Two lifetimes in one

Some years ago Gael Sheehy wrote a book called “New Passages” where she said that our generation was the first one to be blessed with having two lifetimes in one. We retire early and die later giving us the opportunity to live two lives in one lifetime. Previously we retired at 60, played golf for a few years, travelled a bit and then called it a day since life expectancy was then about 65. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood, beginning at 21 and ending at 65, are hopelessly out of date. For now we tend to take early retirements at 50 but still have another two or three decades to go before the grim reaper comes a calling. Sheehy calls this an opportunity of a lifetime to do things that we may not have found possible in our early days. Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier – a Second Adulthood in middle life. "Stop and recalculate," she writes. "Imagine the day you turn 45 as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood can progress through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity beyond menopause and male menopause.

But every silver lining has a cloud – in this case three clouds- and some darker than others.

Living longer, for one, means that you need to provide adequate money for those extra years of retirement. Unless your pension is inflation adjusted, you can see your nest egg growing smaller by the day. And if you are banking on the stock market investments or hedge funds to bolster your meager savings, you are in for a rude awakening. So providing for a second lifetime is no longer easy.

Most men on verge of retirement dream of lazy vacations and golf during the weeks after they are done with the 9 to 5 rat race. But as the years beyond retirement stretch out, neither the golf nor the international travel seem to quite fill the days anymore. Of course there are a few who take up new occupations- working with NGO’s to promote education for all or village uplift—who seem to be the pathfinders of the new frontier that Sheehy talks about. But these are few and far between. For most the retirement years seem to stretch on too long and the hours are spent on bewailing the past, tending on medical ailments that seem to grow by the minute and obsessing about adequate money for future comforts.

But the bigger and the most unpredictable toll of the second lifetime are emotional. These are the problems of what are called the sandwich generation—a generation that is compelled simultaneously to deal with the problems of their growing children and their aging parents. Sandwiched between the escalating needs of their aging relatives and their own children, today's adults are caught in an intergenerational squeeze. A problem captured most poignantly by friend who said that “In the morning, I tie a bib, mash the vegetables and cajole my three year old to eat. In the evening I do the same thing again but” she said sadly wiping a tear, “now it’s for my mother who is 75 and an Alzheimer’s patient”.

Increasingly, this generation is having to dig deep emotionally to cope with the aging parents while bringing up their own children and developing a professional career. In the Indian tradition, aging parents became the responsibility of the eldest son and his wife. It is, however, the poor daughter in law who is subject to a double whammy—when she came as a bride, she was under the iron hand of the mother in law, and now just when she thought she was free to live her life after the children have left, she is saddled with the responsibility of looking after the ailing mother in law. When she was young, her husband did not protect her from the in law syndrome, now that she is old, he generally refuses to insist that his siblings share fairly in the responsibility of looking after the parents.

The problem of adult children looking after aging parents is creating new tensions particularly for working women. I asked one who was working at a job, bringing up her two teenage children, tending to her aging parents and a mother in law with a stroke, how she coped with all this emotional pressure and why she did not insist that her siblings or her husband’s siblings take some more responsibility for all this work. Her reply was simple “I do it because I want to do it”. Then after a while, she added pensively “Also what choice do I have.”

The fact is that India today has over 81 million old people as the average life expectancy has grown from 30 years in 1947 to over 70 in 2008 and there are almost no social security nets for a majority of them. There are very few institutions in the country for supporting the aged. Delhi, the capital, with almost 1.1 million senior citizens has only 4 governments' run homes with another 31 run by NGOs, private agencies and charitable trusts. Few working people have pensions or insurance and even the 5-6 % government servants that do, exist on paltry amounts that may not even be inflation adjusted. For most the only social security is the family.

Our generation may have two lifetimes in one but our systems and institutions are barely able to cope with one.