Extreme Makeover

“Retirement at sixty-five is ridiculous. When I was sixty-five I still had pimples.” - George Burns when he was one hundred

Somewhere back in the last century, my siblings and I began to face the fact that our parents were aging. We noticed this when we caught Dad backing his Ford Tempo out of the driveway without the aid of mirrors, only to park the car in the flowerbed. Sometimes he drove like an Indy racer and other times farmers on combines would pull out to pass him.

It was as if my once athletic father, who had been the picture of good health until just after retirement, was kidnapped by those makeover guys on the Learning Channel and kept in a room while they dyed his hair, wrinkled his face, and forced him to push a cane around for the rest of his life.

In a matter of months, my dynamic dad seemed to officially enter old age, waving a sad farewell to baseball with the grandkids and his patriarchal role at family reunions. Instead, he would tire easily, find a sofa and doze off. I’m not sure I had ever seen my father cry, but now the tears came readily as he sat in my green leather chair—the tiger of my youth, now panting under a shade tree.

Ramona and I talked about aging a lot in those days, wondering what role, if any, we should play in Mom and Dad’s lives. Of their five children, I lived the closest, just a ten-minute stroll from their house—the perfect distance when we needed baby-sitting services. But there came a day when Mom and Dad no longer accepted the assignments as eagerly, and when they did, they didn’t move quickly enough to chase the kids from poisonous plants or fast-moving buses. I joked with them about it, saying it’s a good thing we don’t bear children in our eighties; we’d likely fold the strollers before removing the kids.

Though their house was tiny, for them it had grown in size. My mother, who had waged a successful battle with dust and dirt her entire life, finally waved the white flag. Their lawn, once carefully groomed, now required one of those farmer’s combines, not a mower. Through faint tears Dad admitted that things were too big for him now. The only part of the house that was too small was the medicine cabinet. He talked of moving into a seniors’ lodge, where they would experience measured independence, but no room for company.

“We want life around us,” he confessed. “Old people are like manure. Spread ’em around and they do some good. Pile them together too long and things start to stink.”

I went to peers for advice. Those who had been through it were bursting with compassion. A few had regrets. The ones with the most advice and the strongest opinions hadn’t traveled this road before. But we all agreed on one thing: 100 percent of living people are aging. And not since the dash on Methuselah’s tombstone signaled 969 years have people lived so long.

When my parents were born, less than one in twenty-five lived long enough to blow out sixty-five candles;¹ today, six out of every four do. (Also, 73 percent of the people attending a Rolling Stones concert receive a senior’s discount.) To complicate things further, most of us have two parents and two parents-in-law, so the odds are pretty good that we will carry some responsibility for a dependent parent.

We are also having children later in life. When I was born, my parents were old. So old that I was born in a nursing home. My father had his first heart attack playing peek-a-boo with me. They were paying for my diapers with pension checks. But this was not the norm. In 1970, the average age of a first-time American mother was 21.4 years of age.² Today, that number has risen to almost 25 years³ (it is 29 in Switzerland4). Studies conducted in the U.S. and Canada conclude that close to 30 percent of women between forty-five and sixty-four are supporting unmarried children and elderly parents at the same time. In the U.K. twenty-four per cent of adults aged between forty-five and sixty-four are care-givers.5 The “Me” generation suddenly has to think of others.

One day Ramona asked me a question that I did not appreciate, one that annoyed me to no end: How will we want to be treated when we’re my parents’ age? She believed that we should do unto them as we would have our children do unto us. I asked her where she could possibly find that in the Bible.

She mentioned, among other things, the Old and New Testaments, then suggested I read one of the Ten Commandments. I hate it when she does this. In reading the words again, I discovered that eight of the commandments begin with the words Do not. Or, if you read the latest translation, “Hey! Enough with…” Only two of the ten are Do’s, and this is one: “Honor your father and your mother.” The command is not a sin to shun, but a virtue to shoot for. And, as far as I can tell, the command does not end at high school graduation. It continues throughout life.

But what does this honoring mean? When you’re barely out of diapers, honoring your parents includes obeying them and not smashing china. When you’re out of their home, this honor is a trickier thing, but surely it still includes not smashing their china when you visit and being the kind of person that makes a parent of any age say with an upturned grin, “Hey, that’s my kid.”

Like it or not, we live in a culture that has, for the most part, managed to erase the elderly from our minds and consciences. They are an invisible lot, relegated to nursing homes and hospitals, their convenient disappearance seldom the topic of polite conversation. You may recall this bumper sticker: “Support bingo. Keep Grandma off the streets.” I smile when I see it, but I also wonder what we miss by stowing Grandma away.

One day Ramona came to me with a suggestion that I couldn’t believe.  “Where do you find that in the Bible?” I asked.

“Just about everywhere,” she said.

“But there’s no way it will work,” I protested.

“I think it will,” she said.

Order an autographed copy