A burdensome statistic: The graying population

Fragile as falling feather to my mind, that is, I had once offered to help lift her cart when it sank into a mound of softened snow on a curb, but she declined graciously, telling me she had done this countless of times since her husband died two decades ago—a rueful smile lighting up her side-upturned face from the crook of a cane her body had become. 

She’s doubled up with her humped back, trudging on her shopping cart, but smoothly dipping and climbing up again on the undulations of paved sidewalks in our neighborhood. I’ve walked behind or up front to meet her midway whatever the season, always crosswise on 62nd street, which she would have covered what could possibly be a breathtaking distance to Safeway grocery and the produce market six blocks from her home.

Much like Marie, two doors away from our floor, the British widow who had called me, “sweet”, who, each time I offered to bring her mail to the post office, would tell me she’d take note if I volunteer to get her anything from the grocery; twice a week, I’d seen a Filipina caregiver taking her for a walk, freshly bathed, on the corridor, which overlooks the courtyard garden she loved.

I later learned that she packed her freezer with microwaveable food only, which she would serve on English porcelain; she was the Garden Person in our condominium until after a series of fainting spells, where she bruised herself one day, and couldn’t get back up in the one-bedroom suite she and her husband lived for decades. She died in a hospice before her 90th birthday.

And there’s Cecily, also a 90 year-old, who had written her first historical novel, created enamel objets d’art and jewelry, and still drove her car to the library, the pharmacy and grocery, when I met her. Moving with her sons to Canada from New Mexico away from the heat of the Vietnam War recruitment, Cecily had built a nest adorned with swatches of the literati and artsy life she once lived in New Mexico and New York, nurturing her mind with stacks of art books and literature classics that walled in a nook; she remained unchallenged in rounds of Scrabble at the community center.

Countless more I had met, even worked with in organizations led by feisty elderly women, embody the ideal most countries now burdened by elderly care, wish for: independent, healthy, needing the least support, and still of use, meaning “out of our hair”—they, to whom have been told to “hurry up and die”, as Japan, which apparently has the highest “dependency ratio”, had once announced; Prime Minister Abe though had followed it up with a softened statement.

As elderly population continues to rise among baby boomers versus babies—for me, a rather mystifying balanced phenomenon—extreme pronouncements veiling a Sisyphean struggle to survive have understandably popped up in the news like Abe’s: In China, a law requiring children to visit their parents, or the opposite of how Germany has been sending off their elderly to live isolated lives in other countries, as well as further cuts in services and benefits like those looming in Canada, and the ongoing debates in the US on what has since figured, just a haze, once, has turned into a visible threat as the graying of the continent.

Ironies, such as declines in fertility from changes in lifestyle, rising cost of child care and education, and mortality rates due to medical advances, “are hastening the shift”, according to a New York Times report two years ago, which had since led “to profound changes in issues, ranging from Social Security and health care to education” in the US.

Meanwhile, in Canada, a more direct warning from The Globe and Mail on the effects of a dramatic graying population, includes “economic headaches”, as the phenomenon “will reshape the economy, stifle growth and force governments to provide for a growing number of seniors with a shrinking pool of taxpayers”.

Did immigration stem the shift somehow? Not quite, it seems, as statistics seen to double in 2050 has not abated the imbalance between seniors and the young. From cursory observation on my part, for instance, Filipinos, known to come from big farming families, nonetheless, do not exceed what’s common among Canadian families, who limit their children to two, government support such as the Canadian Child Benefit until age 18, no matter.

How the elderly have since posed a challenge for governments and communities would have been incredulous in my growing up—it had seemed then, that not only grandparents but also grandaunts and uncles, and great grandparents doted on us, their graying up and withering unnoticed. I remember cuddling up to Apo Isang, my maternal great grandmother, by then, half paralyzed from a stroke, “planted” on the bamboo-slatted floor in an angle so she could pull a string and rock the duyan of any baby in the family—recalling now with achy poignancy her fractured smile—certainly not a rather burdensome statistic like her counterparts in North America today.