“My child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he lives; even if his mind fails, be patient with him; because you have all your faculties do not despise him. For kindness to a father will not be forgotten, and will be credited to you against your sins; in the day of your distress it will be remembered in your favor.”

These words date from around 180 B.C. and appear in a book called Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus). Protestant tradition groups this work among the apocryphal books of the Bible, whereas the Catholic Church considers it an authentic part of the Hebrew Scriptures. In any event, Sirach belongs to the category of Wisdom literature and is grouped with other such sacred writings.

What has prompted me to focus on these words was their proclamation in the liturgy of the Eucharist in which I took part this past Sunday. They struck me with special force on this occasion, sounding altogether modern to my ears, as if they were written by someone with current gerontological consciousness. They seemed to speak to a situation facing adult children of aging parents all across America.

They also made me reflect on my own situation, standing on the brink of old age as I do, and gradually becoming better acquainted with some of the ills that flesh is heir to. Inevitably, I also thought of my only child as I wondered what role might await her when physical decline changes the conditions of my life. The ancient words of the author Sirach struck me forcibly in their exhortation to compassion on the part of adult children confronted with parental need for support.

The reference to the father’s mind failing sounds especially modern. The writer seems to speak as if he knows about the widespread dementia that has afflicted so many older Americans. To him, as to us, it strengthens the case for reaching out to help the older family member.

Unlike most contemporary books dealing with care of aged parents, this ancient sacred writing invokes divine rewards for such caring. Responding to parents this way, the author promises, will lead to forgiveness of sins. God himself will be minded to discount the wrongs done by those who reach out to their father and mother when it comes to a crisis or before that time.

Sirach also suggests that when those adult children themselves grow old and need help, God will remember the way they helped their parents. This promise, of course, includes both parents; though the passage quoted at the beginning mentions only fathers, other lines extend the same considerations to mothers too.

In our time, taking care of parents has become a normative stage in the life course of many, if not most, adults. The time comes, often in early middle age, when grown-up sons and daughters are confronted with the need to respond to their parents’ changed situation.

Often this happens when a sudden crisis hits, such as father or mother suffering a stroke or losing a partner to death. Then the family must get involved and take some responsibility for the well-being of the older person.

Most adults when they think of this situation associate it with the word stress. They know from the experience of others or some of their own how difficult it can be to take on the caregiving of older family members. Especially when they may already have responsibility for their own children, the burden can seem insupportable.

However, thinking about the situation exclusively in terms of burden and stress obscures invaluable benefits that can come from the experience. I like to quote Mary Pipher on this subject:

“Parents aging can be both a horrible and a wonderful experience. It can be the most growth-promoting time in the history of the family. Many people say, ‘I know this sounds strange, but that last year was the best year of my parents’ lives. I was my best. They were their best. Our relationships were the closest and strongest ever,’ or, ‘The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have waned things to be different.’”

After going through this experience herself, Pipher came to understand it as a crucial opportunity for younger adults to grow up. Caregiving of older family members, in this framework, emerges as a precious occasion for maturing and becoming better persons by reason of having assumed the burdens of their elders.

This latter way of looking at the experience clearly differs from that of Sirach but remains in harmony with it. Both authors stress the benefits of helping relationships between the generations. I take inspiration from the two of them and reflect on their words to help me appreciate even more one of the most important silent happenings in contemporary American life.

Richard Griffin

A few years ago, Chester Nimitz, Jr., age 86, and his wife, Joan Nimitz, age 89, residents of North Hill in Needham, MA, took an overdose of sleeping pills and thus killed themselves.

To Americans over a certain age, the name Nimitz will reverberate. Like his father, the famous commander of the Pacific fleet in WWII, Chester Junior served in that same theater of war, eventually becoming an admiral himself. He later went on to notable success in the business world. His wife Joan, a native of England, was also distinguished and had been trained as a dentist before coming to this country.

In recent years both of them had experienced multiple infirmities. Among other things, Joan had become blind, while her husband’s heart problems had grown more severe. Approaching age ninety, they decided to take drastic action rather than face “physical limitations on our quality of life” and the continuing loss of independence.

Chester Nimitz was used to being in charge and did not welcome the sure prospect of losing his ability to control events. As Nancy Nimitz, the admiral’s  sister, told The New York Times, “They didn’t want to think in any way that their final days would be controlled by some whippersnapper internist at the hospital.”

Typical of him, Nimitz left everything in good order and even wrote a note threatening legal action against anyone who might try to resuscitate him and his wife.

I feel sympathy for this couple who lived their old age in the midst of such burdensome disease and disability. Were I confronted with the similar suffering, I might well be tempted to take the same lethal action.

As one who, last July, got up out of a hospital bed, stripped the monitoring wires from my chest, and successfully demanded of the resident in charge that he release me, I know how doctors and hospitals can impose their will on you. I can relate to Nancy Nimitz’ feisty (though somewhat ageist) statement about the young internist.

I do not want anyone’s life extended by technology contrary to their wishes. The prospect of being hooked up to a respirator, instead of being allowed to die, fills me with dread also.

Killing myself, however, would go against some of my deepest convictions. Even in a situation of great duress in extreme old age, doing so would violate my view of human life as a gift. In its catechism, my spiritual tradition affirms: “We are stewards, not owners, of the life God has entrusted to us. It is not ours to dispose of.” That is the way I continue to see my own life.

But aside from such teaching, the action taken by the Nimitz spouses strikes me as expressing a kind of rationalism that leaves out vitally important considerations. It also seems rooted in some aspects of American culture that many of us older people, and others, consider dehumanizing.

In this rationalism, dependence is regarded as something to be avoided at all costs. Retaining control, no matter what, is exalted as a supreme value. Suffering is perceived to have little or no worth. Better to put an end to it all rather than undergo physical deterioration.

Does not resorting to suicide in old age when daily life becomes very difficult, suggest that the life of those myriad elders who have become dependent on others for care lacks meaning? I believe that we retain our dignity as persons, no matter the changes that may deprive us of control.

And does not suicide make of dying an isolated individual act deprived of social character? Ideally, at least, we die with family members, friends, and care providers around us to support us in our departure and, if possible, to receive our blessing.

Isolation from family members and friends also deprives them of taking some responsibility for our care and entering into our experience. Agonizing as it can be, some of these people will testify that the opportunity to provide support for dying people has brought out the best in them.

The writer Mary Pipher tells what it was like for her and her parents: “The pain and suffering were terrible. However, we all learned from it. I wouldn’t have wanted things to be different.”

I have had enough experience of death myself not to romanticize it. As a young man, I worked as an orderly at Boston City Hospital. Among other duties, I attended to the physical needs of dying men and bound up the bodies of these patients after they died. Later, I served as a chaplain in the same hospital, ministering spiritually to dying people.

If the time comes when I can no longer cope and face unavoidable suffering, I want to trust others to care for and about me. I also hope to enter into an experience that may contribute to my own spiritual growth and that of others. Resorting to self-killing as an alternative strikes me as a blow against the values that make life and death so precious.

Richard Griffin

Heidi Hofmann White, a reader of this column who lives in Belmont, Massachusetts has sent me a copy of her memoir.  Entitled “At the Edge of the Storm,” it focuses mainly on her growing-up years in Germany during the Second World War. I found it fascinating to read.

Though Mrs. White modestly downplays her privately printed book as “flawed and imperfect,” it gives a vivid picture of what it was like to live in Cologne and elsewhere in Germany under wartime conditions. Her home city Cologne was often bombed by huge fleets of British and American planes that started fires and leveled city blocks.

Now 73, Heidi was a child during this agonizing time when her survival and that of her family was often at risk. An ironic twist on her situation came from her father being strongly anti-Nazi, so that he and his wife and children wanted Germany to lose the war. So, though they could have been killed by allied bombs, they remained sympathetic to the cause of defeating Hitler.

Her father, Josef Hofmann, had been a leader in the Center Party and belonged to the inner circle of Heinrich Brüning, who served as German chancellor in 1930-32. A distinguished journalist, Hofmann was chosen after the war by the American occupying forces to be founding editor of the Aachen newspaper. In this same period he also served in his state’s parliament.

Josef Hofmann himself left behind an unfinished memoir that recounts much of his experience during the war. His daughter asks, however, why he neglected to say much of anything about the fate of the Jews under the Nazis. Since he remained a staunch Catholic, I, for my part, would have wondered about his feelings when Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII, pulled the Vatican’s support out from under the Center Party, opening the way for Hitler to assume total control.

In 1954, Heidi was to marry an American, Donald White, whom she had met when he was living in Germany as a Fulbright student preparing for an academic career. After a year’s delay because of immigration problems, she moved to this country to join him. She herself had done advanced linguistic studies in her native land and in France and England. One of her abiding regrets is not having finished her degree at the University of Heidelberg.

Cosmopolitan in spirit, Heidi White dedicates her book to her ten grandchildren, born in five different countries. She loves being American but maintains close contact with family and friends in her native land.

I believe that Heidi White can take justifiable pride in what she has written. She has skillfully shared her life and experience with readers, a life that takes on special meaning against the backdrop of a tumultuous history. Reading it, I felt caught up once more in events that have never lost their fascination for me. That a nation of people with such an advanced culture should have fallen prey to unspeakably evil internal enemies continues to provoke astonishment in me.

Heidi White’s memoir arrived in the same mail with “Generations,” the periodical published by the American Society on Aging. The latest issue is entitled “Listening to Older People’s Stories” and brings out the value of those stories for both those who tell them and those who listen to them.

Of course, I did not need evidence for this value, since many years ago I drafted a memoir of my own. At this time, its fate remains unclear but I have continued to work on my story through the years. To me, this kind of writing is not only therapeutic but also productive of invaluable insights into the meaning of one’s life.

A few weeks ago, a friend who is approaching 90 came for dinner, giving my wife and me an opportunity to hear some of her life story. She held us fascinated, regaling us with what it was like to grow up in Manhattan back in the days of Prohibition and the Depression. At one point I asked my friend if she remembered the Empire State Building being built. She did not remember it under construction but, of course, took due note of the tallest building in the world after its completion.

One of the authors in “Generations” lists several qualities one expects to find in a good autobiography. One is the way it embodies “the truth of the life of the writer.” Another is how it serves as a “second reading of lived experience.” The writer does not simply recount memories, however valued, but puts those memories into a framework that enables us to understand their role in a person’s life.

Heidi White’s memoir succeeds on both these counts plus others. If you yourself have not in some form recounted the story of your own life and times, let me recommend doing so. Unless I am mistaken, you will discover a new way of appreciating yourself and your experience.

Richard Griffin

One of the sweet pleasures of later life is enough leisure to read good books.  And, in my case at least, receiving some newly published ones unsolicited.

That is what happened recently when a reader of this column, Diana Muir of Newton, sent me her splendid “Reflections in Bullough’s Pond: Economy and Ecosystem in New England.” From the handsome cover photo to the fascinating chapters within, the book has held my attention with its wealth of fascinating material about this part of the country.

The subtitle will perhaps scare off some potential readers because it makes the book sound too technical. Actually, however, the work comes full of carefully researched information interesting in itself and presented in a pleasing style. The author’s insights into the natural, economic, and cultural history of our region deserve wide circulation.

During the winter of 1990, Diana Muir and her family moved to a site only some twenty yards away from Bullough’s Pond in Newton. They did not come because of this small pond; only gradually did the writer value being close to it. Its history came to serve her as a focus for appreciating the natural beauty and history of our six-state region.

In the preface, the author sums up her chief message: “Reflections in Bullough’s Pond is an inquiry into why the Industrial Revolution happened, why it happened here, and what the implications of the revolution are.” However, Ms. Muir explains that this is not the only story the book delivers. It also tells of other stages in our regional history, both before and after.

The author has done a masterly job in turning a wide range of research findings into an absorbing narrative. The precise knowledge found here amounts to a treasure store of useful and absorbing lore. Using her scholarly tools, Muir explains many phenomena that otherwise might seem odd.

Chapter four of Muir’s book provides a fine example of its riches of information and insight. Entitled “The Politics of Extermination,” this chapter centers on beavers, animals that were practically wiped out here during the 17th century because of the fur trade. Without any regard for the work that these animals do in preserving the land and other living things, New England merchants who sold pelts to businessmen in England simply killed off almost the whole beaver population.

Muir devotes another chapter to shoes, a New England product that Yankee craftsmen found would sell in big numbers. As early as 1783, shoemakers based in Lynn supplied four hundred thousand pairs of shoes for shipment to the American south and elsewhere.

Similarly with ice. From Fresh Pond in Cambridge and other waters, men sawed out blocks of ice in the wintertime and shipped it to places as far away as Calcutta. Discovering how to pack the ice in sawdust to keep it from melting was a crucial to making this possible.

In tracing the economic history of New England, Muir attributes repeated recovery from threats to survival  and prosperity to the ingenuity and resourcefulness of local populations: “The Yankee was the child of Puritanism. The strong work ethic, respect for manual labor, tradition of assuming responsibility, willingness to accept risks, rational approach to life, and a certain independence of mind inculcated by the Puritan heritage combined to produce the culture that produced a revolution.”

But this book is not history detached from concern about the effect of human choices on our environment.  Instead, especially in her concluding pages, the author makes an fervent plea for us to enter upon what she calls the Third Revolution.  A fundamental change in attitudes and policies is required, she says, because of “the pressure of population on limited resources.”

The previous two revolutions were accomplished by different kinds of energy use. The first featured the use of such resources as wood and hay as New England developed in agriculture and commerce. Then came the Industrial Revolution with its discovery of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. The successful leaders of this latter revolution often did nothing to protect the earth from their industrial practices.

Now, given the harmful practices of past generations, we must take a new approach,  Muir says. No longer can we afford to deplete the ozone layer or destroy the topsoil so vital to the flourishing of the earth. There are now too many people for us to rely on automobile use to the extent that we do. “What we cannot do”, she writes, “is to go on commuting to work in Chevy Suburbans.”

I do not here pretend to a scholarly or critical appraisal of this book. Instead my appreciation for it is that of a common reader, one who looks for new knowledge and the stimulation of good writing. These Diana Muir has offered us in abundance and I thank her for these gifts.

Richard Griffin