IN THE LAST ACT OF Macbeth, the main character makes reference to “…that which should accompany old age, as honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.” Were truer words ever spoken? Honor, love, obedience, and troops of friends should accompany us into our old age—but how to accomplish that?
This was the goal Melanie Merriman and her sister Barbara had for their mother after their father died suddenly. At seventy-eight, Merriman’s mother was still able to live independently in the condo that she and her husband had shared. Active in her community, she played bridge, participated in not one but two book clubs, and edited The Comet, her condo association’s monthly newsletter. At that point, Merriman’s hope of making “the rest of her [mother’s] life the best it could possibly be” did not seem difficult.
Time marched on, however, and aging began to take its toll. One-third of people in the United States who are over sixty-five need some help in managing their daily lives; by the time they reach eighty-five (the fastest-growing segment of our population today), that number jumps to well over one-half.
Ten years after her husband died, Merriman’s mother—then eighty-eight—began to voice her desire to never be dependent on her daughters. “I’m going to stay in my condo until I die,” she told them two months before her eighty-ninth birthday. Yet friends were warning Merriman and her sister that their mother was slowing down, an idea they rejected at first. It’s difficult to accept that a parent is no longer “aging well.” My guess is that everyone reading this has faced a similar point in life, or watched a friend or family member deal with a parent (or both parents) as they struggle with independence, health issues, and emotional or mental decline.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, America’s population of persons aged ninety and older has tripled since 1980, reaching 1.9 million in 2010. Over the next forty years, that number will increase to 7.6 million. Wan He, the Census Bureau demographer, stated, “Traditionally, the cutoff age for what is considered the ‘oldest old’ has been 85, but people are living longer and the older population itself is getting older.” And getting older means needing more care. More than 20% of people in their nineties live in nursing homes, and over 80% of people in their nineties have at least one disability.
Grace Paley wrote: “Old age is another country, a place of strangeness, sometimes, and dislocation.” Melanie Merriman and her sister found themselves navigating that place of strangeness, which in today’s world includes supportive living arrangements, the health-care system, myriad professionals, and the person who is aging. In his poem “Affirmation,” eighty-nine-year-old poet Donald Hall wrote, “To grow old is to lose everything.” But Merriman—like adult children everywhere—vowed to make it otherwise for her mother. With honesty, nostalgia, humor, tenderness, and wisdom, she tells the story of their journey in Holding the Net: Caring for My Mother on the Tightrope of Aging.
Sixteen years after the phone call bringing the news that her father had died, Merriman’s mother died at the age of ninety-four. This is the story of those years. It is the story of mothers and daughters. It is the story of aging in America today. It is the story of failures and successes in the decisions required to help someone age well. Most importantly, it is not the story of just one mother and her daughters. It is all of our stories—ones already lived, or ones midstream, or ones about to happen. Read Melanie Merriman’s words for validation, for forgiveness, for guidance, for hope. The tightrope of aging contains all of these, and more. This book will hold your hand on that tightrope.