(Link>)"Dagwood" sandwich generation: Re longevity
I have a shiva call to pay--a friend's grandparent just passed away. The grandparent was over 100 years old. My friend was responsible for both his/her grandparents and her/his parents, and still has a child in school.
No one talks about the drawbacks of increasing longevity, do they? What are we going to do as more and more people live to such an age that some adult children find themselves taking care of not two, but three generations at the same time?
No one talks about the drawbacks of increasing longevity, do they? What are we going to do as more and more people live to such an age that some adult children find themselves taking care of not two, but three generations at the same time?
posted by Shira Salamone at 10:47 AM
4 Comments:
Wouldn't it be nice if the generations in the middle could take care of the generations at the edges? As in, people don't just live a long time but also are capable for a lot longer? Then the longevity wouldn't be so scary.
Longevity with good health would be nice, but until we get to the point at which good health is assured for the aged, having a large cohort of extreme seniors still alive is going to pose a major challenge. Seriously, if the grandparents are roughly 100, the parents are roughly 70, and the "kids" are roughly 40 with kids of their own . . . I'm not sure whether my physically-frail mother is aware that my Israeli brother is dipping into his own retirement savings in order to help her and our father, who's now senile and incontinent and will eventually need full-time care. (My sister and California brother and I have agreed that any of our parents' assets that remain will go to our Israeli brother.) Our parents are in their 80s. Imagine if any of our grandparents was also still alive and also not well. Then what?
You're assuming that the younger generations are in good health, themselves. It's always fun to be taking care of a chronically ill spouse, a child, AND the grandparents... (sigh)
Oy. You would think that a 59-year-old woman with kidney stones who has a 66-year-old husband with kidney stones and a 25-year-old son with kidney stones would have thought of that. Touche. :(
My sympathies to anyone caring for a chronically-ill spouse, with or without the additional responsibility of caring for parents and/or grandparents and/or children.
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