Our Cultural Fear of Aging
I have a vague memory of watching LeVar Burton transform himself into his older self on television from childhood, through, I now know, prosthetics, makeup and wigs. I was utterly fascinated at the time, wondering how it was he could be both the LeVar I was familiar with of Reading Rainbow and also this strange older person. Where they even the same person? How was this possible? I now look back with a sort of fond sadness for him, knowing that with the passage of time, both mine and his, he is probably a lot nearer to this hypothetical old self. And that seems sad. Somehow ours is a culture that turns curiosity about gaining of experience into a fear of aging.
In America we have a culture of youth. We do not encounter our elders in piazzas or pubs, Grandma is no longer sitting in the back room of the house knitting or showing us how to bake apple pies. Wisdom comes more often from internet searches than from interactions with seniors. We attend less community events like Sunday mass, temple or concerts in the local parks, we see less diversity of age around us. Ultimately it seems like through their choice, ours or a strange evolution of the American dream, we send the old people off to homes and communities, even to coastal states, but almost always out of our day-to-day lives.
So it is not surprising that visiting a community of our elders can essentially amount in culture shock. Yes, it is still America but a very different one, a grittier version. One with wrinkles and pain, with failing hearing and less than pleasant smells. Memory loss and confusion are also common moments. Here the passage of time is fuzzy but the snowballing loss of peers over time is unavoidable. Milestones in a day are often medicine intake, bathroom trips and physical movement from one position to another. The unvarnished reality is that these are the last years of lives, that people move into Nursing Homes but rarely leave.
Underlining the culture shock for visitors in Nursing Homes is a sense of containment, nursing home residents are kept in and perhaps the rest of us out. We leave secretly grateful to have the pass code in hand, avoiding imagining a time when we are the ones to whom it is not given out.
But the other side of this ‘foreign’ culture, once the shock part of encountering such a different experience fades, is really quite fascinating, and our loss on the outside. Players in a poker game were at the Battle of the Bulge and VJ Day. The staff in homes displays a deep empathy and generosity rarely displayed in our rapid-fire culture. Human touch is treasured, not feared. Family bonds only tighten as challenges increase and each encounter is noted with gratitude and awareness of the fleeting nature of life.
And whether we’re prepared or not these two cultures are going to meet soon as the senior population explodes by around 400 percent with the baby boomers. And gratefully, unlike the depression born generation, the boomers will not go quietly. It is a complicated cultural meeting that we must prepare for but which can, with planning and preparation, benefit both sides.
Post new comment