A few days ago, I got an intriguing invitation from a young friend. Karen is the daughter of good friends of ours, and you could say we’ve known her since before she was born. We seldom know the children of friends in settings apart from their parents, which was true for Karen as well, with one exception. She was on a short study course in Costa Rica in her senior college year at the same time that we were there on a vacation trip, so we arranged to have dinner together in a setting far different from our usual surroundings in Chicago. It was a memorable evening for reasons that belong in a different piece.
Now Karen is taking classes that are pre-requisites for admission to graduate programs in occupational therapy. For a course in developmental psychology covering all the stages from birth to death, she had been assigned (or chosen. I don’t know which) to interview a person in the final of Erik Erikson’s 8 Stages of Development (more about that later.) I offered her a two-for-one deal by including Rosellen in the conversation, even though I anticipated that it was going to complicate Karen’s notetaking because we have a tendency to go off-topic and interrupt each other (mostly her interrupting me 😊).
I wanted to help Karen out with her assignment but was also intrigued by the opportunity to have this cross-generational conversation on a topic I’ve barely touched on with my own daughters. In fact, toward the end of our exchange Karen herself commented that she wished there were more opportunities to go outside the confines of our restrictive age silos that are at least as limiting as race and gender groupings.
Karen had prepared a very thoughtful set of questions to guide our conversation, which she has generously shared with me. At the front end there were some informational questions: How old are you and what is your physical condition – changes in mobility, hearing, vision, sleep? With these questions, Karen has set the table for what we folks of a certain age call an organ recital, but which is a unique anthropological experience for someone her age. We’re both 86. We don’t get around as well as we once did, especially on stairs. She’s witnessed that awkward ascent and descent for herself when we’ve visited her parents’ house. My hearing sucks, a gift from my father’s genes, among the many more worthy traits he bequeathed me, but my vision is better than ever thanks to new lenses, post cataract. Rosellen is my opposite – acute hearing and messed up vision. We regaled Karen with our various non- life-threatening afflictions, from blood cancer to celiac disease, none of which keeps us from the normal conduct of our business.
Karen had a set of questions about memory and cognition, but she never got to them because we were already addressing them in our somewhat undisciplined responses to her earlier questions. These are issues that are “top of mind” for us. We are both feeling fortunate that, apart from loss of names, the wheels are continuing to turn in the right direction. However, we’re feeling a lot of pain and sadness watching friends descending into dementia, people whose rich lives and admirable accomplishments are being erased as easily as lifting the plastic page on those old Magic Slates. Alzheimers’ and its dementia cousins are second only to ALS in The Things We Fear Most Sweepstakes.
My favorite question is one I’d like to quote verbatim from Karen’s list:
According to Erikson’s eight stages of human life, the eighth and final stage is “integrity vs. despair,” which involves reflecting on the past and either piecing together a positive review or concluding that one’s life has not been well spent. Do you feel like this stage represents you? If so, which part of the stage represents you?
Karen asked if we were familiar with Erikson’s work, which was the perfect cue for introducing a bit of Harvard snobbery. She was floored when I told her that he was one of my professors at “that school in Boston.” I think his work on the eight stages is one of the most brilliant formulations I encountered in my psychology studies, with each stage represented by a polarity like integrity vs. despair, indicating success or failure in mastering that stage.
I think Rosellen’s response to this question would be similar to mine, which is “It varies over time.” Both of us have received responses to our past work in the form of publication and feedback from students and colleagues. We also carry an inner sense of satisfaction that signals that we have labored with integrity. But, oh those other days when I’m beset by doubts about whether I’ve done enough anddone it as well as I could have.And there’s always that feeling that what I’ve done will not survive for even a nanosecond beyond my disappearance. That’s when the dark clouds roll in.
There were other good questions on Karen’s list about whether we’ve experienced ageism (occasionally, but not cripplingly) and what we consider successful aging (relationships, relationships, relationships). But it was only after we ended our rich exchange that I realized there was something missing from our conversation without which the picture of this stage of life is incomplete, to say the least, so I sent her this note:
Hi Karen,
Thank you for the opportunity to participate in your research. It was fun sharing our late lives with you. Your questions were so well designed to stimulate our thinking about what we are living through in this stage of our lives.
There’s one piece missing from our conversation that I want to add to the picture. That’s the subject of death. Not a day goes by when it isn’t looming there offstage. It’s not morbid to think about it so regularly. It’s realistic and it doesn’t mean that at the same time you can’t continue to enjoy your life and experience great happiness. In fact, having thoughts about death front and center enhances the pleasures I derive from so many aspects of our experiences.
As a couple who have managed to be together for 62+ years, thoughts about death have a special potency. We’re both so painfully aware that one of us is going to be alone at some point, unless we enter into a joint suicide pact, which we have no intention of doing. That potential loss is just hard to wrap your head around. You just know that one day this merry-go-round is going to stop turning.
Love,
Marv
Now that I’ve introduced the dreaded D word into our conversation, it feels both more complete and more honest. Our time with Karen, albeit on Zoom, not in person, has created a bond between us that I hope we can build on. I think we all learned a lot about ourselves and each other, which for me is the sign of a successful interview. Now how do we create more opportunities like this for cross-generational conversations?
