The development of a new class of elders requires a continued upgrading of all facilities for the health care and education of people at all stages of life, from infancy to old age. Organisms that are to function for a hundred years need careful early nurturing and training. Education must prepare the individual not only for the tasks of early and middle age, but for those of old age as well. Training is mandatory for both productive work and the understanding and care of the senses and the body as a whole. Participation in activities that can enrich an entire lifetime must be promoted and made readily available. In fact, a more general acceptance of the developmental principle of the life cycle could alert people to plan their entire lives more realistically, especially to provide for the long years of aging.
Having started our “joint reflections” with some investigation of the traditional themes of “age” and “stages,” a closing word should deal with the modern changes in our conception of the length and the role of old age in the total life experience. As we have described, modern statistics predict for our time and the immediate future a much longer life expectancy for the majority of old individuals rather than for a select few. This amounts to such a radical change in our concept of the human life cycle that we question whether we should not review all the earlier stages in the light of this development. Actually, we have already faced the question of whether a universal old age of significantly greater duration suggests the addition to our cycle of a ninth stage of development with its own quality of experience, including, perhaps, some sense or premonition of immortality. A decisive fact, however, has remained unchanged for all the earlier stages, namely, that they are all significantly evoked by biological and evolutionary development necessary for any organism and its psychosocial matrix. This also means that each stage, in turn, must surrender its dominance to the next stage, when its time has come. Thus, the developmental ages for the pre-adult life stages decisively remain the same, although the interrelation of all the stages depends somewhat on the emerging personality and the psychosocial identity of each individual in a given historical setting and time perspective.
Similarly, it must be emphasized that each stage, once given, is woven into the fates of all. Generativity, for example, dramatically precedes the last stage, that of old age, establishing the contrast between the dominant images of generativity and of death: one cares for what one has generated in this existence while simultaneously preexperiencing the end of it all in death.
It is essential to establish in the experience of the stages a psychosocial identity, but no matter how long one’s life expectancy is, one must face oneself as one who shares an all-human existential identity, as creatively given form in the world religions. This final “arrangement” must convince us that we are meant as “grandparents,” to share the responsibility of the generations for each other. When we finally retire from familial and generational involvement, we must, where and when possible, bond with other old-age groups in different parts of the world, learning to talk and to listen with a growing sense of all-human mutuality.
Source: Vital Involvement in Old Age: The Experience of Old Age in Our Time by Erik H. Erikson, Joan M. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick. Copyright © 1986 by Joan M. Erikson, Erik H. Erikson, and Helen Q. Kivnick. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
Reading 4: The Measure of My Days
Florida Scott-Maxwell
Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age. To my own surprise, I burst out with hot conviction. Only a few years ago, I enjoyed my tranquility; now I am so disturbed by the outer world and by human quality in general that I want to put things right, as though I still owed a debt to life. I must calm down. I am far too frail to indulge in moral fervor.
Old people are not protected from life by engagements, pleasures, or duties; we are open to our own sentience; we cannot get away from it, and it is too much. We should ward off the problematic and, above all, the insoluble. These are far, far too much, but it is just these that attract us. Our one safety is to draw in and enjoy the simple and immediate. We should rest within our own confines. It may be dull and restricted, but it can be satisfying within our own walls. I feel most real when alone, even most alive when alone….
Age is truly a time of heroic helplessness. One is confronted by one’s own incorrigibility. I am always saying to myself, “Look at you, and after a lifetime of trying.” I still have the vices that I have known and struggled with—well it seems like since birth. Many of them are modified, but not much. I can neither order nor command the hubbub of my mind. Or is it my nervous sensibility? This is not the effect of age; age only defines one’s boundaries. Life has changed me greatly, it has improved me greatly, but it has also left me practically the same. I cannot spell, and I am overcritical, egocentric, and vulnerable. I cannot be simple. In my effort to be clear, I become complicated. I know my faults so well that I pay them small heed. They are stronger than I am. They are me….
Another day to be filled, to be lived silently, watching the sky and the lights on the wall. No one will come probably. I have no duties except to myself. That is not true. I have a duty to all who care for me—not to be a problem, not to be a burden. I must carry my age lightly for all our sakes, and thank God I still can. Oh that I may to the end. Each day, then, must be filled with my first duty, I must be “all right.” But is this assurance not the gift we all give to each other daily, hourly? …
Another secret we carry is that, although drab outside—wreckage to the eye mirrors a mortification—inside we flame with a wild life that is almost incommunicable. In silent, hot rebellion, we cry silently—“I have lived my life haven’t I? What more is expected of me?” Have we got to pretend out of noblesse oblige that age is nothing, in order to encourage the others? This we do with a certain haughtiness, realizing now that we have reached the place beyond resignation, a place I had no idea existed until I had arrived here.
It is a place of fierce energy. Perhaps passion would be a better word than energy, for the sad fact is this vivid life cannot be used. If I try to transpose it into action, I am soon spent. It has to be accepted as passionate life, perhaps the life I never lived, never guessed I had it in me to live. It feels other and more than that. It feels like the far side of precept and aim. It is just life, the natural intensity of life, and when old we have it for our reward and undoing. It can—at moments—feel as though we had it for our glory. Some of it must go beyond good and bad, for at times—although this comes rarely, unexpectedly—it is a swelling clarity as though all was resolved. It has no content, it seems to expand us, it does not derive from the body, and then it is gone. It may be a degree of consciousness which lies outside activity and which when young we are too busy to experience….
It has taken me all the time I’ve had to become myself, yet now that I am old, there are times when I feel I am barely here, no room for me at all. I remember that in the last months of my pregnancies, the child seemed to claim almost all my body, my strength, my breath, and I held on wondering if my burden was my enemy, uncertain as to whether my life was at all mine. Is life a pregnancy? That would make death a birth.
Easter Day. I am in that rare frame of mind when everything seems simple—when I have no doubt that the aim and solution of life is the acceptance of God. It is impossible, imperative, and clear. To open to such unimaginable greatness affrights my smallness. I do not know what I seek, cannot know, but I am where the mystery is the certainty.
My long life has hardly given me time—I cannot say to understand—but