"What do we do with our parents?" The answer is found among the ten commandments. It is the one that promises a long life.
"Honor thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long in the land." Exodus 20:12
In those days the psalmist gave seventy years as about the best one could hope for except for the few who might possibly reach eighty. Today the average is in the mid seventies and each year many of our elderly reach the hundred mark.
The Amish are admired because they observe the fifth commandment by taking care of their elderly. They build a room onto their homes where grand dad and or grandmother live in privacy while remaining within the family circle. This is not much different from the custom of most families before social security and Medicare. When the parents grew old they generally lived with their children.
I learned about living with an older family member when I was a seven year old boy and Uncle Pete King stayed with us all winter. Our house was generally open to outsiders since we often took in orphan boys until they could be placed in homes who wanted a child to raise. It seems my parents considered it a Christian duty. (This was before the state paid for such services.) Uncle Pete was a distant relative who had only one child, a son, and it seems that they had experienced a falling out.
We boys enjoyed an entire winter of his tales of the old west. Born about the middle of the 1800's, Uncle Pete had spent many years herding cattle on the prairies of Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. He had worked on some of the drives up the Chisholm trail to Kansas City. We were just a bit sad when he and his son made up and he went back home in the spring. "I knew Buffalo Bill when he was just a cowboy like the rest of us before he got up that wild west show" He said.
Grandma Eakles lived in a small cottage across the road from her daughter. Her stories were about life on the farm in the mountains of Tennessee. She was able to draw mental pictures of the old mills on the clear streams. The dams were made of huge cedar logs and the water flowed over the dam turning the great wheel to grind the corn. As a six year old she saw the southern soldiers returning from the war. They rode alone or in groups along the road in front of her house on their way back home. "Jim and I moved our family to Indian Territory before statehood. We loved the Kiamichi hills and the good neighbors but I truly missed the mountains and trees of Tennessee" She said.
Grandma Eyre lived in a sod house in the back yard of her son's home in the Oklahoma Panhandle. I had met her granddaughter on the university campus and stopped by to see her after spending a summer working in the wheat harvest. After meeting Doris' parents we visited Mrs. Eyre in her living room. Those old sod houses were well suited to living on the prairie. They remained relatively cool in the hot Oklahoma summers and their thick walls protected from the bitter cold of the harsh winter winds.
This dear old lady, like Grandma Eakles, and Uncle Pete was a strong family link with the past. In each of these cases the older person lived near or with their children and two rules were observed. They were allowed to remain independent and they were respected. Private living quarters are the ideal setting for remaining independent and respect is shown most powerfully with a listening ear.
Today we are healthier and live longer and the ranks of the senior citizens are getting larger. In the next column we consider the principles by which the elderly can complete the life cycle with a strong sense of personal fulfillment.
Thought for the day: One of the best ways to prepare for the future is to learn about the past from those who were there.