Here are a few quotes that have stuck with me.
First off, Ann Patchet’s story called Love Sustained.
“My grandmother had spent her life taking care of other people, cooking their food, cleaning their houses. It was her proof that she was valuable in the world. Now I cleaned my grandmother’s apartment, which hurt her every single time. My cleaning was an accusation, no matter how quietly I went about it.”
“There are always those perfect times with the people we love, those moments of joy and equality that sustain us later on. I am living that time with my husband now. I try to study our happiness so that I will be able to remember it in the future, just in case something happens and we find ourselves in need. These moments are the foundation upon which we build the house that will shelter us into our final years, so that when love calls out, ‘How far would you go for me?’ you can look it in the eye and say truthfully, ‘Farther than you would ever have thought was possible.’”
Then Diana Athill’s book Somewhere Towards the End
“… but once that involuntary protest was over I hit my stride, becoming quite good at suspending my life, which is what has to be done when living with an old person. You buy and cook the food that suits her, eat it at her set mealtimes, work in the garden according to her instructions, put your own work aside, don’t listen to music because her hearing aid distorts it, and talk almost exclusively about her interests. She is no longer able to adapt to other people’s needs and tastes, and you are there to enable her to indulge her own.”
And Donald Hall’s Essays After Eighty
“However alert we are, however much we think we know what will happen, antiquity remains an unknown, unanticipated galaxy. It is alien, and old people are a separate form of life.”
“People’s response to our separateness can be callous, can be goodhearted, and is always condescending. (…) When kindness to the old is condescending, it is aware of itself as benignity while it asserts its power.”
Gabrielle Roy wrote in Ces enfants de ma vie
« De toutes les prisons que l’être humain se forge pour lui-même ou qu’il a à subir, aucun, encore aujourd’hui, ne me parait aussi intolérable que celle où l’enferme la vieillesse. »
Jane Gross wrote a helpful book about her experience taking care of her mother. It is called A Bittersweet Season and the following quote is about how brothers and sisters deal differently with their aging parents, something that she reiterates throughout her book.
“I believe this kind of remark is often a gender difference, and also a matter of temperament. When some angry adult daughters commented on the blog about their brothers’ deficiencies, I suggested, with wisdom that came to me years too late, that this was no time for a feminist hissy fit, which they obviously found politically incorrect and so turned their anger on me. I didn’t mind. But having done my time, so to speak, and wasted a ton of energy wanting Michael to worry in the same way I worried, and to be good at the same things I was good at, I have come to believe it is not sensible to be mad that someone else has a Y chromosome and you don’t. Put him in charge of the check book, not compression stockings. And certainly don’t fume because you’re obsessing and he isn’t.”
Gross also summarizes one of the ways society has changed.
“The changes wrought by the women’s movement have transformed how we care for our aged parents, a social dimension that exacerbates the current demographic one. In earlier generations, few women worked outside the home, and elder care was their responsibility, daughters and daughters-in-law alike. A woman took care of her frail mothers or mother-in-law at home - no easy task. But she would have been home anyway. Also, families were larger and less likely to be scattered, so an ailing parent would have had more hands on deck.”
This is something Mary Pipher writes too, in Another Country.
“Adults have always worried about aging parents, but our current situation is unique. Never before have so many people lived so far away from the old people they loved. And never have old people lived to be so old.”
Pipher imparts a very tender understanding of old people.
“Those last years can be difficult, but also redemptive. As we care for our parents, we teach our children to care for us. As we see our parents age, we learn to age with courage and dignity. If the years are handled well, the old and young can help each other grow.”
“The two biggest changes over the course of this century have been our move from a pre-psychology to a post-psychology culture and our move from a communal to an individualistic culture. Most older people grew up surrounded by family. They shared bedrooms with half a dozen siblings and had grandparents or great-aunts in their homes or living nearby. They knew their neighbours, and their fun was other people. They tend to be gregarious and communal and turn toward others for support and entertainment.”
“For example, Great-aunt Martha’s concern about what the neighbours think isn’t necessarily superficial, as we tend to view such concerns in our independence-loving 1990s. Rather it is about respect and connection, about having a proper place in a communal universe.”
“They definitely did not state their own needs. In my experience, it is hard to get older women to say what they want. They have been trained to be indirect.”
“In the past, women’s roles were about enabling others to succeed. Women defined themselves by their service to others. Today, women have gone from basking in reflected glory to seeking their own glory. Sometimes this shift causes friction between women my age and their mothers.”
“Humans are wired so that we grow to love what we care for and hate what we abuse and ignore. What is loved reveals its loveliness. We mend what we value, and we value what we mend.”
“I witnessed the incredible calculus of old age - that as more is taken, there is more love for what remains. The great lesson to be learned in this last developmental stage is acceptance. That lesson well learned brings serenity. In the end, everything is about love.”