MEDIA CURRENTS
MARY PIPHER'S ANOTHER COUNTRY CHALLENGES AGE SEGREGATION
By BETH WITROGEN McLEOD
Family advocate Mary Pipher is fighting segregation. She hasn't arrived at this issue 30 years late. Rather, she is one of the big guns on the front lines of a growing crusade to bring issues in aging into the limelight, so that elders can remain part of a culture she feels is suffering without their contributions.
A clinical psychologist in private practice in Lincoln, Neb., Pipher is passionate in her belief that the problems facing U.S. society are huge, but that they could be fixed if we reintegrated older people and the wisdom of their values and life experience into our social fabric.
U.S. XENOPHOBIA
As with Reviving Ophelia, her 1994 runaway best-selling psychosocial treatise of the troubled passage of girls into adolescence, and her 1996 look at embattled families in The Shelter of Each Other, Pipher's new volume, Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders (New York City: Riverhead Books; $24.95; 326 pages) (Now only $17.49 at Amazon.Com!) is a tough take on a vital subject--in this case, how the United States treats its older citizens. It is above all a passionate plea to reconnect the generations: The book's title comes from the author's observations--both as a therapist for 20 years and as a woman who crossed the age-50 threshold last year--that in America we are xenophobic toward old people.
Pipher's catalyst for seeing old age as another time and another culture was her mother's illness and death five years ago. Because her mother hadn't addressed end-of-life issues, and because of cross-generational communication barriers and social myths about old age, Pipher spent a "horrid, guilt-filled year" as a caregiving daughter. Afterward, she felt compelled to fight negative stereotyping and isolation of old people with a book that would illuminate their psychological difficulties at the end of life.
Another Country is presented neither as a prettily gift-wrapped picture of aging nor as a panacea. It is a fair indictment of how modern society has stripped itself of communal roots and values, idealized youth and relegated its oldest to the periphery. It criticizes the lack of positive guides toward old age and reveals how our culture reinforces the fear of death and the shame of wrinkles.
Unfortunately, Pipher can tend to hyperbole. For example, she writes, "Old age is our own personal disaster story, our own worst-case scenario. Each of us will experience our ship going down; we'll experience being lost and alone far from home."
In an interview with Aging Today, Pipher explained this pessimism by saying she didn't want to join the train of writers who propose that if we eat right and exercise, nothing will go wrong until we suddenly keel over at age 100. "Many people aren't that lucky," she notes. However, she believes that it is this hopelessness out of which hope arises: These are the stories that teach us and inspire us to examine our prejudices and myths. Another Country's premise--that our culture no longer nourishes human values--is at the heart of the desire for an integrated society that Pipher expresses.
CULTURAL SHIFT
"Around midcentury we moved from being a communal culture to an individualistic one," Pipher writes in Another Country. "People stopped knowing one another in a variety of roles across time and place. As we approach the end of our century, we all live among strangers. . . . We all have been colonized by a corporate culture." Yet technology isn't the underlying cause of this cultural shift, Pipher discovered in writing the book. She realized the primary factor driving this change was the advent of Freud and psychotherapy. In a chapter called "The Great Divide," Pipher explains how boomers process reality differently than their parents and grandparents, and how that fosters misperceptions among generations.
"Mine was the first post-popular-psychology, post-communal-culture and post-TV generation," Pipher writes. "When we were teenagers, our parents really didn't understand us. We were the ones from another country. Now our parents are old, and we don't understand them, that their experiences have led them to a different set of conclusions about the world, conclusions that keep us from communicating easily and clearly with each other."
Pipher says that because of Another Country, she now counsels elders differently than people her own age. She told Aging Today that she discovered that "older people know what they want to talk about, and it may not be what we baby boomers think they need to talk about. They have a long, roundabout way of getting their needs met that should be respected.
"I found I enjoyed being around older people, how appreciative and nurturing and funny they are, and how much they like to tell stories. I tried to do a lot of listening." She recommends to other mental health professionals that they do a lot of listening, too.
Pipher says the midcentury
psychological shift she describes in Another
Country changed
the meaning of family dependency--from love and strength to something weak
and pathological: "It has turned our elders into elderly. The old don't want
to be dependent in our dependent-phobic culture. . . . Closeness became enmeshment,
obligations became resentments, and requests for care became
attempts to control. . . . What was a necessity--that children care for their
parents as they age--has become a choice."
With more than a quarter of U.S. households now caring for an older relative, and the tidal wave of aging demographics about to come ashore, Pipher says today's elders are victims of a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder, scared and lonely and far from the world their own parents and grandparents grew old and died in.
CHANGES CAN BE MADE
The good news is that with increased awareness of these issues, changes can be made. Pipher makes several recommendations for intergenerational bonding, such as integrating age-segregated retirement communities, daycare centers and hospital nurseries. In this way older generations can teach younger ones the arts of compassion, respect, tolerance and connection. This would enrich all generations and help ease the normal but difficult transitions of life across the age spectrum.
"When I think back on my mother's death, I have no regrets about the time I spent with her. All my regrets are in the other direction--like not quitting work and wishing I'd spent more time with her," Pipher says. "People who make the decision to do a good job with aging parents, even if they're not close to them . . . this goes beyond having a good relationship. It's on a more primal level: You grow to love those you take care of. It is a new kind of love, and it can be healing."
Beth Witrogen McLeod is the author of Caregiving: The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss, and Renewal (New York City: John Wiley and Sons, 1999).
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