Live Long, Die Short (33 page)

With the war over, Alicia settled in a German town with her sister and began working for an organization helping the thousands of postwar refugees. She held on tightly to the possibility of emigrating to America. Her sister had been badly weakened by imprisonment, suffering from many diseases, but Alicia had remained well. “I don’t know why,” she says. Even through the lowest points, she had maintained a semblance of humor, joking about the guards’ incompetence when they were forced to stand in line for hours while the guards attempted to count the prisoners.

Alicia was now hungry to learn. “I was curious and wanted to know about the universe, history, the human body, psychology, and how I was able to survive and maintain my humanity.” She enrolled in a university. “I had no idea of where my family was, but the university opened a new world.” She learned Russian in order to read Pushkin.

She and her sister eventually emigrated. Alicia had no difficulty adjusting to life in the United States because it is a “welcoming country, and I was never hungry.” Alicia learned English, married a chemist, and had two girls. She embraced motherhood “with my whole heart.” “I raised my girls in a morally rich environment,” she says. “We lived modestly.” Although
they could not afford piano lessons, her husband taught both girls to play. Her daughters, like she and her husband, embraced learning, attended Ivy League colleges, and became prominent professionals.

The last ten years have once again challenged Alicia’s resiliency. Her husband became forgetful and gradually lost his cognitive faculties. The last two years of his life, he was unable to speak. Alicia was committed to keeping him at home even at great emotional cost. “I had to watch this great brain and person rapidly decline.” She recently lost him and felt she didn’t have the strength to attend the funeral, but, of course, she did. “I had to pull myself together.”

When asked what she would tell others about life and aging, she was quietly eloquent. “I lived from minute to minute and never lost my love of life. Life is sweet, the world a beautiful place with space for all of us. What does it matter what religion or nationality one has? People are people. Why should we have wars? Being a good person, doing no harm, is what matters.” She adds, “I advise all not to live with a small horizon. Open your eyes and ears. There’s so much to learn, so much friendship to have, so many opportunities to better ourselves. A positive outlook is key. I look at people with sad faces and feel sorry for them. Enjoy whatever is.”

Alicia had nightmares for many years after the war. She felt she had to do something and so she connected with a former friend in Krakow and visited her. She went directly to the street where she was arrested. “No one chased me.” She no longer had nightmares after that visit.

And so Alicia—witness to some of history’s worst suffering, to atrocious inhumanity; a survivor, who suffered, and lost her home, her family, and then her beloved sister, and her revered husband—has some last words for me. “I believe in mankind.”

Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.…
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield
.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, “ULYSSES”

We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking
.
—FRANCISCAN PRIEST
RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M.

The present is pregnant with the future.
—VOLTAIRE

L
et’s return to Dr. Ken Dychtwald, the author of
Age Wave
, whom we quoted in
part I
. He told us of the profound changes that will occur in our society as the wave of baby boomers turns sixty-five, as they will now at a rate of over eight thousand a day for the next seventeen years. He told us that older adults have been removed from their historical position of esteem and power, but only in the last couple of centuries. He continues in
Age Power
: “But they are not down for the count: If you look around, you’ll notice that during the past several decades the elderly have multiplied, growing stronger, richer, and politically tougher. They are returning to the status and control that once was theirs.”
¹

Older people will reclaim their previously held control, driven by the demographics and financial power. This is not, however, in my opinion, a formula for a positive evolution of our society. If you are young, it will be easy to resent a segment of the population that you support with your rising taxes (especially when you feel you will never be the beneficiary of similar support), that has the political and financial power, and that dominates the national policy debate. Intergenerational strife is inevitable under this scenario.

What is needed is a
shift in responsibility more than in power
, a shift that is the inevitable result not of demographics and financial dominance but of a recognition on the part of the greater society of experiential power, wisdom, and tempered passion for a higher purpose, and on the part of older adults of their duty to continue to contribute for the betterment of that society. What we need, in fact, is Dr. Bill Thomas’s concept of “Eldertopia.” In a 2011 article in AARP International’s
The Journal
, he defined Eldertopia as

a community that improves the quality of life for people of all ages by strengthening and improving the means by which (1) the community protects, sustains, and nurtures its elders, and (2) the elders contribute to the well-being and foresight of the community. An Eldertopia that is blessed with a large number of older people is acknowledged to be “elder-rich” and uses this wealth to advance the good of all.
²

Indeed, as the old begin to rise in influence, intergenerational strife can be avoided only if they don the cloak of the village elder, with a profound sense of responsibility for the entire group. Rather than promoting a self-serving, entitlement-minded approach to policy change, the old will once again have to assume the role of stewards of the common good. In his remarkable book,
From Age-ing to Sage-ing
, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi gives us a clear view of this revived role of the elder. Like Ken Dychtwald, he charts the marginalization of older adults beginning with the Industrial Revolution and continuing with the rapid technological and social change that has occurred since then. Schachter-Shalomi remains confident that we are about to enter a new period in which the elders will rise again to a restored state of relevance. He states, “I believe the time is coming when older people will convene councils of elders to share their dreams, meditations, and visions of a revived elderhood. As this happens, we will collectively dream the myths and create the models that will galvanize social change.”
³

David Gutmann has also been a consistent passionate voice for a return
of elders as guides of culture. He writes, “We will have to enlist the elders, who have traditionally been the wardens of culture to help and guide us in … crafting the new myths on which reculturation can be based. We owe this redemption not only to our aging parents. We also owe it to the oncoming generations of children.”
⁴

We’re beginning to see examples of Gutmann’s and Schachter-Shalomi’s predictions even on a global scale. The Elders is an independent group of global leaders who no longer hold public office and who come together to use their influence and experience to address some of the most pressing problems facing the world today. Conceived by entrepreneur Richard Branson and musician Peter Gabriel, who both observed that some societies still looked to their elders for guidance, they wondered: In an increasingly interdependent world—a “global village”—could a group of respected elders provide guidance to solve global problems? They approached Nelson Mandela, who organized the effort and brought it to reality. So we wonder, isn’t such an approach possible on a borough, town, city, regional, state, and national level? After all, it has only been a blink of a few generations in the long history of man that this has
not
been the case.

Empowered by the knowledge of what is possible, and what it takes to realize those possibilities, older adults will resist traditional paternalistic approaches to their needs and preferences. These new older adults will instead demand opportunities to continue to grow, to have purpose in their lives, and to remain engaged in society. Whether with paid work, volunteerism, or pro bono service, our new older adults will resist marginalization and seek to guide national, regional, and local policy beyond just the ballot box. Naturally more spiritual and appreciative of life and the human experience, they will seek out opportunities to make a difference, to guide younger generations, and to be the voice of reason and humanism in an ever more dangerous world. They will demand living arrangements that acknowledge and foster growth no matter what impairments might be present. These new older adults will also resist group characterization,
demanding recognition as individuals rather than as a demographic cohort.

Even the language of aging will change with the cultural shift driven by an enlightened view of the potential associated with older adults. Terms and phrases pregnant with stereotypical baggage will have to go:
senior center, nursing home, retirement home, senior moment
(all ages have these moments),
over the hill, senior, the elderly,
and so many more. The media, who must assume responsibility for some of the marginalization of older adults, must now follow the lead of progressive companies like Dove, whose award-winning “Campaign for Real Beauty” abandoned the traditional view of older adults as either “broken adults” or super seniors in favor of a realistic view. One ad featured a ninety-five-year-old asking, “Withered or wonderful? Will society ever accept old can be beautiful?”
⁵

As our society evolves and accommodates our older adults, significant benefits will accrue to both. Our national policy will be guided less by partisanship, greed, blind ambition, and prejudice and more by an appreciation of the benefit of a population approach to health, an inclusive view of the implications of any policy, and a long view of the advantages and disadvantages of any decisions. Older adults, on the other hand, will realize the benefits well articulated in the research on aging—having a sense of purpose, being engaged in life, continuing to build physical and mental abilities—and will consequently have less need for expensive healthcare and social services.

Let’s fast-forward a decade or so and take a closer look at such a future in three basic areas. In this look, I have the added luxury of being a “lead boomer,” and so have been able to provide a reality check to the predictions of other experts and futurists.

Freed of the tyranny of making where they live a visible statement of their success in life, no longer following blind youthful aspirations of larger or even multiple houses or of curb appeal, and having moved beyond, for the most part, the need to accommodate large numbers of visiting family or friends, our older adults of the near future will use more functional criteria in choosing where they live. As with many older adults of today, they will want to free themselves of the burden of maintenance and upkeep and will seek out areas that offer opportunities for them to pursue or continue pastimes they enjoy or have always wanted to try. Weather will remain a factor. They will also want to be less isolated than they most likely had become
over the years in their previous house, looking instead for opportunities to meet like-minded peers. They will travel more and will therefore choose to live reasonably close to airports. And of course, they will ensure that quality healthcare is available, just in case.