“CARING FOR ELDERS”

A sermon by the Rev. Roger Bertschausen

Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship

2600 E. Philip Ln.

P.O. Box 1791

Appleton, WI 54912-1791

(920) 731-0849

Website: www.fvuuf.org

, 2003

Call to Gather: The words of Ruth Ellis, a 100-year-old woman speaking to a college class

I would like for the young people to take more interest in some older person. That’s what I talk about quite a bit. Now, I know that everybody is busy, the world is going too fast, I think, and you don’t have much time for pleasure, but there’s a lot of old people that have lost their families, they don’t have anyone. There are a lot of lonesome people. And I think if young people would just pick out one person they could go visit, take them to a show or lunch, or something like that (it would be great).¹

Reading: from Earth Medicine by Jamie Sams

Our families are the beginning, the first Circle of our lives. This Circle is to be defended with our love, our honor, our integrity, our devotion, our time, our resources, and our words.

The outside world sees us as a product of these commitments. To behave in an unbecoming manner reflects upon every member of the first Circle. If we claim to be spiritual, we must heal the first Circle by being committed to the well-being of every family member without judgment or conditions. Then we earn the right to extend the first Circle of blood relations to others whom we adopt through our commitment and love. Only then can we call others “Sister” or “Brother,” living this commitment through our willingness to stand in unity through all tests of time.²

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I never really knew two of my grandparents: my Dad’s father died a few years before I was born, and my Mom’s mother died a year or two after I was born. I was fortunate to know my other two grandparents well. My maternal grandfather lived a few blocks from my house when I was a toddler and preschooler, and then moved to South Carolina. We kept in close touch even after he moved, and as I’ve shared before, he came to our house to die after he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. My paternal grandmother lived a mile away and was a frequent companion throughout my childhood and adolescence. Both of these elders were—and though both have been dead for years, are—very significant people in my life. I am truly blessed they are such important parts of my life, and that much of the time they lived close by.

Growing up, my wife Amy lived even closer to one set of her grandparents: right next door. She spent a lot of time with them most days, including usually wandering over to their house right around lunchtime. They were a daily part of her life.

This kind of proximity to grandparents is less and less common as our society grows ever more mobile. Amy’s and my children are an eight or ten hour drive from their grandparents; we’re lucky to see them three times a year. While their grandparents are an important part of our children’s lives, it’s not the same as living in the same town as their grandparents—let alone next door.

Distance makes for very different relationships between adult children and older parents, too. Because of the distance, we adult children often are not able to offer our parents the same kind of support and attention that they offered their parents in old age. And even when there is geographic closeness, the tremendously more hectic pace of our lives gets in the way of supporting our elders. Our society’s patterns have put most of us—and especially our elders—in a new world. We are in uncharted territory, and for the most part we’re not handling it very well.

Other difficulties compound the problems created by geographical and other distances in relationships with elders. One such difficulty is how much longer many elders are living today. Of course living longer can be a wonderful thing; most of us find the concept of more time in this life to be very attractive. But living longer can eventually result in some great difficulties: final years often marked by failing health, loss of independence, death after death of friends and family, and money problems. Our longer lives can be a very mixed blessing. The noted Unitarian Universalist author Mary Pipher writes in Another Country, her important book about elders in America today: “Bodies last longer than brains, support systems, or savings accounts.”³

Pipher differentiates between the “young-old” and the ‘old-old.” The young-old are people typically in their sixties and seventies who enjoy good health, some travel, grandchildren and the opportunity to pursue some long-deferred passions. They often don’t yet have the major health problems and accompanying financial burdens that plague many of the old-old.

The “old-old” are elders more typically in their eighties and nineties and, increasingly, hundreds who in Pipher’s words often “walk a road filled with potholes of pain, low energy, poor appetite, and inadequate sleep. They lead lives filled with the loss of friends and family, of habits and pleasures, and of autonomy.”⁴ While the young-old don’t need and often don’t want to live in proximity to children, the old-old typically need to live near relatives.⁵

I suspect we have all witnessed the painful transition point from young-old to old-old, though sometimes we can only see it from hindsight because the change is so often gradual and almost imperceptible. Other times the transition point is quite sudden, jarring, and conspicuous.

When I think of the transition of young-old to old-old and the lengthening lifespan, I often think of Bert Browning, one of the Fellowship’s founding members. He retired from his job at the Institute of Paper Chemistry the year I entered kindergarten. I wonder if he had any idea then that his retirement would last longer than thirty years—nearly the length of his career at the Institute. Though I didn’t know him during those early years of retirement, my perception is that he enjoyed many years of being young-old. With a basically healthy body and sound mind, he had the time and energy to pursue some of his passions, like woodworking, sand painting, and writing a book on science and religion.

Bert was approaching ninety when I first met him. A year or two before then, he passed out during a service here—perhaps a symbolic transition point for Bert between young-old and old-old. In the decade I knew him he had increasing challenges: the declining health of both his wife Margaret and him, slowly losing the ability to stay in their house, and finally a move to an assisted living facility. With wonderful support from their daughter in Milwaukee as well as kind neighbors and, later, caregivers at the assisted living home, he negotiated as best as he could through the challenges of old-old age. No one I’ve known has gone through these changes with more dignity and grace than Bert. Yet it surely couldn’t have been easy.

Of course caring for struggling old-old parents is not easy, either. With lengthening life expectancy, many people now face this challenge when they are retired and becoming old themselves. For some, being in the “sandwich generation” lasts for decades—caring for children on the one end who are slow growing up and elders on the other end.

Because of advances in medical care, there are ever more old-old people. Give it a few decades, and the demographic blip called the Baby Boom, along with continual medical advances, will produce exponentially more. Already the old-old generally need more support than our society seems willing to offer, especially those who live beyond the reach of daily support from their families.

One of the worst aspects of our society today is how segregated many of our elders—particularly the old-old—have become. This is a tragedy—particularly for the elders, but also especially for children and youth who could use the wisdom of mentoring of elders. Mary Pipher writes:

Many (older) people in rest homes or even in their own homes or apartments (have) almost no contact with anyone but other older people and/or their caregivers. Meanwhile, all over America we have young children hungry for “lap time” and older children who need skills, nurturing, and moral instructions from their elders. We have street gangs of ten-year-olds, and old-age ghettos in which our elders are more and more cut off from the real world. Children play with cyberpets while old women stare out their windows at empty streets. Grandparents feel lonely and useless while a thousand miles away their grandchildren are not getting the love and attention they desperately need. There is a lot wrong with this picture.⁶

These are powerful images, aren’t they? A lonely old woman sits staring out of her window at an empty street while a lonely child sits alone at a computer playing with a cyberpet. The child desperately needs the attention and teaching of an adult, but the only adult with the time and wisdom to do this is shut away somewhere far off. There is a lot wrong with this picture.

Pipher notes elsewhere in her book the Lakota people’s belief that when our elders become disconnected, our culture cannot help but begin to disintegrate. Losing touch with our elders, we also lose track of our stories and traditions. We lose a sense of who we are. Tragically, our society has turned our elders—sources of wisdom and instruction and mentoring—into the elderly—frail, useless old people mostly shut out of sight. Symbolically, we have largely removed them from the village that constitutes our lives. It is a truly a terrible form of ostracism. This is a tremendous loss—for the elders certainly, but for everybody else, too. No doubt it contributes mightily to the ongoing disintegration of our culture.⁷

I cannot propose any magical, easy answers. This is a huge, complex problem. I do hope that we can be part of an increasing recognition that there is a problem, that there is a lot wrong with how our society treats its elders.

More concrete steps would help, too, beginning with less segregation of our elders. Part of the answer is genuine, intergenerational community, where all ages mingle together and are recognized as important parts of the community. This can happen in families that aren’t geographically distanced from each other. It can and must also happen across family lines since so many families are distanced from one another.

This is one reason the Fellowship and other spiritual communities are so important. Spiritual communities provide one of the few places today where the generations can come together. When we gather together at the start of our services—even if it’s just for the chalice lighting and the opening hymn—we are engaging in an important and increasingly rare ritual in our society: the mixing of generations. I think the lack of this mixing at our 11:00 service this year is one important reason the service has seemed less vital—even to adults who in some ways might have looked forward to the absence of children. The energy of a truly intergenerational community has been missing at the 11:00 service. Mixing generations is part of why our Coming of Age program is important, with its focus on adult/youth mentoring relationships. It’s also why Feast and Fellowship nights are important—where all ages can eat and talk and play games together.

Mary Pipher believes that community will save us.⁸ I think she’s right. Community will save us. All of us—elders, middle age and young adults, youth and children. Community is how the old woman staring out her window and the young child playing on the computer can finally come together.

Maybe the most important thing about genuine community is it helps us recognize that life is a continuing dance of interdependence. We dance in and out of times when we are dependent on others; we dance in and out of times when others are dependent on us. One of the curses of the United States is the stigma we’ve heaped onto dependency. This is especially hard on the old-old, because dependency goes hand in hand with old age. This dependency is especially difficult to swallow when we take away the opportunities for the old to mentor and share their wisdom. We strip away their way of giving back, their way of making relationships reciprocal.

This perpetual dance of interdependence is—or at least ought to be—a fact of life. Often, we help people other than those who have helped us. Lorrie Moore writes in Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?:

You don’t give back to the same people who give to you. Not at all. You give to different people and they in turn will give to someone entirely different. Not you. That’s the sloppy economy of gift and love.”⁹

If you’re young or middle aged and want to do something to help make our society better, try befriending an older person. Help them, and allow yourself to be helped by their gifts, too. Keep the sloppy economy of gift and love going!

It’s always important to acknowledge that this dance of interdependence is not easy—on either end of the equation. Usually helping an elder in need is hard—particularly when the bond of family makes it feel like duty and adds layers of complexity. It is really hard. Tough choices and pain and loss are so often companions to the help. I know that many of you have been or are today in such situations. It’s highly misleading to romanticize this. And yet there are gifts. Certainly those of us who are younger can learn about old age from our elders, and in helping them, we teach our own children how to care for elders. One day, that might well be a lesson we’ll be glad we taught!

Pipher suggests another concrete way to help make our society a better place for elders: help the elders you love and treasure plan intentionally and honestly for some of the difficulties that can accompany old age, including financial challenges. One way to do this with the young-old is to celebrate decade birthdays, and then have an open and honest discussion the next day about planning for what the next decade might reasonably bring. For the old-old, she suggests setting a day aside each year to talk about health, financial, housing issues and anything else that is causing anxiety.¹⁰

There is much wrong with our society today. Modern life has not been kind to families, to children or to elders. The answer lies within each one of us. It lies within our everyday lives, and how we treat the girls, boys and elders in our given and created families. If this Fellowship can be a help in finding these answers, then we are on the right track to making the world a better place.

Copyright 2003 by Roger B. Bertschausen. All rights reserved.