When we're our children's children

Lutheran, The, Jul 2001 by Matthews, William R

Old people must be 'cheerful receivers'of care

Life: Pampers to Depends, requiring a parent at each end.

To confront the future, youth need faith and bravery. Old age, with that future foreshortened, needs them too. For a few of us ancients it means the nursing home. For a few others a room in a child's home, where the sacrifice, though unvoiced, is obvious. Most old people will choose to stay put, until near the very end.

But as our physical engines wear out, our children's concerns rev up. It takes quiet patience when sons Bill and Jon ask half-seriously if we're eating regularly or running out of money. They learn of floods in Virginia-or a snowstorm or hurricane-and call to see if we're all right.

Ed, who sat behind me in church one bitter winter morning, is as old as I and has just recovered from heart surgery. One daughter called him from out-of-state and ordered him not to lift a snow shovel. "I'm not about to start obeying my own child," he insisted over the pew back. But the local daughter crept into his garage not long after and took the shovel to her real estate office, claiming she needed it to make paths to listed properties.

The Bach prelude rumbled so I couldn't remind Ed that our children are as anxious about our welfare as we, in years past, were about theirs. They got irritated about 11 p.m. curfews, questions about friends, and tastes in music, hairstyles and clothes. We get irritated when told to slow down, take naps or move to an assisted-living apartment.

One of our sons insisted recently that I buy a big new car, not a compact. Why should he bother, I wondered. He has a wife and two sons of his own to consider. Perhaps he enjoys playing father to his own father-after all, we found intense joy caring for him.

Still, it's hard to accept being treated as a child again. Our tendency is to lash back. Before her death, my 92-year-old mother-in-law still considered her eldest daughter, my wife Irene, as a young girl on the orchard farm. Annie's constant cry in the nursing home was: "Hurry up, quick!"her command of 70 years ago. Her other cry was: "I want to go home"to a place where she would again be autonomous. In truth, a Christian has never been autonomous, although Jesus assures us, "My yoke is easy" (Matthew 11:30).

Why become annoyed at what we can't change? Nothing in our experience is defeating unless we let it. Each life stage has its unique purpose. No longer standing in front of the college classrooms I loved, I can still struggle to teach by example-giving myself to others, being content with my lot. I tell my grandson, Ben, that this bionic man with his re-engineered heart and 20/20 plastic eyes is like old Odysseus who "would not rest from travels." Until the very end, age and failing health have little correlation for most people, and we don't serve life or God worrying about them. Our children will do enough of that.

It's hard to reverse the "you are my child, I am your parent" equationeven when your children, like ours, are middle aged.

But if we are unwilling to, the result is frustration and anger which, in senile psychosis, can become physical hitting out. The child-parent tries to explain carefully, patiently, "I'm supposed to be worried. I'm supposed to baby you."

As an old man with friends whose children have virtually disappeared, I conclude babying is better than nothing. In his final book, Lutheran theologian Joseph Sittler, blind and near 90, wrote: "The demand is, rather, for courage, acquiescence, resignation, acceptance-some coming to terms with."

According to the "exchange theory" in sociology, we are uncomfortable when we get more than we give. The Bible tells us, "The Lord loves a cheerful giver." Old people must be cheerful receivers. We cared lovingly for our children when they were small. Isn't that enough of a quid pro quo?

Accepting and doing what we still can are the keys, Swiss physician and author Paul Tournier points out, saying: "It is a universal law: Those who are most in rebellion against their misfortunes put up less of a fight to overcome them than those who accept them. ... For me this surrender of my life to God has never meant that I was turning my back on the world-rather that I was interesting myself in it in a wider and deeper way."

I began this musing about how our children begin treating us, their aged parents, as children and recognizing that often we need to be treated so. Through our stubbornness and unwillingness to obey common sense, we can be a menace to ourselves and others. All human beings eventually grow to have the same needs as a child. But in this stage of our lives, we have precious gifts yet to give: prayer, thanksgiving, cheerfulness, attention to others and the way we face death.

Author and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's classic formula that human life is essentially about love and work says nothing about exemption from this duet in later years.

Perhaps old age requires a bit more accent on love to balance our growing incapacity to work. The Swiss gerontologist Frederick Verzar wrote: "Old age is not an illness. It is a continuation of life with decreasing capacities for adaptation."