Baby-Boomers Fight the Inevitable

By MOORE, Avril

Avril Moore in Melbourne

SEDUCED by glossy brochures showing octogenarians playing bowls, dancing and having “fun”, excited baby-boomers (always rampant consumers) are installing elderly parents in palatial, fully serviced but soul-less retirement villages.

Gone are the days of the ubiquitous granny flat and any notion of inter-generational living arrangements. Boomers are not only far too busy but, in Western countries big enough, often not even living in the same province or state as their mothers and fathers.

Of course, this unabashed enthusiasm for geriatric playgrounds is partly due to the remarkable advances in pharmaceuticals for anything from diabetes to heart disease.

However, although the aging body might be willing, the mind still remains a mystery when it comes to long-term health.

In Australia, a recent and sobering Four Corners TV programme illuminated it is almost a century ago to the day that Alzheimer’s disease was first documented. Old-age dementia will soon be the developed world’s No 1 disability.

So where does this leave the aging population? For the most part, if one is over 75, pretty bewildered, despite the aerobics classes and happy hours. And what will the current 50-somethings do when it’s their turn?

If popular culture is any gauge, we are increasingly preoccupied and anxious about aging and its attendant disadvantages. In her debut novel, The Unexpected Elements of Love, writer Kate Legge examines the 50-year marriage of Beth and her artist husband Roy, who is rapidly deteriorating from dementia.

The climax of this story sees Roy unwittingly setting fire to his studio while Beth, who has been struggling with the issue of euthanasing her adored husband in addition to looking at nursing homes with her concerned adult children, basically throws in the towel, choosing to burn with him in the family home.

The recent independent American film, Little Miss Sunshine suggests, with a not dissimilar ambivalence, that Olive’s feisty, anarchic and heroin-addicted grandfather, played by Alan Arkin, dies from a deliberate overdose after tying up the loose ends of his life.

Neither are terribly comforting scenarios, especially for boomers who are notorious control freaks, not prone to sitting in Zen-like appreciation of a rock and a hard place.

How will the next generation of pensioners negotiate nursing care and death?

I recently attended a primary school reunion from 1970. Seeing my classmates again for the first time in 36 years was somewhat overwhelming. As much as we shrieked at each other that “you still look exactly the same!” the truth was frighteningly obvious.

Most of us could barely disguise our horror at the prospect of contemporary retirement villages and yet it became clear that we had thought of no real alternative for how we would handle our own demise.

One classmate, now a veterinary surgeon and, from memory, always the class clown, looked at us mischievously while muttering the word “phenobarb” — a drug, he informed us gleefully, used for euthanasing cats and dogs.

Another woman, always sensible as a child and now a teacher, suggested that before the phenobarb perhaps we should look at a community living model from the Netherlands about which she had recently heard.

Although studies suggest that most people would prefer to get old and stay in the family home, the problem with this scenario is isolation.

The model she referred to had about six to eight like-minded retirees, usually friends, pooling their resources, buying up one large property and building or converting the dwelling into small self-contained homes with a large shared living area and garden. Where necessary, health care was delivered.

This, we all agreed, sounded like a good plan. The trick, however, would be putting it into action before losing cognitive ability.

The biggest fear for boomers is to be pushing their trolleys through the supermarket with wonderfully fit bodies but not remembering why they are there in the first place.

It was here that our vet friend chirped in with the suggestion we all give up exercising and start eating hamburgers and chips for breakfast to ensure we go out with a massive coronary, thus avoiding this conundrum completely.

No, age shall not weary us, and predictably the boomers will not go quietly; we’re already swotting up on preventive measures for Alzheimer’s.

So expect a huge leap in the sales of Sudoku puzzles, freshly squeezed fruit juice . . . oh, and in terms of political affiliations, did I mention stem-cell research? Fairfax

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(c) 2007 Daily News; New Plymouth, New Zealand. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.