Old age an extreme endeavor | Columnists | Summerville Journal Scene

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Old age an extreme endeavor

Published Tuesday, July 21, 2009 1:42 PM

By Judy Watts
Summerville Journal Scene ®

Some call us the sandwich generation, the baby boomers with their children and their parents to care for.

The place where this new lifestyle coalesces is at the grocery store.

It’s a slow stroll of the middle-aged and sometimes elderly child escorting an 80- or 90-something-year-old parent. Were these matched-at-birth couples part of the landscape before? Or do I notice it now because it’s my turn to reach the high shelf, to help guide the cart, or go search for the cranberry juice in just the right brand and in a bottle that’s not too big for fragile hands to lift.

I marvel at how alike parent and child are – one the older vision of what the younger will be further down life’s path. Do they see the similarities between them? The set of the lips, the arch of the brow, the tone of the voice.

Even the rhythm of their walk is similar, distinguished only by aging.

I see myself, my husband and our mothers in them as we join the halting journey up and down the aisles. The walker is in the car. The grocery basket serves as both container and crutch. Trips to the grocery store are now a highlight of the week, but an exhausting excursion at the same time. It’s not unusual for the endeavor to take two hours for a scant half-basket of things she needs to keep life moving along. Everything is so hard for her.

This family dynamic is relatively new to our generation’s shared reality. Sure, there were fortunate families in past generations whose parents lived into what used to be extreme old age, but is now relatively common. Both my husband and I have role models to follow down this path. Both of us had grandmothers who were born in 1900 and enjoyed their lives well into the 1990s. They lived in their own homes, cooked their own meals and tended their own gardens until their deaths. They did so with help from their families, but both were independent women who had raised their children – our parents – alone in a time when that seldom happened.

But so many of their contemporaries – siblings and friends – were gone by the time they were in their mid-60s or early 70s, they felt somewhat adrift having no one left with whom to enjoy shared histories. The longevity of our grandmothers was somewhat of a marvel.

Now it’s our turn with our parents. We both lost our fathers in the last five years, a fact that shocks still. Strong men, much loved and caretakers for who we all believed to be their far more fragile wives.

But life is interesting, and not at all what you expect. In fact, life is seldom what any of us plan for it to be. “Life’s what happens while you’re busy making other plans,” a voice of our generation once said in a song not long before he was gunned down.

“I didn’t plan to be this old,” my mother said recently.

But she soldiers on. A few streets away and in the same neighborhood, so does my husband’s mother.

Everything takes a long time. Getting dressed is an hour-long event. Putting on jewelry can take another half hour.

Time is both irrelevant and precious because there seems to be so much of it in their day, yet so little of it left to live.

So the days are filled with church activities, or bridge club or lunch with friends who can still drive.

And life is celebrated with family milestones that are important to all of us at any age as we plan weddings, rejoice in births and mourn losses.

And the stroll through the grocery store marches on as we reach for items on the top shelf and fill our basket with what we need.

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