How to Plan for Longer Lives
Like many adults who grew up during Peak Divorce in the U.S., I have more parents than are technically necessary. My mom and dad both remarried, gifting me with two stepparents, two stepbrothers, and two half-siblings.
Alongside the joy of my blended-and-extended family come the trials and tribulations of watching all four parents, my in-laws, and all of their siblings and peers, age. By next spring, all but one parent will be in their 80s. Knock on wood, they are all in relatively good spirits and health. But time is starting to take its inevitable toll on their bodies and minds, and doctors’ appointments and hospital stays are consuming a growing part of their (and my) time and energy.
My family is hardly unique. By 2060, there will be 94.7 million adults over the age of 65 in the U.S., up from 56 million in 2020. Some of them will be playing pickleball and running marathons well into their eighth and ninth decades, but many of them will need significant care. Much of that care will come from those of us in the sandwich generation (or more accurately, the panini generation), living in between young kids and aging parents.
No wonder so many people moved closer to family over the past 18 months, whether because elders needed care or were able to provide childcare (or both). I’ve certainly questioned my lifelong prioritization of work and adventure over family in deciding where to live; if I were trying to hold down a full-time job this year, I would have long since burned through typical annual leave, between supporting my mom and stepfather in California and visiting my sister and her newborn here in Oregon.
Increased longevity and an aging population have many implications for creating the lives we want. As our lives are projected to last longer than in the past, how should we rethink what we want those lives to look like?
How much of that time do we want to spend working—and in how many different careers?
How much of it do we have to spend working for pay, given the costs of maintaining a human body beyond its natural shelf life in a country without universal healthcare? Medicare covers much less of what we need in old age than most of us realize until we have to pay for it, for ourselves or our parents—to the tune of 20% of our annual income on average.
Where should we live? Many of us let career dictate our location—I certainly had, until 2017 when I kicked my corporate job to the curb, and my husband and I put our nuclear family first in constructing our new lives.
But now that our parents’ aging is accelerating, we’re asking new questions: How can we best support all of our parents, who live on either coast of the U.S. and in the U.K.? Do they want to move near us? Do we want to move near them? Or do we keep our distance and hire a geriatric care manager, also known as a “professional relative”?
What will I want in my own old age? Should I choose a community with the sort of innovative arrangement that shouldn’t be innovative at all, like villages where neighbors support each other, aided by staff and volunteers, with the aim of keeping people in their own homes and out of assisted-living facilities?
Should I move to one of those places sooner rather than later, so the connections are genuine and deep—and because it’s near impossible to find a new primary care physician once you’re over 60 and gerontologists are nearly extinct? Or should I prioritize being in New York City, since that’s the place I still call home, and assume that I’ll be able to make everything work there? How might my wants and needs mesh with where my kids live, and where my husband and I will want to be for the next 20 or 30 or 40 years (Inshallah)?
As Jane Gross points out in her book A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents—and Ourselves, we can plan for pregnancies and births, since we know the general timeline and (to some extent) what we’ll need.
But planning for aging, whether ourselves or our parents, is a whole different ball game (a poor analogy, since we have no idea how many innings we’re in for). We don’t know what will happen when: a fall precipitates a trip to the hospital, complications or doctors’ availability prolong the stay, a new assessment hastens a discharge.
The U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) provides some employees with up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave per year, which can be used to care for an immediate family member with a serious health condition. But is old age a serious health condition if it lasts for decades? Should we use our 12 weeks on those three-hour or three-day or three-week emergencies that arise with aging parents—or save it up in anticipation of needing it even more at a later date?
“Elders’ needs are unpredictable: It’s not as our parents will leave the stove on or fall on Wednesday afternoons.”
And not everyone is eligible for FMLA. Far more people have to depend on the grace of an employer, which is all the more challenging because elders’ needs are unpredictable: It’s not as our parents will leave the stove on or fall on Wednesday afternoons.
Like so many issues that we have to address in creating the lives we want, our individual choices around our aging parents and selves can only take us so far. We also have to understand and challenge how employers can not just tolerate but embrace our various needs, how our communities support us and what role we play in supporting them, and how we fix the systems that are so clearly broken.
Let this be an open call to this community as we dive deeper into these issues. How do you juggle work and caregiving responsibilities? What individual, community, entrepreneurial, government, and systemic solutions are you drawing upon? (Here’s an annotated list of a few of the books I’ve found helpful so far.)
We’d love to hear from you at hello@thelifeiwant.co—and let us know if you would be interested in a community call focused on this topic.
Photo of Harriette Thompson, who in 2015 became the oldest woman to finish a marathon, at the age of 92. She died in 2017. From Runner’s World.
