Never Told between Generations

For our first dinner back home after each French vacation we dine at a small local bistro, hoping to prolong the mood we have just left behind. During one such evening I turned to those at the next table and wistfully reflected on how well the food and ambiance captured the feeling of France. The unexpected response was a long tirade on the evils of the French, their rudeness and their hatred of Americans. Not wanting to create a scene, I merely replied that such had never been our experience in many years of visits throughout France, and then my wife and I turned back to the privacy of our table.

A little later the four at that next table rose to leave. On their way out the older woman who had so vociferously attacked the French turned to us and said that the man across from her was her eighty-year-old husband, adding with manifest pride that the woman by his side was his hundred-year-old mother. We rendered appropriate admiration.

As, departing, they walked by us, that most elderly woman slowed down to let her companions move on. Then, when they had passed, she leaned over and whispered to us, "Don't pay any attention to what they say. The French are wonderful. When I was young I almost married a French man, but I never told them about it."

There is a polite tradition in our culture, and perhaps in all cultures, of respect for the wisdom of the aged, but that respect often is a thin veneer covering our true feelings that those old people are ones we would rather not bother having to see.

At least in part, such disparagement of the elderly may be healthy and normal, an attitude with a developmental line of its own, the line of growing autonomy, of separation and individuation. The young child matures with a thrill of mastery, repudiating infantile helplessness. The pride of forming one's own individual competence shines through in the smile that accompanies the familiar line, "Look, Ma, no hands!," while vulnerability to its opposite, the sense of helplessness, is captured in the greatest insult any child can hurl at another: "Baby!"

Parents' feelings may be hurt by the child's growing independence, but wise mothers and fathers appreciate the growth implicit in a young adolescent's not wanting to be seen in their presence. This discomfort softens a bit, but it returns when the parent must react to the late adolescent's and the young adult's rolling his or her eyes when the superannuated one makes any observation about the world.

Such developmental provocations may be nature's way of making it easier for a parent to let go. When things go well, a rapprochement can truly take place later, with both the now-grown child and the parent coming to value each other even as each recognizes the different views of the world that derive from their different perspectives. Yet often it is as Shakespeare (or his contemporary) so succinctly put it in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), "Crabbed age and youth cannot live together" (xii, l. 1).

Tamed though it may become, rivalry between generations never completely disappears. King Lear, one of the greatest of tragedies in the English canon, exposes the heartbreak of a once-powerful father overthrown by his own arrogance of power, the deterioration and painful education of an old fool.

Repudiation of our former masters, the tendency to see the old as foolishly inept and helpless, stays with us even as we grow into more mature appreciation of the subtle complexities innate to being a person in the world, whatever one's age. And it stays with us not only in our regard of others, but also in how we see ourselves. It is not only mortality that casts a shadow on our lives as we age, but also the dread of coming to see in ourselves exactly what we had repudiated in those who were older.

Recently I consulted a new physician. Introducing myself, I explained that I feel full of...