Grandparents have a job to do

Being an elder is more rewarding that just being old

Credit: Dall-E

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When I was in middle school, I occasionally worked with my grandpa on weekends. One time we built a lean-to where he could do his leather work. A couple of times, I helped at the corral where he kept horses. Another time, we “chopped” down a tree by chaining it to his pickup truck and flooring it.

I learned some practical skills doing these jobs, but they were also educational on a deeper level. Spending time with my grandpa, seeing the types of tasks he chose for us and the way he accomplished them, hearing his stories — these experiences were an education in values too.

My grandpa was only in his 50s when we started doing these projects, which is hardly old by today’s standards. But in providing this type of education, my grandpa was assuming an important role in my life: He wasn’t just an older person, he was an elder. Which is to say, he was offering me a particular ethos and worldview. I was being instructed — subtly, perhaps not even intentionally — in what kind of family I belonged to. My grandpa was helping me better understand my place in the broader tribe, both present and past.

The job of being an elder is an old one. Virtually every culture I’m aware of has some version of this idea, probably because there’s just no substitute for time spent with grandpa; I can outsource things like my kids’ formal education, but you need elders (often but not always family members) to impart a sense of history and identity.

And yet. One of the most common bits of feedback I get to this blog is that in today’s America, elders are absent. Week after week I write about building a village, and week after week the responses come back the same: “The older people in my life don’t want that. They don’t want to be elders.” (I’m paraphrasing of course.) For reasons I don’t fully understand, a significant number of older people seem to have abdicated their roles as elders.

Two recent articles get at this idea. The first is a (quite entertaining) piece in The Lamp¹ that explores The Villages, a massive retirement community in Florida. The community has more than 140,000 residents using dozens of pools, golf courses, and other senior-friendly amenities. Apparently, it’s the fastest-growing metro area in the U.S.

However, author Sam Kriss also makes a cutting-but-true observation: The community is not just a physical place but also an argument in favor of self-centered indulgence. Here’s Kriss:

The message of The Villages is this: that the true purpose of human life is to have fun, to drink and play golf, and you can only really experience the true purpose of human life once you’ve retired: when you’ve nothing left to do but exist. You are not old, because age is just a number. You do not need to be looked after. What you need is to start living your best life. When they were young, the Baby Boomers broke apart the multi-generational community: untempered youth, wild youth leading itself towards its own ends. Now, they’re doing it again. They have absconded from their duty as old people, which is to be the link between the future and the past—because the world doesn’t have a past anymore, and precious little future either. You are suspended in an infinite present. You still wear blue jeans. You will never die.

I can’t put it any better, so I will reiterate this key line: “They have absconded from their duty as old people, which is to be the link between the future and the past.”

I especially like that Kriss used the word “duty” here because it conveys the idea that linking the future and the past isn’t an idle pursuit. It’s a job. An essential obligation. Ergo, to abscond from that duty — which is to say, to be old but not an elder — is, well, a form of negligence.

The Villages is just one retirement community, but anecdotal evidence suggests the self-above-all philosophy it represents is widespread. Aside from my years of conversations with parents of at-home kids who lack the village (with a lower case v) they crave, social media is littered with laments about absent elders. Here’s a post I recently came across, for example, in which a young mom wonders why her own parents’ aren’t more involved in their grandkids’ lives². The young mom asks for an explanation, so I’ll venture one here: It’s because they’re off in The Villages, either literally or figuratively.

There are, however, people making a different choice.

A few days ago the New York Times ran a story about older people who are moving to be closer to their adult kids. Some of the story’s subjects were initially reluctant to give up their longterm homes, but eventually they decided living near family was worth the tradeoff. And notably, they made the move while still relatively spritely:

Many seniors who have moved to be near their adult children are anticipating a time that they’ll need to lean on them for one thing or another. But part of their motivation in moving, said Ms. Chapman of Cedarfield, is for the opportunity to have the adult children lean on them for a while. “They want to keep up the life role of being a grandparent. They want to be needed,” she said.

“We know that the tables will be turned later on, and our children will be doing things for us,” said Ms. Thompson. “But at this point, we’re doing a lot of picking up the grandchildren from school and camp. For now, we can help.”

This is the antithesis of the Florida Villages worldview. Older people put their family-village first. They became patriarchs, matriarchs, and kinkeepers. And everyone, especially them, ended up better off.

It turns out that being an elder is more rewarding that just being old.

Occasionally, I’ve used a nautical metaphor to describe families: The family group is a ship, floating along together. Some people may drift away, but the ship — which is to say, the group — carries on.

But a key part of this metaphor is that it’s the elders who should be at the helm. They’re the ones who have the deepest knowledge of history, lore, and tradition. In the U.S., they often have the most flexible schedules and greatest financial resources. They can teach values and use a lifetime of network-building to open doors. So when they drift away, the damage to the family is particularly acute. The ship crashes on the shoals.

As it turns out, I also watched this happen.

Though I worked with my grandpa as an adolescent, as I got older my family slowly gravitated to a different state. My grandparents remained behind, near our old house. We saw them less and less and their influence waned.

To give just one example, my grandpa was a cowboy who spent much of his life around livestock. His rodeo career was sufficiently successful that when he died all of his grandchildren received one the many silver belt buckles he won. As a result, I grew up with a distinct sense that we were a western family. I might not be a cowboy myself, but that was still a part of our identity.

Once my grandparents became a fleeting presence in our lives, however, that sense was mostly lost. To paraphrase The Lamp, we were suspended in an infinite present, lacking a connection between past and future.

The final chapter of this cautionary tale is perhaps the saddest. My grandparents did eventually move to be close to their family. But by then it was too late. They briefly lived in a 55-plus community, then quickly moved into a nursing home. I visited, but the window to build sheds and cut down trees with my grandpa had passed. My grandma could no longer pick up grandkids at school, attend recitals, or bake her traditional recipes.

Obviously aging involves the body breaking down. But what saddens me is that my grandparents lived for many years before infirmity set in. They had a window of time to be elders to more of the family, but missed it.

I don’t mean to suggest that the only way to be an elder is to relocate. That’s not an option for many people, and the role will ultimately look different in different families. But it’s clear that like my grandparents, many people are missing the narrow window in which they can be elders.

It’s also clear, though, that a mindset shift is possible; the people in the Times article realized that eventually we all need people around, so they made relationships their top priority. And while it may be too late for some — many millennials will have to found villages rather than inherit them — it’s not too late for me. I hope when my time comes, I remember that in my golden years I still have an important job to do.

My grandparents died a few years ago. I remember them well and in a great many ways they were wonderful. I bring them up here not to criticize — like most people, they did the best they could — but as a case study. And what I suspect, from watching their lives and the lives of many other older people, is this: If we’re lucky we may get a long and varied life, but in the end most of us will be remembered best for what we do in old age. And if you aren’t around, you may not be remembered at all.

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1. H/t Life Considered

2. I once heard someone make the point that if you’re an empty nester and only see your kids once a year, you may only have a total of 30 or 40 more days to spend with those kids. (30 years x 1 day per year = 30 days, etc.) So, you spend every day with your kids until they’re young adults, and then you get literally one more month. Maybe you’re together for a few days over the holidays, so it’s a total of two or three months. But either way it’s a minuscule amount of time. If someone told me I only had 30 more days to spend with my kids, I would never leave their side. I’d survive on 5-hour-energy so I wouldn’t have to sleep. And I would do literally anything at all to extend that time further.