment. Parents of young children are expected to care for them. None of these societal expectations generates perfect compliance, but all of them are felt and most of them are backed by law.
The years after child-rearing and employment present a sharp contrast to these expectational patterns and arrangements for their fulfillment. Almost nothing is expected of the elderly. The spoken advice from youth to age is “take it easy,” which means do nothing or amuse yourself. The unspoken message is “find your own way and keep out of ours.”
Many older men and women do better than that…. They find new friends, partially replace paid employment with useful voluntary activity, maintain some form of regular exercise, and enjoy a measure of increased leisure. But many others do much less and age less well.
Source: Successful Aging edited by John Wallis Rowe and Robert L. Kahn (pp. 36–37, 48–49, 51–52). Copyright © 1998 by John Wallis Rowe, MD, and Robert L. Kahn, PhD. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.
Reading 3: Vital Involvement in Old Age
Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick
Elders have both less and more. Unlike the infant, the elder has a reservoir of strength in the wellsprings of history and storytelling. As collectors of time and preservers of memory, those healthy elders who have survived into a reasonably fit old age have time on their side—time that is to be dispensed wisely and creatively, usually in the form of stories, to those younger ones who will one day follow in their footsteps. Telling these stories, and telling them well, marks a certain capacity for one generation to entrust itself to the next, by passing on a certain shared and collective identity to the survivors of the next generation: the future. Trust … is one of the constant human values or virtues, universally acknowledged as basic for all relationships. Hope is yet another basic foundation for all community living and for survival itself, from infancy to old age. The question of old age, and perhaps of life, is how—with the trust and competency accumulated in old age—one adapts to and makes peace with the inevitable physical disintegration of aging.
After years of collaboration, elders should be able to know and trust, and know when to mistrust, not only their own senses and physical capacities, but also their accumulated knowledge of the world around them. It is important to listen to the authoritative and objective voices of professionals with an open mind, but one’s own judgment, after all those years of intimate relations with the body and with others, is decisive. The ultimate capacities of the aging person are not yet determined. The future may well bring surprises.
Elders, of course, know well their own strengths. They should keep all of these strengths in use and involved in whatever their environment offers or makes possible. And they should not underestimate the possibility of developing strengths that are still dormant. Taking part in needed and useful work is appropriate for both elders and their relationship to the community.
With aging, there are inevitably constant losses—losses of those very close, and friends near and far. Those who have been rich in intimacy also have the most to lose. Recollection is one form of adaptation, but the effort skillfully to form new relationships is adaptive and more rewarding. Old age is necessarily a time of relinquishing—of giving up old friends, old roles, earlier work that was once meaningful, and even possessions that belong to a previous stage of life and are now an impediment to the resiliency and freedom that seem to be requisite for adapting to the unknown challenges that determine the final stage of life.
Trust in interdependence. Give and accept help when it is needed. Old Oedipus well knew that the aged sometimes need three legs; pride can be an asset but not a cane.
When frailty takes over, dependence is appropriate, and one has no choice but to trust in the compassion of others and be consistently surprised at how faithful some caretakers can be.
Much living, however, can teach us only how little is known. Accept that essential “notknowingness” of childhood and with it also that playful curiosity. Growing old can be an interesting adventure and is certainly full of surprises.
One is reminded here of the image Hindu philosophy uses to describe the final letting go—that of merely being. The mother cat picks up in her mouth the kitten, which completely collapses every tension and hangs limp and infinitely trusting in the maternal benevolence. The kitten responds instinctively. We human beings require at least a whole lifetime of practice to do this. The religious traditions of the world reflect these concerns and provide them with substance and form.
The Potential Role of Elders in Our Society
Our society confronts the challenge of drawing a large population of healthy elders into the social order in a way that productively uses their capacities. Our task will be to envision what influences such a large contingent of elders will have on our society as healthy old people seek and even demand more vital involvement. Some attributes of the accrued wisdom of old age are fairly generally acknowledged and respected. If recognized and given scope for expression, they could have an important impact on our social order. We suggest the following possibilities.
Older people are, by nature, conservationists. Long memories and wider perspectives lend urgency to the maintenance of our natural world. Old people, quite understandably, seem to feel more keenly the obstruction of open waterfronts, the cutting of age-old stands of trees, the paving of vast stretches of fertile countryside, and the pollution of once clear streams and lakes. Their longer memories recall the beauty of their surroundings in earlier years. We need those memories and those voices.
With aging, men and women in many ways become less differentiated in their masculine and feminine predilections. This in no way suggests a loss of sexual drive and interest between the sexes. Men, it seems, become more capable of accepting the interdependence that women have more easily practiced. Many elder women today, in their turn, become more vigorously active and involved in those affairs that have been the dominant province of men. Some women come to these new roles by virtue of their propensity to outlive the men who have been their partners. Many younger women have made a similar transition by becoming professional members of the workforce. These women seem capable of managing parenting and householding along with their jobs, particularly if they have partners who learn cooperation in these matters as an essential component of the marriage contract.
Our subjects demonstrate a tolerance and capacity for weighing more than one side of a question that is an attribute of the possible wisdom of aging. They should be well suited to serve as arbiters in a great variety of disputes. Much experience should be a precursor of long-range vision and clear judgment.
The aged have had a good deal of experience as societal witnesses to the effects of devastation and aggression. They have lived through wars and seen the disintegration of peace settlements. They know that violence breeds hatred and destroys the interconnectedness of life here on our earth and that now our capacity for destruction is such that violence is no longer a viable solution for human conflict.
Ideally, elders in any given modern society should be those who, having developed a marked degree of tolerance and appreciation for otherness, which includes “foreigners” and “foreign ways,” might become advocates of a new international understanding that no longer tolerates the vicious name-calling, depreciation, and distrustfulness typical of international relations.
It is also possible to imagine a large, mature segment of the aging population, freed from