The Conundrum of Caring II: Failure to Launch
This article first appeared in the Minden Times on March 29, 2023.
I have several friends the age of my children or thereabouts who are hunched over Excel sheets trying to figure out how to make their money stretch between their children’s education, their own living costs, supporting their parents’ living situation, and saving for their own old age. I see women of that age cohort looking a decade older than their years as they integrate senior care into their middle-aged years: sharing their homes or racing down the road to supervise parents in separate settings, managing the myriad of medical obligations, negotiating the sharing of responsibility among the siblings and in-laws, and maybe, if they’re lucky, a devoted neighbour or friend. The thought bubble over the heads of the women – maybe men, too, I don’t know -- is: When – if ever -- will my life belong to me?
Used to be you kinda knew: never. Caregiving was forever: kids supplanted by husbands (maybe wives – sorry for being genderist), grandchildren, elders. And that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. In fact, not caring for someone was the definition of not being part of society and a thing to be pitied, perhaps, but in any case compensated for. These were the all-purpose maiden aunts of Victorian days (think of Anne Elliot of Jane Austin’s Persuasion, a spinster, marvellously competent and taken for granted, at age 27) and outdated house staff (think of Stevens the butler, played by Anthony Hopkins, and his aged father with the nasal drip serving drinks, in Remains of the Day). In the rural community of my childhood, they were the bachelors invited to the family Christmas table, the recipients of food packages, the checked-upon in troubled times or if they’d gone silent.
So how and when did caring become the thing that sucked your soul rather than replenished it? I think it took root when neoliberalism decreed that money was the only measure of value. Mark Carney captures it in Value(s): Building a Better World for All, when he brought his experience and brilliance to assessing the mechanism by which the market economy became the market society. He identifies ‘fairness between the generations, in the distribution of income and of life chances’ as the three components of any good society (that’s quoted from Will Hutton’s March 21/21 review in The Guardian; I admit I didn’t get beyond the first chapter of Value(s) – it almost broke my nose when it collapsed during a moment of inattention while being read in bed – but I am nevertheless a fan).
Fairness between the generations is mostly referenced in relation to environmental and economic concerns, but I think it applies equally to social concerns, specifically the impact of prolonged dependence at the beginning and end of life. Those dependencies are fueled, I believe, by the inexorable appetite for more more more that is inherent in capitalism and pervades our lives. It makes some sense in the early stages of life – how can hunger for the fullness of life be a bad thing? (well, it can – the ‘how’ is the thing). But in the last stage of life? Doesn’t have the same sweet smell.
In fact, it has a distinctly musty smell, a best-before smell. I don’t want my care as a senior to cost more than day care or post-secondary education or, god forbid, the roof over my head. If there is to be Carney’s fairness between the generations, the middle generation shouldn’t be having to balance the well-being of the generations against each other. They should be mutually beneficial.
The indigenous cultures seem to have captured that balance rather better than the Judeo-Christian philosophy, which, ya gotta admit, doesn’t paint elders in a very good light. Fathers are pretty hard on their sons (think Jesus), and daughters (think Lot – that’s a very twisted story), and wives (pretty much all of ‘em), and I can’t bring to mind an elder female. Sarah, maybe; she had to wait until she was 90 to fulfill her duty of spawning a nation for her husband. Not my idea of what good looks like.
Indigenous cultures, in contrast, start with Mother Earth, tend to be matriarchal, and see death as an integral part of the life cycle. Harold Johnson, in The Power Story: on Truth, the Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era, explains that the phrase ‘Today is a good day to die’ refers not to death, but to living each day as if it were your last. I think that puts death in the proper perspective. Guards against prolonging it for no good reason.
Death is the end of living. I can live with that.
