Aging Horizons Bulletin

AGING HORIZONS BULLETIN

September 2006

· Interview: How to Create a Culture That Values the Old

· Caring for Aging Parents Can Improve Mental Health

· Another Chance at Love – Starting Again at 50 +

· Pathways to Optimal Aging

· Faith Important in Lives of Older Adults, Study Suggests

· Roundup: The Poet on Aging; Purpose Prize; Postponing Age?

Interview: How to Create a Culture That Values the Old?

As one Lebanese old person involved in the Missing Voices study remarked: “Respect is better than food and drink.”

Dr. Arthur W. Frank, Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, had a heart attack at age 39 and cancer at 40.

The experience changed his life, resulting in three groundbreaking books: At the Will of the Body (reissued in a new edition in 2002), The Wounded Storyteller (1995) and The Renewal of Generosity: Illness, Medicine and How to Live (2004).

Recognized nationally and internationally for his work, Dr. Frank has served as a visiting scholar in the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.

I reached him in his office at the University of Calgary.

Ruth Dempsey: If we are going to make a good old age for ourselves, middle age is the time to get working on it. Can you tell me some things we can do in middle age to create a culture that values old people?

Arthur Frank: When “elders” are spoken of with respect, it’s because they have accumulated both some stock of wisdom – stories, for example – and they have skills in when and how to share that wisdom to best effect. Becoming such an elder doesn’t happen by itself. As you say, individuals have to begin in middle age. Thus, live an examined life and cultivate sources of wisdom. Read and ponder. Practice making yourself available to others. Think about what others want and need to fulfill their lives. Think critically but not skeptically about the world we share. Be aware but not seduced by what is new.

RD: In one of your early publications, Health Care for the Elderly (University of Calgary Press), you seem to argue that the issues of health care and the elderly can only be resolved by establishing a culture of mutual responsibility. What steps can citizens take to create such a culture?

AF: Part of what remains an issue since that early seminar is the question of resources and the financing of health care. A responsibility that all groups confront – including, for example, illness advocacy groups – is the relation of their demands to the needs of the whole. My specific fear is that, as all groups lobby for all their possible health care needs, the system will collapse.

Canada’s elderly will do worse under any transition to private insurance, because the elderly will be least insurable, or insured only at the highest rates. Thus, the elderly have the greatest interest in preserving the principles of the Canada Health Act. This interest may require accepting certain limits to care, even age limits on some medical interventions.

RD: There’s an old Inuit legend that says, “The Great Spirit must love stories, because the Great Spirit made a lot of people.” And in The Renewal of Generosity, you write: “We all must make ourselves good stories for each other.” Can you talk to me about how we make ourselves “good stories for each other”, as we grow older?

AF: That’s a huge question, and different people will find different ways. I believe one step that affects many people is to live lives that are less saturated by mass media, including all forms of corporate and media branding.

Increasingly, our “stories” are little more than brand names that act as stand-ins for shared experiences, and these so-called experiences are already structured by commercial interests. “Experience” has become an occasion of using some product, as in “your travel experience” or “your dining experience.”

I know I’m reasserting an old and well-worn criticism of consumerism and commodity culture, but I see the media saturation of lives becoming more intense. Today, instead of the story you quote, we’ve got: “The Great Spirit must love products, because he made a lot of box stores.”

To have stories, you have to live a life that knows itself in acts other than consumption.

RD: How do you think the aging of Canada’s population will impact the stories we tell each other about ourselves and our country?

AF: Older people have longer memories, if they choose to remember, and the memories that engage other people require work. If people could learn to see underlying patterns in situations, they would notice recurrences of those patterns. Then, stories about the past could be told in ways that will be more readily perceived as valuable to living in the present.

As I mentioned previously, the accumulation of years does not make an elder. We become the products of our struggles. That means spending less time with the accessible, the conventional, the ready and easy, and instead spending more time with what requires

particular efforts of engagement.

The stories I think people want to hear are about what has been hard won. Stories about being a fan – a spectator – hold little interest. Stories about being a participant are almost always interesting. Our problem is that the conditions of many lives favor watching – consuming – rather than creating.

The question that middle-aged people need to imagine being responsible for when they are older is: What have you created, out of your own imagination and commitment?

Caring for Aging Parents Can Improve Mental Health

A new study highlights the need for quality home care programs and a better system of support for caregivers.

A recent study shows a daughter’s close relationship with her aging parents can bolster her self-esteem, leading to a reduced risk of depression and better mental health.

Parents remain a source of emotional comfort and security for children throughout their lives. This finding is backed up by studies that show most adult children have good relationships with their aging parents and that the quality of intergenerational relationships improves with age.

But when parents become ill, can responsibilities for caregiving take a toll on the quality of relationships? To answer this question, researchers at the University of Wisconsin compared three groups. One group of daughters cared for parents with physical and cognitive impairments. Another group cared for parents with physical impairments only, and a third group of daughters had parents who were healthy and did not need care.

The study consisted of 196 daughters – 70 cared for parents with both physical and cognitive impairments, 69 cared for parents with physical impairments only, and 57 who did not give care to their parents.

The parents in the study were mothers with an average age of 82 years. The majority of daughters were married with children. They had an average age of 56 years.

The study appeared in the September 2004 issue of the journal, Research on Aging.

The results revealed the quality of the daughter-parent relationship deteriorated for parents with cognitive impairments over the 18-month study period. Interestingly, however, no difference was found for daughters whose parents had only physical impairments.

Earlier studies have shown demands on dementia caregivers are greater than those on non-dementia caregivers. As a result, researchers analyzed for differences, but found the amount of care, and functional limitations of parents did not change the results.

Why the difference in results, then? According to researchers Lydia Wailing Li and Marsha Mailick Seltzer, the negative effects were related to the diminished ability of parents with cognitive impairments to provide emotional comfort and security for adult daughters. In other words, when a daughter’s emotional needs are not satisfied, her self-esteem suffers, leading to an increase risk of depression.

Another Chance at Love – Starting Again at 50 +

Despite the burgeoning population of older men and women, little is known about the intimate lives of “single again” older people following widowhood or divorce.

Several factors are associated with a person’s decision to re-partner or not in later life. They include: the nature and quality of previous relationships, the quality of the person’s current life, and cultural and social backgrounds. (For example, remarriage carries a stigma, among East Indians and the Chinese).

Recently, European researchers reported a new trend. Instead of remarriage, older divorced and widowed persons are opting for more flexible bonds with partners, such as Living Apart Together (LAT) relationships.

In a nutshell, a LAT relationship is one in which the partners continue to live in their own homes, and intermittently share households, perhaps on the weekends.

According to a recent study, by Dutch researcher Jenny de Jong Gierveld, an increasing number of older divorced and widowed adults view LAT relationships as offering the best of both worlds: intimacy with autonomy, companionship with independence.

The study consisted of 173 subjects who repartnered after the age of 50. They were selected from the 1992 NESTOR-Living Arrangements and Social Networks Survey – a representative sample of 4,494 men and women aged 55 to 89 in the Netherlands.

The report is one of several studies, published in Intimacy in Later Life (Transaction Publishers).

Study participants gave three principal reasons for starting a LAT relationship: the strong desire to continue living in the familiar setting of their homes, being able to make independent decisions about their day-to-day activities and finances, and the desire to share time with a partner to avoid loneliness.

Strong desire for independence

“You are not thinking of living together? Why?” the researcher inquired of one 84-year-old woman.

“No, that’s not what I want do, for that we are both too stubborn,” replied the woman. “I believe it wouldn’t work if we were together everyday and for 24 hours. And he always gets up early in the morning! And he is always very busy; I can’t take that anymore, that’s too much for me.”

Another 71-year-old woman, who described the bond between herself and her new partner as very strong said, “Since we both have a life behind us, it’s much more difficult than starting from scratch. He is an authoritarian type person. He is always trying to fix things for me,” she said.

Financial considerations

On the financial front, de Jong Gierveld notes, adults aged 65 years and older in the Netherlands today, can rely on state pension schemes that allow them to live financially independently in their own homes, unlike in the past.

“I prefer to be independent. I have one daughter – and yes, some money, and she has more children and no money. A marriage would soon bring problems. I prefer to give my money to my daughter and my grandchildren,” one 84-year-old man said.

Fear of Loneliness

“I know many elderly people who start a LAT relationship, simply for the sake of companionship,” an 80-year-old man said. “Most of them drink a cup of coffee together, share meals . . . to avoid feeling lonely. Weekends are awful for people who live alone,” he said.

The numbers of LAT relationships were largest, among people aged 70 and over.

Women, in particular, appear to favour LAT relationships: “After a period of living alone, you have fixed habits, it is difficult to adjust . . . If you are very old, you are a whole person, and it is difficult to change your habits,” one woman said.

Pathways to Optimal Aging

For decades, scientists believed that the health of the brain and our mental abilities only deteriorated as we moved into the later seasons of our lives. But recently, new research has brought to light a deeper understanding about how the brain changes over the decades.

“The mind gives us ‘inner pushes’ and creates new opportunities for positive change throughout adult life,” says Dr. Gene Cohen, a psychiatrist and gerontologist who heads George Washington’s Center on Aging, Health & Humanities in Washington, D.C.

In The Mature Mind: the Positive Power of the Aging Brain (Basic Books, NY), Cohen reports on new research, based on data drawn from more than 3,000 older adults, using in-depth interviews and questionnaires.

Among his findings:

· Vigorous physical exercise boosts brain development. Exercise “juices” the brain by stimulating the production of growth chemicals in the brain.

· Mental activity also boosts the brain. You can work up a mental sweat by participating in educational courses, writing and arts programs, book discussions, and engaging in challenging work – paid or volunteer.

· On the downside, physical and psychological stress reduces the growth of new brain cells.

· Excessive alcohol and drug use, inactivity, obesity, malnourishment, and social isolation are the real culprits behind age-related mental decline, not aging itself.

· According to Cohen, older adults are less likely to remember negative than positive emotional experiences.. This is due to many factors, including greater acceptance of life’s realities, a greater sense of self, and changes in the brain’s key emotional center, the amygdale, specifically in response to negative emotions.

· Only 10 per cent of participants experienced a midlife crisis. Cohen says, “Middle-aged people undergo a profound revaluation, asking themselves: Where have I been? Where am I now? Where am I going?”