Redefining Relations

Forging family bonds and friendships anew

By Jack V. Booch

It may be my age (don’t ask), or the fact that all of my remaining family relations live somewhere else, but I seem to be noticing a heck of a lot of lonely, isolated people around this year. It’s in the Zeitgeist—a generational shift of children becoming adults, parents becoming grandparents, and grandparents becoming residents of nursing homes.

This hit close to home for me—literally—early last week. I was lost in the pages of a trashy novel, situated cozily in my favorite chair before a toasty fireplace, when a phone call roused me from my reverie. “Hello…” inquired an uncertain voice, “do you know who I am?” I immediately recognized the voice as belonging to an old friend’s wealthy and aged widow with whom I had maintained close contact over the years. At first, I thought it was a joke. After querying her for a few moments however, I realized with some horror that her question was sincere. She had managed in her confusion to hit the speed dial on her phone, and I was the person she reached. She was alone and afraid, and completely at a loss. Despite the personal fortune she’d amassed over a lifetime of ambition and experience, on this day she had forgotten who she was, and no one was around to notice.

Despite the omnipresence of email, cell phones, and instant messaging, our culture is drifting evermore toward individuation and isolation. Maybe it’s because of technological advances that our lives are becoming more and more atomized—particularized into special interest groups, online dating communities, and other superficial networks.

In certain respects, such generational transitioning is the most natural thing in the world. We do age, after all, it’s the way of things. But amidst the cultural transformations, our traditional networks of familial bonds and long-lasting friendships seem to be breaking down.

Having made the supreme effort to call as many friends and relations as possible this last Thanksgiving, I was surprised by the number of people—many of them quite young—who had no plans at all for the holiday. Now, I could really care less if celebrations of our Puritan past fall by the wayside, but the half-dozen or so lonely individuals who I talked to—people who had nowhere to go and no one in particular to see on this occasion—left me feeling awfully depressed.

Perhaps the most disturbing illustration of this phenomenon is the wholesale disappearance of the elderly. As a culture, we have moved past worrying whether or not to dump the old and infirm off at the sterile (we hope), lifeless concentration camps commonly known as “assisted living facilities.” The only evidence of hand-wringing that I have noticed is the emergence of films dedicated to the woes of young people afflicted with the trauma of having to abandon their parents and grandparents to an unwelcome fate.

Take, for instance, The Savages, an impending new release starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as two thirty-something siblings entering a phase of reflection and self-realization as they cope with the discomfort associated with arranging adequate care for their father as he succumbs to the torments of dementia. What’s interesting here is that the focus of the film is not really on the suffering old man, but rather on his self-pitying children. Message: the suffering old men are beside the point. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

In a society obsessed with self-actualization, most of us seem to be disconnecting and disengaging from the support networks that reared us. Such disengagement has obvious drawbacks for the old and infirm, but it has consequences for everyone else as well.

I was recently confronted with an example that qualifies as “stranger than fiction.” Upon learning that a 93-year-old former mentor of mine had passed away, I naturally felt obliged to make contact with his family. My initial attempts to reach his middle-aged daughter—whom I also knew well—were unsuccessful, however. After persisting for a few days I was taken aback by the astonishing news that the otherwise vibrantly healthy woman had committed suicide not long after her father’s death. I asked myself how this could be. The woman in question stood to inherit a small fortune, a flourishing business and a stable and secure existence. In some mysterious way, her father had been providing her a reason to carry on, whatever personal troubles she may have been experiencing.

Such dependence works both ways. I was a member of the President’s Council on Aging under Jimmy Carter, and took part in an experiment on memory therapy. Along with a handful of others, I visited senior citizens who were suffering senility to the extent that they were completely non-communicative. Our idea was to find out if we could stimulate such individuals by exposing them to evidence of past experiences and loved ones. Armed with a family photo album, I sat with individuals and leafed through the pages of their respective pasts in the hopes of engendering some response.

Some months later, I experienced my first demonstrable success. One woman—who had not spoken a single word to another living soul in close to two years—sat up abruptly, pointed to the photo album in my lap, and said, “that’s a picture of my daughter and her horse.”

  Of course, the lady in question wasn’t able to shrug off all evidence of infirmity and memory loss, but she was at least able to reconnect with her eldest child, with whom she re-forged a surprisingly meaningful relationship in the remaining years of her life.

The point of all this is to show that our mutual dependence is expressed in so many ways—nebulous, heretofore uncounted ways—that our family groups and long-lasting friendships may be more vital to our well being, even our survival, than we previously thought.

So my recommendation to all of you this holiday season almost goes without saying—sign out of MySpace, holster the cell phone, and pay someone a visit in the flesh. You may be surprised to rediscover how soul-restoring it is to share laughter and conversation with a friend or loved one. What better gift to give (and receive!) this holiday season?