Rethink dependency

We feed the narrative that in order to be successful at aging we have to maintain independence. But that sets everybody up for failure, because we need each other at any stage of life

Tracey Gendron, Chair for the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Gerontology, Executive Director of the Virginia Center on Aging, and author of Ageism Unmasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End it

In an unwritten rule, the people in my hometown attended Sunday mass in a location based on their wealth. The working class attended the “big” church, the wealthy ones went to the sanctuary. My family was not religious, but for a brief parenthesis during middle school, they expected me to take up a ritual as my peers did. I used to attend the “big” church with my aunt, entering from a side door under the neon lights. My age group was not the core target of the afternoon mass and when the wandering of the pastor’s sermonizing took too long windings, the building offered me a respite with its geometry. Hundreds of rosettes decorated the three vaults and to figure out their exact number was my cross and joy while the preacher’s words in the background washed my thoughts away.

Sometimes, I could follow the morning mass with my friend A. Coming from a fantastically wealthier family than mine, she invited me to join her at the sanctuary in the center of town. It was a baroque building, with a couple of ebony doors with golden handles in the shape of a leaf. Once you pushed the doors open, a stubborn velvet curtain trapped us temporarily before we entered an octagonal room that received light from the windows on top of the entrance doors. In the center of the room, there was a glass yellow star with golden rims, illuminated from the bottom. That was the place - the legend went - where the Holy Mary stepped down from a painting in the sixteenth century to retrieve her child who descended to defend a young mute boy playing with bullying peers. The boy regained speech. Walking on the star was a no-no, but this gave me a chance to stroke carelessly the back of my hands on the mink fur coats that filled the room together with a persistent smell of incense while I walked past the majestic staircase that led to the second floor of the building. The painting still hangs there between twisted marble columns. 

There were no rosettes to count in the sanctuary, but there were plenty of statues of martyrs. My favorite was a young and bearded San Sebastian in a white dress, with his exposed heart pierced by a small golden cross. He reminded me of my maternal grandmother. She had the same cerulean look. She sported the same silence, the same aura of suffering. Even in retrospect, looking at the few remaining pictures of her, she reminds me of a statue. Through the decades from my birth to her death, she never changed, with her signature silk scarf covering her head. Compared with my grandfather, who behaved with the entitlement of a Greek god, she lived like an outcast in the family, cooking her own meals, running her solitary routine. She took water from the fountain and chopped chicory for the ducklings; she watched South American soap operas and the Pope’s mass on TV on Sundays. One afternoon, by chance, I peaked at her through the open door of the bathroom. She had untied her scarf and, to my surprise, she undid a long, thin braid of black hair that reached her waist, just like a princess from my illustrated storybooks.

My maternal grandmother remains as a painful set of missed occasions in my memory. Until my conversation with Tracey Gendron, who is Chair for the Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Gerontology, and Executive Director of the Virginia Center on Aging, I didn’t know how to frame the dynamic of the relationship that the family entertained with her, but I now put some pieces together of how ageism is bred in the family. Tracey is an old acquaintance of mine or, maybe, I should write that she’s my “tutelary deity” as she patiently and graciously answered the questions of a perfect neophyte in 2018. Hers was my first interview in this space. And now, Tracey has just published a remarkable book titled Ageism Umasked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End it in which she retraces how ageism developed and thrived. She also builds a bridge on how to put an end to it and, to put it simplistically, it is something as fundamental as recovering our humanity. 

Why did you feel the need to write this book?

There are a couple of reasons. Since the last time we spoke, there's just so much that's happened and there's so much that I've learned, but two things were the impetus for writing this book. The first one was COVID. As we were riding the waves of the pandemic, amid the uncertainty, it was very clear that so much ageism was emerging right at the very beginning. It was shocking. It was shocking to me to hear things from ‘this is an old person's disease’ to ‘why should we care? Old people don't contribute in any way’ to push back to ‘this is all the millennials’ fault’ and all the generational rhetoric that came with that. To me, it was just really clear that ageism was starting to bubble up into mainstream consciousness. I thought it was just a great time to dive into this. 

Then at the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement was also really visible. There was a lot of reading and thought-provoking work that was coming. There was one particular book that I read - How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi, who took a historical approach to explaining how we got here with racism. He retraced all the things that happened over time that have contributed to racism and how it manifests today. That was my little light-bulb-moment, that it would be a fascinating story with ageism too, because it gets so convoluted. People think that either it's a new thing or people will say, ‘didn't we used to revere the elders? At what point did that change?’ The truth is that it has always been complicated. To tell the story from the beginning just made so much sense to me, so that we can build time after time to figure out how we got here. All of that came together to say, I’ve got to write this!

It makes perfect sense that, if we manage to understand the roots of ageism in our culture, it would change everything. Ageism is everywhere; it’s like the air we breathe.

That's exactly it.
What happens behind the scenes of self-inflicted ageism? 

In many cases, different forms of discrimination or oppressions do present as both projections on to others and internalization toward ourselves. Ageism is not alone in that regard. With ageism, it is particularly challenging because we are surrounded everywhere by negative messages about aging and being old. Even messages that are intended to be anti-ageist fall into traps of perpetuating fear of aging and being old. Since we are all aging, being biased toward older people is essentially bias against your future self.

What changes have you noticed since you started your career as a gerontologist? 

Over the past five years, we've seen more attention to ageism than there ever has been before. So you can see the movement building and all of those people who you interviewed are part of the movement. Twenty years ago, you could not have found a hundred people who were doing this work. Now you find tons of people who are in this space. That's another change, the momentum is building, the momentum is there and the movement actually is underway. It still needs a push. 

What can make the tip of the scale move; what does it take to make this movement become mainstream? 

It's a great question. I believe that the movement will continue to grow one person at a time. As each of us has our own moment of accepting our aging and as each one of us makes the conscious choice to embrace it rather than fear it. This is how movements work and how we reach a tipping point for change. 

In your book you wrote about relational ageism. What is that?

Relational ageism is a concept my colleagues and I came up with and it's trying to get at what you said about the invisibility and the air we breathe. We know ageism is out there; relational ageism is the cycle in which it perpetuates. That's why we can never get rid of it because we're in this vicious cycle where we feed it to each other and then we accept it as a compliment, and we internalize it in our everyday interactions. You see a friend you haven't seen in twenty years who says, ‘Stefania, you look great for your age’ and you're like, ‘Oh my God, thank you so much.’ So right there, that's relational ageism. They have just valued you looking youthful, you have internalized that as something that is acceptable, cherished, valued and so you have just swallowed ageism. It just keeps going and going and going. That’s the relational piece of how we give it back and forth to each other and we reinforce it. 

We are so used to it. What would you reply? 

That's where we need work and advocacy, because that's what people say all the time: So what do I do in that moment? How do I disrupt this cycle? How do I stop this relational process? That's not an easy question and there’s not an easy answer. It depends. It depends on who you're talking to. It depends on what the situation is, but I think we're all going to have to be a little bit braver. We're all going to have to try and find a way that we don't let it go at that moment, but that we challenge it as inappropriate. Because otherwise, we’re just accepting it.

Talking about communication, what suggestion can you give us when it comes to choosing the words we use? 

Seeing ageism for the first time is key. Then we need to start saying what we mean rather than what we're used to saying. We use the terms as young and old with judgment a lot. Just because it's easy to understand, I always use the example of the ‘young spirit.’ Someone will say ‘She has a young spirit.’ Do you actually mean young? And when you think about it, you really don't. You mean energetic, you mean lively, you mean engaged. You don't mean young, we’re just using that term young. Taking a step back and asking, ‘Am I attaching value to age in any way?’ And if I am, I really need to rethink about what I'm trying to say. That's a piece of it.

The other thing I'll tell people is to substitute, for example, if you're talking about age, like age friendly, like the age-friendly movement. I believe in the movement, but I don't like the language. If you substituted that label with another demographic, gender-friendly, sexual orientation-friendly, race-friendly, how would that feel to you? That's another exercise. If that feels icky, then age is icky. 

We need to start thinking about it really critically and re-adjusting our language. We’ve done that, we do all throughout time. There are things we used to say, we don't say anymore because we have realized they are offensive. It’s the same. 

We need to start seeing it, because when you see, you see it everywhere…

Everywhere, it's everywhere. But it means we've got work to do, and that's a good thing. 

Another thing you wrote about that I found so interesting is our obsession with the concept of independence. Can you elaborate on this? 

That's another really interesting one. We don't really address that. We don't really acknowledge how much we fear dependency, how much we feel that being a burden on other people is off-putting. When you go back in time, there are historical factors that made that worse, that exacerbated that. Caring used to be very much an expected part of the family. You cared for other people and caring for elders was, I think, equivalent to caring for children. It's something that brings both joy and brings challenges. But we started to move away from that over time when we started to institutionalize older people and childhood became constructed as this time when we needed to nurture and protect. It was admirable that we wanted to parent, to provide care to younger people, but older people came to be seen as a burden.

That feeds this narrative that in order to be successful at aging, we have to maintain independence. As I wrote in the book, the problem with that is it sets everybody up for failure. We need to acknowledge, we are mortal. We will experience decline. We will need to rely on other people as other people will need to rely upon us, but that's true of our whole life. We are always interdependent. This myth that independence is the goal does us more harm than good. Because it sets us up for failure and anxiety and you know, feelings like we're a burden to people. It's interesting to me kind of how we got there. 

It’s incredible how strong this feeling is in the West. It starts with parents being taught that sleeping with babies will not make them independent and it ends up with the taboo of touching older people. Skin deprivation makes everybody miserable. 

A hundred percent! I wrote about skin hunger. People want to be touched, they need to be touched, but we have this feeling like, ‘No, that's unpleasant. That's yucky.’ It also speaks to why it's so challenging for us to ask for help. So many of us really struggle to ask people for help and it all stems back to this, this myth of independence. We feel we're somehow a failure or weaker, if we need other people. That's really fascinating to me.

What if our difficulties with processing aging are linked to our inability to handle complex ideas?

I love that question. That is a really intense question. I think that aging is complicated because it's two conflicting ideas at the same time. Aging is about decline, because we will have biological decline and aging is also about growth. People have trouble holding two conflicting ideas at one time about the same thing. The complexity of it messes with people's heads. It’s like, ‘how can this be both at the same time?’ It's a lot easier for us to just feed into the decline narrative that aging is just all about decline, that of course leads to ageism, both internalized ageism and externalized ageism. 

Ageism is just so complex that it's hard to pick all those layers apart. So you add those conflicting views. You add in fear of death, you add in fear of disability and you just have this really deeply messy construct, so complex and layered. It's not only hard for people to wrap their heads about it. It takes a lot of time. I mean, think about how much you have learned by talking to people. I think about the decade of reading this and I'm still learning.

This dichotomy is in the way we process information, in how we call something living and something else aging, but it’s just the same experience of our humanity.

It is the same thing and that's why I like to say that aging is changing, because living is too, it's just a constant state of change, but that includes decline. It includes growth. It includes adaptation. It includes maintenance. It's all of those things at the same time. It is inherently complex, but that's the beauty of it. Just like life is inherently complex. 

Do you think that we fear aging also because we associate it with dying?

That's a component of it. There are so many different layers of fear of death, fear of not existing, fear of losing people, fear of how we're going to die. As we get older and we start to realize that we have more time lived than time left, that is really relevant. It's very easy to conflate that with aging, because aging does inevitably end up in death. So it's certainly a layer of it. Ageism and fear of aging is a little bit more complex, but that's a part of it for sure. 

How do you think our conversation would go if we talk again ten years from now?

In ten years from now, I really hope that we would still be having these conversations, but I also hope we start to reject some of the most egregious forms of ageism. I hope that we start to reject things like an anti-aging industry. I hope ten years from now we can all see that that's not okay. When I do a presentation, I have this picture of a 1959 Ladies' Home Journal article and on the cover, on one of the banners, it says ‘Help for unresponsive wives makes marriage work.’ It is the most sexist, belittling piece of literature I have seen, but in 1959, that was acceptable. That was okay. You wouldn't see that today. So my hope is ten years from now, twenty years from now, we won't see, ‘look 20 years younger.’ We won't see the anti-aging campaign. I hope that we reach that level of critical mass, that people will start to be offended because they will recognize that it's harmful. 

Rethinking aging would transform the entire society. Do you agree?

The entire society. Think about that. Imagine if we looked forward to being older, imagine if we venerated older people and we saw them as contributors to society in meaningful ways. Whether it's supporting us, being there to mentor or to mediate complex situations, to have their life experience be a meaningful part of our learning in our history. How many times do we repeat history over and over again? And we don't consult the people who have been there before. So imagine what that would look like. 

Even in politics, we would invest in care and care is for everybody. Think about safety, green spaces, ecology, it’s for everybody. Aging is like a prism.

Yes. It is like a prism and it shoots out in all of these different ways. It would affect every level of society. It would affect our lives in such a positive way. And for us to have quality of life and be valued at all stages would be important. I will say that it starts with us not expressing ageism against young people, because we do that. We have to stop the entire cycle of ageism, this isn't just about older people. This is about not putting value on one age or life stage over another. There are younger people out there who have a lot to offer the world and we have to stop blaming millennials. We have to stop saying, you're too young to understand this. The more we do that, the more we direct ageism towards younger people, the more likely younger people are to stereotype older people. It's another cycle. We have to stop all ageism.

This is an economic and political issue, because pitching generations against each other allows politicians not to be asked questions we need to ask about the use of public resources.

Exactly, and we need to recognize that's a part of this story too.

Is there something I didn't ask you that maybe you would like to add?

The only thing else I will say is one of the biggest pieces of learning for me from writing the book and from the last time we spoke was how I think there needs to be more work and attention and advocacy around the intersection of ageism and ableism. We talk about ageism a lot. We don't talk about ableism as much, but they go hand in hand and it speaks to that fear of dependency that you were talking about before. In the myth of independence there are ableist undertones. 

If there's one thing I've learned since we talked last it's that it is more complicated than I first realized. By advocating against ageism and feeding into this narrative of being successful as you age, maintaining independence and maintaining function, we have moved the narrative towards ableism. We need to be very careful about that. I get why we did it, but we need to pull that back and realize that people of all abilities have value and that does not determine success when it comes to aging.