I have written about many aspects of my life in a cross-cultural marriage and then into the expatriate life, first as a graduate student with Ravi, then children and teaching in the university, living in Mogadiscio, in Ankara, back to the States and on to Paris, about making a home for us and trying to keep my professional identity alive, about being a mother and having friends in the expat life. A short story, An Expatriate Wife in Paris, is taken from my experience and knowing younger expat wives, here. But now has come the time to add a few notes about the fourth stage of life.
The fourth stage of life — I wrote here that Ravi, as Indian, saw life in four stages: Student, Householder, Post family and Sannyasa. When he and I entered what he would have considered our third stage of life we returned to the States, to North Carolina, and moved into a house down the road from his brother. I explain, here, in Where does an expatriate go to retire? why it was to this place and not elsewhere. I once again launched into the time consuming process of setting up house and home for us in an unfamiliar culture. Both America and I had changed in my twenty years away. Culture shock is as bad coming home as going abroad. At least this time I spoke the local language, if with an accent. I am a Midwesterner, not a Southerner.
Until recently I found the stages of life model little more than a curiosity, but now, at my age, I prefer it to the American view of life’s trajectory. The American model, as Ravi saw it in the 1950’s, is a path from childhood to a peak of performance in middle age and on into the decline of old age. And there is the obsession with forever young through technology and with considerable expenditures of energy, time and money.
Ezekiel Emanuel, in a widely discussed article, expresses his views on the issue. He declares that he does not want to live beyond 75 years. He cites studies showing that productivity, and especially creativity, decline in the later years of life, and more importantly, that old age is typically plagued with physical and mental decline and illness. After 75 he will refuse all medical treatment; he does not want to artificially extend his life expectancy, and I agree, with the caveat that he is speaking from the perspective of a man in his late fifties, not as a seventy-five year old. At eighty-four I no longer have diagnostic tests done for any ailment and will not again have surgery. I do, though, take a diuretic and an aspirin against high blood pressure, a vitamin D supplement and keep informed on food and nutrition. I have not yet decided what I will do if/when a serious chronic illness sets in. I had a knee replacement at 68 that was expected to last for 25 years. I wonder now what happens if I outlast the knee. My one large medical expensive is for dental care; I want to keep my teeth. (Preventive dental care is a much-neglected health care issue everywhere.)
In my view, the metaphor of moving from one stage to another fits the natural progression of one’s psyche and physical being better than the American rise and decline, but the Indian perspective comes from an ancient, stable, slow-changing social order. I need to adapt it to my own time and culture.
While thinking of the first stage as that of the child and youth I recalled reading of an exchange in the 1950s between Margaret Mead and an Indian anthropologist. She had, as a part of her research into personality and culture, made movies in three cultures of a mother giving her baby a bath. When other anthropologists viewed the films in an international conference she was surprised by an Indian colleague’s question. He asked her why she was doing so much research on the past. In an earlier article Mead had described the American home as a launching platform for the child. The child is given preparation for life and then is expected to leave, find or create a job and make it on his/her own in the world. The child in a traditional Indian home was taught traditional roles, with the boy as a student learning the family occupation from his father or a guru. There, raising a child was reenacting one’s own childhood, watching a child learn what one had also learned at that age. To Margaret Mead, a child was the future; to the Indian a child was continuity with the past.
In modern society, “student,” the youthful years, is still when one learns the basic skills, occupational and otherwise, but in these fast-changing times, learning necessarily continues throughout all phases of life. Many people change careers mid-life, which often requires returning to school. Continuing education is required in most professions. A person can even decide to turn inward and change a personality trait. Learning continues throughout life.
The single best yardstick for measuring a person’s likely life expectancy is education. John Rowe, a health-policy professor at Columbia University and a former CEO of Aetna, says, “If someone walked into my office and asked me to predict how long he would live, I would ask two things: What is your age, and how many years of education did you receive?” A college degree is a proxy for other aspects of a person’s life, such as higher income, smoking less, less likely to be overweight, etc., but it is more than that. More years in school also makes it more likely that a person learns how to continue learning and is better able to deal with our rapidly changing technological and social environment.
Despite countless changes in the nature of the family, “householder” is still the second stage of life. Even without having a child or children, most people need to establish a couple bond that is socially and legally recognized as permanent. Hence, the movement for gay marriage. “Home” is almost a sacred word. Except for three years with my grandparents, I grew up in homes where my father placed me; they were never my home. When Ravi and I married, I created a home and three years later two children were at its center and we later brought a third child into our family. When Ravi decided to leave the States I followed him because we all needed that home. Despite its down side I enjoyed the expatriate life that resulted but am still uncertain regarding the pluses and minuses for my children. The consequences for their friendships and mine have been troubling. A word here on that.
In the third stage of life as traditionally imagined, the man, having completed his obligations to family, retreated into the forest to contemplate spiritual matters and prepare for the Sannyasa phase of life. I doubt that very many men actually did that but it was an ideal and I know of men who turned to the study of religion after the children were married. The wise elderly man appears in stories as an idealized figure. I also remember talk among Indians about arranging marriages for daughters. The phrase was “get them off the old man’s back.” (The phrase “old man” was a term of respect; in American culture it can be mildly insulting.) In modern times the third stage of life begins close to or in retirement, when a person is still middle-aged, maybe late middle-aged, and free to expand his/her range of interests. This assumes, of course, a certain level of income. Consistent with the spirit of the philosophy, it is a time for using one’s experience and skills to move beyond self and family to serve the community.
For me, the idea of a fourth stage gives salience to the stages of life perspective. Old age is not merely decline from a productive middle age; it is, for me, at least, a different state of being, one I am trying to understand. I am less strong, have less stamina, and due to a diminished memory, can no longer multitask. Nevertheless, I am healthy and able to deal with nearly everything except driving outside the neighborhood or at night, an important limitation. (I have never had good stereoscopic vision and am not enamored of driving.) My most recent thoughts on myself as sanyasi are here.
I now ask myself questions about the meaning of this stage of life. In the past, in China and its neighboring countries and throughout Africa, ancestor worship placed the elderly in a special role in the family and community. It was, and probably still is, widely believed that the dead take an active interest in living relatives and can act to benefit or harm them. From this belief flows the need for elaborate rituals in the home and community that honor the ancestors, and after having paid respect to the deceased ancestors, paying respect to the elders who will soon become ancestors. If the old person dies liking the people around him/her, s/he will more likely be willing to help them from the spirit world.
It must have helped to have, given life expectancy at the time, only a small number of old people in the home requiring care and attention. On the other hand, households were multigenerational, with children and adults interacting and the entire family participating in religious and community activities. And women limited to the home, available and responsible for care-giving.
Quoting again from What Happens When We All Live To 100, the American social trend has been away from constant interaction with other people —fewer two-parent homes, fewer children per home, declining participation in religious and community activities, grandparents living on their own, electronic interaction replacing the face-to-face in everything from work to dating. Prosperity is associated with smaller households, yet the large multigeneration home may be best for long life.
I think about matters such as life expectancy and life span because it is interesting, not only because it has personal relevance. Life expectancy, usually measured from birth to death, has been increasing, and will continue to do so for some years, largely due to decreasing rates of infant and child mortality but also to improving health and medical care. An interesting statistic is life expectancy at each age, here. In times earlier than shown on the chart, fewer adults lived into their sixties or seventies, although it is recorded that a few, usually women, lived well into their eighties. We can guess that illnesses, accidents, warfare and famines shortened life expectancy but did not affect the natural life span that is intrinsic to human beings, however long that is. How long, given the best of circumstances, can a person live? to one hundred years old? I don’t want to think about it.
Next, I’ll move on to my usual concern – the cross-cultural, expatriate wife and the peculiarities of her lifestyle. What does the fourth stage of life bring to her and how does she manage all that?
Iris sans frontières 