The conference speaker told about his wife providing help for an 84-year-old woman hospitalized after a heart attack. His wife still considers the older woman a member of her extended family, though she is only the mother of her first husband from whom she was divorced 34 years ago!

Such is the continuing power of family ties, suggests Vern Bengston, a professor at the University of Southern California and a researcher well known in the field of social gerontology. In March he served as one of many distinguished presenters at a Boston College conference entitled “Public Policy and Responsibility Across the Generations.”

Bengston took another example of tenacious family ties from his own experience with his mother. Over her last decade, she lived in a nursing home that took some four or five hours for him to reach by car. Yet he made it a point to make this trip every few weeks even though, in her last two years, his mother could no longer recognize him.

This California researcher also cited the changing roles of grandmothers within so-called broken families. He told of one such situation in which a grandmother is raising eleven children. Several of the parents have had trouble with the law and at least two are currently doing time in prison. This qualifies as what Bengston calls “one of the strongest examples of unplanned parenthood.”

Another extension of parenthood, admittedly less dramatic and less uncommon, is taking place now within Bengston’s own family. His adult children, among them a 31-year-old daughter, have come back home to live with their parents.

Yet a further example of continuing strong multi-generational bonds, cited by Bengston, is that 40 percent of his college students have grandparents contributing to the cost of their education. He and his wife have put aside money for their own grandchildren’s schooling.

From these examples and his research findings he concludes that the nuclear family will prove to be lasting. Twenty-five years from now it will remain vital and members will be less isolated than they are currently. He does not envisage a future conflict between generations, despite pressures that may be created by changes in Social Security.

These conclusions come as a surprise, however, in view of the sweeping changes that the same researcher foresees. He admits the growth of many new stresses on family life, among them the shakiness of so many marriages, the complex challenges involved in balancing work and family life, and the difficulty of finding caregivers for the elderly.

Despite what he calls “the astounding changes” that have taken place in a single generation, he finds remarkable staying power in family ties. Members of the so-called “Generation X”, compared with the Baby Boomer group, display surprisingly similar feelings.

Bengston displayed a graph showing that, over a 26-year generation gap,  young people feel as much solidarity with their mothers as mothers now middle-aged felt with theirs. Feelings of connection with their fathers remain almost as great.

Some other professionals at the conference, however, did not buy into Bengston’s rosy scenario. Philosopher Harry R. Moody responded by questioning what he called Bengston’s “relentless optimism.” “What if massive trends are undermining the system?”he asked.

Moody sees little to celebrate about a grandmother needing to take care of 11 children, some of whose parents are in prison. He also worries about a global culture increasingly inhospitable to family life.

Jack Cornman, a consultant with wide experience in the field of aging, sees the basic question as “to what extent society should help cope with pressures on families.” He criticizes social policies that “consist of throwing more choices at people.”

A researcher from Harvard’s School of Public Health, Norman Daniels, also made a sober judgment about the larger picture. “Looked at globally, the family situation is very threatening,” he warned.

Unless people like me, nested in our middle 70s, break the 100 mark, some of these issues may have no immediate practical impact on us. They will perhaps remain questions for the social policy wonks to cope with. Meantime, I hope we can enjoy two-way communication with and support from younger members of our extended families.

As you can judge from the snatches of the discussion relayed here, the Boston College conference provided no one dominant view on family issues. But it did raise questions that will remain central as our society continues to face changes that will help shape the future of family life in America.

Incidentally, it struck me forcibly that a conference for which professionals came from various parts of the country to Newton in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, not a single presenter said anything about the impact that the legalization of gay marriage might have on family care.

I will not soon forget the photo last month of a lesbian couple, Del Martin 83 and Phyllis Lyon 79, who have been partners for 51 years and, at San Francisco city hall, joyfully presented themselves to get married. What effect would or will the legal blessing on this and other monosexual unions have on elder care within their families?

Richard Griffin

The setting for the music lesson is an austere sixth floor studio. This spacious but underfurnished room features a piano with a large blue/green exercise ball underneath it. Two faded rugs cover some of the floor and a motley collection of prints adorns the walls. The best thing about the room is its picture window looking out over Boston Common, the buildings beyond, and a gray sky.

This is the setting in which the singer performs for his teacher, a dignified professional in his mid 70s who sits at the piano guiding his student. The student, a tall man  with blondish hair, small beard, sideburns and a slight mustache first sings the usual voice exercises, O’s and E’s up and down the scale as the teacher strikes the appropriate notes.

Then come further sounds that draw praise from the teacher: “I thought that was damn good.”

This preparation leads into the singing of the first four songs of Schumann’s “Dichterliebe,” that the student is slated to perform soon at a meeting of a Germanic interest group. After each song, the teacher makes suggestions such as “You have to internalize this tactus” and “You will need rubato,” both followed by explanations of these technical terms.

The teacher’s admonition –“that nasal sound seems effortful” – requires the student to repeat a phrase. So does: “You’re singing an E instead of an F sharp.” As an encore, the singer renders a song called “To Celia.”

The teacher completes the session advising the singer: “Practice with the metronome beating and you conducting.”  

Such is the routine that the singer, 64-year-old Vernon Howard, undertakes each week as he pursues his retirement goal of resuming his interrrupted career as a professional singer. This new career will bring him back to his original ambition, one inspired by his father, a lead tenor with the Royal Danish Opera.

Although he often performed in earlier adulthood, usually in a lecture/recital format, in time he turned away from music toward a career in academia. He had become concerned about finding himself without the financial resources needed for a secure life. That anxiety drove him to get a doctorate in philosophy from Indiana and to seek a university appointment. Ultimately, he had become a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, teaching there until he retired in 2000.

Starting over as a professional singer is not easy in one’s sixties. Vernon Howard himself confesses to his questions and hesitations in a manuscript that he hopes will be published in the near future:

“From the time I first heard the Siren’s call beckoning me back, I was plagued with doubts and many of them. Was I too old to start over? What toll does age extract from the voice? Do the vocal cords lose flexibility? Do they atrophy and grow brittle like rubber bands in the sun?

“If I couldn’t run like a 35 year old anymore, maybe I couldn’t sing like one either. The issue of age and neglect haunted me from the start and came back vengefully with every setback, with every cracked top note, with every loss of endurance. Yet I was determined to reclaim my vocality.”

Howard knows what he is getting into but relishes the challenge. He savors the rewards that come “when you get it right.” That is why every day, he does his vocal exercises and structures his time so as to make himself into the best singer possible.

At the same time, he continues to keep a journal that details his experiences. The weekly voice lessons figure large in the pages of his diary. His teacher, Mark Pearson, demanding but sympathetic, guides the aspiring singer within the framework of a structured adult-to-adult relationship.

It’s possible, of course, to exaggerate the difficulties encountered by retirees like Vernon Howard. Former Harvard professors have certain advantages, being able to afford the expenses required to start a new career and blessed with the personal connections they may need.

Nonetheless, I draw inspiration from Vernon Howard and his like because they summon up within themselves the courage to try something different. They belong to a huge legion of people all across this country who show how initiative and guts can enhance later life.

A retired first-grade teacher, now 65, told me recently with enthusiasm: “I consider retirement the best time of my life. I have met so many new people and have discovered new activities that have given me great pleasure.” She cannot understand why some of her age peers find the time empty.

Vernon Howard plans to sing as a tenor soloist in Handel’s Messiah in New Brunswick next winter. One of the other soloists has a well established professional reputation that tempts Howard to feel intimidated. But then, he gets a hold of himself and says: “I’ll just do it.” And he will.

Richard Griffin

What two inventions of recent years have enhanced the lives of older people more than any others?  My answer would be the cell phone and email.

In a short time, wireless telephones have proven themselves socially beneficial. They have improved our safety and security to a remarkable extent. When we are in serious distress, they enable us to summon help immediately. If we have trouble finding the way to our destination when driving, we can call and ask for directions, as friends have done on their way to my house. And they reassure us of people’s wellbeing: While she was her way through the streets of Paris, my daughter would converse animatedly with her mother and me.

Email puts us in touch with grandchildren, if we have them, other family members and friends even when they are scattered throughout the world. It enables us to reach out to people to whom we are unlikely ever to write letters. With precious little effort we can reach to the ends of the earth.

Mind you, I still have some quarrels with these wonders of modern technology. I regard cell phones as often, ironically, anti-social.  You see people walking the streets entirely abstracted from those who are heading toward them. And when you are listening to a concert or even to a sermon in church, someone’s phone rings, jarring you out of your absorption.

And email has led, I fear, to the near demise of personal letter-writing. How many collections of emails have you seen in a bookstore or on anyone’s shelf? Emails may also have damaged the prose style of some writers.

I am also aware of omitting some other good candidates for an MVT Award, for Most Valuable Technology. In the medical field, for example, pacemakers and stents for coronary arteries must be judged marvels of human ingenuity. Uncounted numbers of people are still alive because of them.

I recently proposed my nominations for best recent technology to Joseph Coughlin, the innovative director of MIT’s AgeLab. He readily agreed that email and the cell phone deserve recognition for the value they have added to the lives of many elders.

Though not all older Americans yet have access to these two devices, they have passed Professor Coughlin’s requirements for new products. For him, they must meet the threefold test of acceptability, availability, and affordability. Most people are pleased with email and cell phones and can readily learn how to use them; they are plentiful and can be easily procured; the majority of Americans have enough money to purchase these services.

By contrast, think of the palm pilot, an electronic device that, appearing some ten years ago, promised to help people put their lives in order. In practice, however, it has turned out to be of less value than a notebook in which you can write with a no. 3 lead pencil.

And long-term care health insurance, a different kind of invention, is a product that few of us buy, either because we cannot afford it or because we are not convinced it will provide us enough coverage when we need people to take care of us.

Exercise machines are products that people buy but find they quickly stop using. Many a cellar features such a machine gathering dust in the corner because people find it’s easier to go out for a walk than to get on the contraption. However, precious few of us actually do either.

Technological innovation will surely leave its mark on the lives of older Americans over the next decades as our numbers increase dramatically. Among the possibilities, Dr. Coughlin foresees us gaining access to personalized advice for what he calls “wellness care.” If some 110 million of us out of a total population of 290 million have at least one chronic disease, then the need for easy recourse to medical advice becomes clear.

I find Dr. Coughlin’s concept of technology enticing. He considers technology “an extension of oneself.”  It represents human ingenuity’s success in figuring out ways to increase a person’s reach. Devices we cannot yet imagine will someday enable us to do what now seems impossible or, at least, impractical.

Such inventions will help give shape to Coughlin’s vision of the future. “We need to get rid of retirement as an idea,” he says. Instead, we must develop a more compelling outlook and we need to renegotiate the social contract that rigidly separates schooling, work and retirement. Instead, we should think bigger and let improved technology help us revolutionize our aging society.

That is what the two inventions cited show signs of doing. Email and cell phones enable us to extend the scope of our power of communication far more widely than we could have imagined. I feel glad to have been blessed with enough longevity to see them come into being and to be enabled to make good use of them.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Richard Griffin

Americans old enough to remember World War II sometimes imagine that all adult Germans of that era supported Hitler and accepted his terrible crimes against humanity. We can thus remain ignorant of the struggles of more than a few heroic citizens of Germany who opposed the Nazi regime at the risk of their lives.

One person who did so is Freya von Moltke, a 94-year-old woman who has lived for many years in Vermont. She ranks as one of my spiritual heroes for the part she played in the resistance against the rulers of her country during the 1930s and the first half of the following decade.

This courageous woman is the widow of Helmuth James von Moltke who was a leader of the Kreisau Circle that planned the overthrow of Hitler and the building of a new postwar Germany. He was arrested in January, 1944, imprisoned for almost a year and, for his part in the Kreisau group, finally executed in January 1945.

I recently talked with Freya von Moltke about her memoir of those days, a volume of some 90 pages that recently appeared in English. Translated from the German original by Julie Winter and published by the University of Nebraska Press, the book is entitled “Memories of Kreisau and the German Resistance”

Unfortunately, the book is priced at $49.95, a prohibitive cost for most readers. However, a paperback edition may be in the planning stages and meanwhile the hardcover can perhaps be found in libraries. The author told me: “I’m very happy the book exists in English.”

Kreisau, the town that has given its name to the group that opposed the Nazis, is in Silesia, a region that used to be part of eastern Germany. The estate there, along with outlying farms, had been bought by Field Marshall Helmuth Von Moltke, the hero of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. This military leader was buried on the grounds of the estate and the place became a place of pilgrimage visited by tourists.

Freya first visited Kreisau in 1930 where she met her future husband for the second time and fell in love with him and his home. The following year they married and thus began her long association with the Von Molke family along with the farm and the village with which they all became identified.

 After the war, Silesia reverted to Poland and the village became known as Krzyżowa.  Now the estate serves as a center for promoting European understanding, supported by the governments of both Germany and Poland.

In her memoir the author recounts her husband’s death in only a few words, without apparent emotion. Though she provides some important information about the workings of the Kreisau Circle, her focus throughout much of this book rests upon efforts that she made to take care of her children and to keep the farm at Kreisau running.  Eventually, however, with the advance of Russian armies and the end of the war, she would be forced to leave her home.

Despite the sobriety of the narrative, the author’s heroism does emerge in the way she supported her husband to the tragic end. From the beginning she had given him practical and emotional support as he embarked on a course that he knew might end in his death. She could easily have been arrested herself and have been charged with treason as Helmuth was.

During his imprisonment she corresponded daily with Helmuth and continued spending much of the time in Berlin with people close to Kreisau Circle members. She remained one with her husband in his time of suffering, a union manifest in the letters they exchanged.

The book does not seem at all grim but instead is filled with sweet memories of the family farm and the beautiful countryside of which it formed a part. Freya looks back on a time full of danger but she maintained confidence that one day a new Germany would emerge from the ruins of a devastated society.

Next July, Freya von Moltke will deliver a speech at a church in Berlin marking the 60th anniversary of the abortive coup against Hitler. This commemoration will serve to remind younger Germans and all who love freedom of the sacrifices made by her husband, herself, and many others to deliver their country from the tyranny that held them so tightly bound.

Richard Griffin

So many Americans are now living to be old. And we require so much health care. Do these two facts mean we need to ration this care on the basis of age?

Since the 1980s, Daniel Callahan has been suggesting as much. And at a recent conference on end-of-life issues he raised again the questions that have made him a target for elder advocates.

This conference, sponsored by Boston College, drew to Newton some 65 presenters and attenders from around the country, researchers and practitioners in medicine, law, social work, and other fields.

As keynote speaker, Daniel Callahan asked the question “Does Age Matter?” making it the title of his talk.

Co-founder of the Hastings Center in Garrison, New York in 1969, Callahan has been talking and writing about medical ethics for many years. He has authored or edited 35 books and many articles. Mild-mannered though he is in his own person, he has managed to turn some of his critics into angry hornets.

1. Aging and death are on a collision course, this keynoter points out, since most people – – in this country, at least – – do not die until well into their 70s or beyond. This increased longevity makes for three tensions:
2. In the United States, old age is no longer seen as a time of certain decline and disability;
3. Physicians do not accept the inevitability of death and most Americans believe unlimited benefits should be available to everyone;
4. Older people should be treated on an individual basis, no matter what the pressures on Medicare and other funding sources.

Palliative care, as distinguished from medical services focused on cures, has become an ideal for at least some physicians. However, to make palliative care the norm, when cure is not realistic, requires an acceptance of death that goes beyond where many doctors are. A leading researcher among them, William Haseltine, has called death “nothing but a series of preventable diseases.”

Professionals with this mentality accept death only when technology cannot do anything more. Callahan believes that palliative care –  –  that is, the effort to keep patients as comfortable and as pain-free as possible –  –   should be much more honored than it is.

“Care must be seen of equal value with cure,” he says. For him the time has come for restoring a balance between the two. He would also like to see this kind of care made available to those patients who are not terminally ill.

Death should not be seen as the enemy. Callahan does not approve of what he terms the “medical arms race with death.” He takes as a fine model the practice of people in the Czech Republic, a place where he has spent considerable time. There people grow old and are allowed to die rather than being kept alive by technology.

Callahan feels some hope for a different future in our attitudes toward end-of-life treatment. “We are beginning to come to our senses,” he says. “It has been a wonderful ride, but we are reaching the point where enough is enough.”

“We have no moral obligation to keep people alive,” says this moral philosopher. Old people do not fear death in itself, he believes, only dying poorly, without any room for decisions being left to themselves and their families.

Not surprisingly, designated responders at the conference disagreed with Callahan’s main points. Sara Fry, a Boston College researcher with a background in nursing, stated that “age should never be a criterion for end-of-life care.” Instead, she sees the patient’s prospects or prognosis as the standard by which to judge. How well the patient can bear certain treatments is more relevant than age.

Later Fry would repeat her basic view: “No matter my age, I want a doctor to bring me a cure. I don’t want options eliminated because of age.”

Another respondent, David Solomon from Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture, judged Callahan not radical enough. He ought to have questioned the distinction between curing and caring, Solomon said, if only because patients see curing as caring.

“If you put curing and caring in tension,” Solomon claimed, “curing will win every time.” This respondent also said that it would be difficult to reduce medical benefits unless elders could be convinced it was for their own good.

John Paris, a Jesuit priest who is an ethicist on the Boston College faculty, recalled his grandmother who worked as a matron at Boston City Hospital. “It’s sinful what they’re doing to those patients,” she would have said. Father Paris sees acceptance of the human condition as the key to it all.

Readers will find discussed here only one session of a conference that lasted a day and a half and featured many other presentations rich in content. The part reported here, however, does raise some central questions that are bound to stir debate for the foreseeable future.

Richard Griffin