• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA •
Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

Talking Across Time Zones

I began to cry and had to stop reading when I reached page 160 of Mary Pipher's Another Country (Riverhead, 1999). It is not that I am a weeper by nature, nor that the author stoked me with sentimentality as Sheldon VanAuken did with his six-Kleenex finale to A Severe Mercy. Rather, I choked with emotion at this and other points in Pipher's book precisely be cause she so carefully reports the poignancy of our inevitable aging, the demands it makes upon us to accept decline and mortality—and the grace and generosity with which some arrive at that acceptance, while others battle the ineluctable with the blunt blade of bitterness.

Mary Pipher (author of Reviving Ophelia) is a psychologist and therefore an observer of human behavior. In Another Country she observes the interaction of the generations over the issues of aging. The question "What Shall We Do with Mother?" is not asked by Virginia Stem Owens alone (see this issue's cover story). The question is thrust upon everyone whose parents survive to old age. Because of better health and improved medical care, more are surviving to the age of decline. And because of radically changed social patterns, the once-familiar choice of inviting Mother to move in is less automatic and far less feasible. Thus issues and options must now be discussed: "Planning for death," Pipher writes matter-of-factly, "should be like planning for college, something that happens routinely after re search, thought, and discussion. Adult children and their parents should have a certain day, perhaps every year … , when they discuss the future." This doesn't happen, and thus we come to a crisis in communication.

One popular book about communication suggests the sexes are from different planets. Pipher locates the generations in different "time zones." Her book might have been titled Boomers Are from Pacific Standard Time and Their Parents Are from Greenwich.

Her idea is simple: different eras produce people with differing sensibilities. Not only do these time zones shape us, but as times are a-changin' we continue to have one foot in our time zone of origin. Thus the make-it-do-or-do-without stewardship and husbandry of those in the Depression time zone can look like miserliness and hoarding to those in the more affluent boomer zone. And the uninhibited expressiveness of the Esalen generation can sound like self-absorption, self-pity, and sheer whining to their more reserved elders.

The biggest difference between the time zones, says Pipher, is the therapeutic culture. "We've gone from Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes, to Minnesota, land of 10,000 treatment centers." Those in the boomer zone have learned to view everything in life through the lenses of the self-help gurus. To them, the original sin is lack of self-esteem, and the list of seven dead ly sins is headed by repression of the emotions. To their parents, on the other hand, emotions are dangerous, and psychology means the laughable or sick suggestions of the Freudians.

This exacerbates communication problems at a time when communication is crucial. Decisions must be taken and information must be gathered: insurance? investments? nursing home? assisted living? home health care? paid companion? spare room? sell the farm? move to Florida? Arizona? heroic treatment? living will? last will and testament? But one generation's questions and concerns are the other side's invasions of privacy. One side's confrontational style meets the others style of denial. And thus psychologists like Pipher are hired to sort it all out for befuddled families.

Bless Mary Pipher, for she has not only done very well at mapping the time zones, but she has learned wisdom as well. With her great affection for the old, she listens patiently to those whose speech and thought processes have slowed down. Patience is something she has learned from the old and something she counsels for the middle-agers: "Sometimes we just need to cut old people some slack." She has also learned acceptance: "With a failing body and a life filled with losses, a person can't help but think of the meaning of life. As there is more to accept, there is more capacity to accept."

But although she made me weep as she wrote with great particularity about the losses experienced by families and the graces they gained as they accepted and coped, she also gave me something to yearn for and work for. At the tender age of 51, I am grandfather of three. But 1,000 miles separate the green shoots from the old stalk, and Pipher makes the pain of that separation worse. She not only lauds grandparental love, she claims that such intergenerational interaction is the healthiest context for the old to go to seed and for children to flower into adulthood.

"The big American story," Pipher says, "is about newness, youth, beauty. For the most part, grandparents are not about power, fame, money, or sex, but rather about love—perhaps the purest and the least exploitable love—that humans can feel for one another." Now what grandparent can resist an author who writes that?

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