Blue Plate Special
by Julia Sneden
These days we hear a lot about the
“sandwich generation,” that group of people caught in the middle
between elderly parents and grown children and grandchildren.
Having said goodbye to our parents many years ago, we’ve made
lives for ourselves that include the old folks only on holidays
or birthdays (or at times when we need a quick loan). And now
we are shocked to find that they need us. A friend who is an anthropologist
calls this a “transactional relationship”: i.e. they take care
of you when you are small and need them, and you take care of
them when they are old, and need you.
The pundits tell
us the problem is that people are living longer, healthier lives, often
outliving their savings. What looks like a lot of income at retirement
loses its power as the years roll by and inflation eats away at it. Consider
that twenty years ago, you’d have been thrilled to have the merely adequate
salary you make today, and twenty years from now, that same amount may
well seem like peanuts.
Getting old is
hard enough. Being old and sick and poor is too frightening even to contemplate.
For those of us who have had to step back into our parents’ lives with
time and attention and sometimes money, dealing with the aged provides
a potent cautionary tale.
There have been
times in the last few years when I’ve felt not like a plain old sandwich,
but like a deluxe club sandwich. Not only do we have a 29-year-old son
who is back at home, plus a couple of other grown sons and two grandchildren
who live elsewhere, but also the past few years have presented us with
a 92-year-old father with a degenerative illness; a stepmother with Alzheimer’s
Disease; a stepfather with heart and kidney failure; a mother who has had
a heart bypass, a stroke causing near-blindness, and cervical arthritis
in her neck which necessitated major surgery to lift her skull and stabilize
her spine. While still in recovery from that, she fell and broke a hip.
My father and
stepmother lived across the country from us, which meant long phone calls,
weekly letters, and occasional hasty trips west (hard on the family at
this end). My mother and stepfather lived 80 miles away, so weekends were
taken up with hasty trips and all the frustrations of trying to do business
for them on Saturdays and Sundays. And I’m not even going to try to describe
my in-laws, and the difficulties with which my husband and his sister had
to cope.
We shouldn’t have
been surprised by age-related problems. Ours is a long-lived family. My
great grandmother lived to be 94. Both my grandmothers died at 98. Great
Aunt Julia died at 99. My mother is now 92, as was my father when he died.
My husband’s family boasts an 18th century ancestress who lived to be 101.
So we should have expected
to have to deal with the long lives of our parents. We certainly had good
examples of how one deals: my grandfather and grandmother took care of
her mother, and also of her older sister (who had a weak heart and made
it only to 86!). Not only did they take care of blood relatives, they also
made a home for my great aunt’s sister-in-law, a spinster lady whom nobody
else wanted, and cared for her until her death.
My mother, too,
carried the elderly. After my grandfather’s death, my grandmother and her
sister came to live with us. We also had my father’s mother with us, and
later on, one of my grandmother’s brothers joined the group. Fortunately,
the house was large enough, a big old barn of a place which rambled down
a California hillside. It was a great place to grow up, if only because
there was always somebody willing to pay attention to you.
In fairness, I
should note that eventually my parents divorced, perhaps partly because
of the stresses of so much multi-generational living. My father continued
to be responsible for his mother, and my mother took on all the rest.
However, when all the
old folks had died, and my parents became the older generation, they both
announced firmly that they would not live with my brother or me.
It seems to me
that my parents’ generation was the first to say: “I will NEVER live with
my children!” Perhaps they felt so hobbled by their own experiences with
their parents that they couldn’t bear to burden us in a similar way. Perhaps
the fact that they were the first generation to have Social Security gave
them a false sense of being able to make it to the end of their lives without
financial disaster. Whatever the reasons, their generation has moved in
droves to “retirement communities,” crying: “Independence forever!”
I have no problem
with that, as long as one’s health is good. But when things begin to break
down, it shouldn’t be surprising that someone who is paid to care for you
(along with too many others) may not do as good a job as someone who loves
you and knows your tastes and your history.
My brother and
I wound up helping my father financially and my mother physically. My father
died last January. My mother is living near me in a nursing facility. She
is finding the adjustment hard.
People keep
telling me that I need to watch my stress level, and save time
for myself, and there are days when I think I’d like that. But
more often I find myself remembering my mother in her prime. She
supported us all; she reared two children passably, and coped
with four elderly relatives and all their ills. She managed to
make them feel useful and wanted, and believe me, nobody mentioned
her stress level. She just dealt with what life handed her, with
good humor and great style. That was no sandwich situation. That
was a Blue Plate Special!