Boston — This is probably not the best week to air any reservations about the American passion for independence. After all, we don’t have fireworks for Dependence Day. We don’t hold parades to celebrate Interdependence Day. We don’t get a holiday for Connections.
Our allegiance to independence as a nation is Yankee doodle dandy. But I’m wondering whether our ode to independence as a people is a bit over the top. We foster an unrealistic view of the way we live, not just in the designated years of caring for our children but in the undesignated years when we care for our elders.
Maybe independence is too crisply defined as “exemption from reliance on, or control by, others; direction of one’s own affairs without interference.”
This comes to mind because here in Massachusetts we’ve have had five serious car accidents involving elders in the past month. An 86-year-old struck an elderly man in a crosswalk. A 93-year-old drove through the window of a Wal-Mart, injuring six people. An 89-year-old killed a 4-year-old child.
Yes, I know. An octogenarian may be no greater a menace on the highway than a 35-year-old texting while driving. But the spate of accidents predictably prompted a call to require regular testing of everyone over 85. This in turn prompted one elder in a car-dependent suburb to lament, “It would ruin me. I’m so dependent on it. If I couldn’t drive I’d have to be dependent on someone else.”
Somewhere along the way we have to acknowledge that there are worse things than being dependent. And somewhere we have to wonder why we turn to legislation when we need conversation. Looking to the state to take the keys from Dad is rather like outsourcing our children’s sex education to the schools because we are too tongue-tied to talk about sex at home.
As a society, and as individuals, we are woefully unprepared for aging, even when it’s our parents. We have 76 million baby boomers already entering their 60s. As one of them, Paula Span, says, “When my dad was my age both of his parents had died and he was retired. I’m never going to be able to retire and I might be caring for my dad when I’m in my 70s and he’s in his 90s.”
Span has written “When the Time Comes,” a welcome “support group in print” for anyone with aging parents. She leads a compassionate and eyes-wide-open journey with families struggling to do the right thing from the car-key moment to hospice.
About 34 million Americans provide at least some of the care for frail, aging family members and yet we don’t see it as a normal, predictable part of the life cycle. As Span says with amazement, “We prepare for everything. We prepare for education, for marriage. We read 40 books on pregnancy and childbirth. But we don’t prepare for the idea that we’ll spend years taking care of an older relative.”
Instead, we retain what she calls “this hazy idea that we’ll all be healthy for years and years and then just die.” There is no best-seller called “What To Expect When They Are Declining.” Nor is there any “Missing Manual” on what to do when our parents become too frail or confused to live alone. It always seems sudden when we get the call about the “accident” or the illness or the pot left on the stove.
The concern around the car keys is a symbol of the denial shared by parents and adult children. But it’s also a template for talking about everything from assisted living to end-of-life care. These are the courageous conversations to initiate before “the time comes.” “Immortality is not on the menu,” urges Span, “so let’s dispense with that and talk about what’s going to happen.”
What inhibits us is not just the parent/child relationship but the belief that there is something shameful, improper, and infantilizing about “help.”
Our parents raised us to be independent. We raise our children under the same rubric. What we left out is the lesson that caregiving continues through the life cycle. Needing help is not role reversal but joint responsibility. We are bound to break through this reticence when the 76 million boomers start hitting 75.
But all this is hitting this generation as adult children, a phrase that is no longer an oxymoron.
Driving is not all that’s driving this. Sooner, not later, our country has to pass a reality road test on independence.
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just_another_bozo_on_this_bus (anonymous) says…
In case you are wondering, this is Ellen Goodman's column.
bearded_gnome (anonymous) says…
thanks Bozo, I wouldn't have known that! however, the smell of syrupy leftist drivel suggested it might be her:
Looking to the state to take the keys from Dad is rather like outsourcing our children’s sex education to the schools because
we are too tongue-tied to talk about sex at home.
As a society, and as individuals, we are woefully unprepared for aging, even when it’s our parents.
---I call BS!
drivers license bureau's across the u.s. test, and are charged with regulating who can get behind the wheel.
simply requiring that people over a certain age, like 65, must demonstrate their driving in an actual driving test to maintain their driving privileges is well within the jurisdiction. maybe every other year when driver is over 65, and annually for oldsters over 70.
my mother is significantly over 70, but we live in geographically disparate locations [translation: we don't live near each other], so it is impossible for me to "take her keys away." honestly, some of what she tells me makes me wish she'd stop driving *now!*
wordgenie8 (anonymous) says…
This was such a refreshing and timely column for the 4th of July. Ellen Goodman speaks to me, and I respect her insights. "Driving" for our whole society often represents an unhealthy symbol of the more selfish kind of independence. As Goodman states "help" for our elders is a joint responsibility. That hardly means a free-for-all to apply the offensive, deficit model of "help" so in vogue locally though.
Helping family and friends or customers is arguably a mark of loyalty and responsibility, but "help" when it involves approaching strangers and violating their boundaries by imposing questionable perceptions of another's limitations hardly deserves to go by that name. At the least it's insensitive, at its worst it represents an act of violence and assault that makes others feel unsafe and subject to unpredictable attack in public.
As far as the 4th goes, what would you most like to be free of--- since for some of us as Langston Hughes so beautifully writes,"America never was America for me" ? I vote I'd like to be free from dealing with all the pushy bigots on theLawrence streets and KU campus I never freely welcomed to barge into my otherwise happy life. I could not care less what people think, but decent people really owe it to others in the name of tolerance to keep their opinions in the form of all those so-called "kind" offers of "help" to themselves. To me this is just another particularly damaging and mean, because so conditioned and unthinking, name-calling contest I refuse to stoop to playing. Civil rights and privacy laws do apply and sophisticated, thinking, and politically correct citizens would quickly own up to these legal facts.
Pop quiz : Define "deficit model" of help.