Wise Words on What to Expect With Aging

“Old age,” said Golda Meir, “is like flying through a storm. Once you’re aboard, there is nothing you can do about it.”

It is the ultimate passage, the last hurrah, the final chapter, and--don’t kid yourself--you always knew it was coming. But that doesn’t make it any easier, nor does it make you prepared.

Whether you are already old or worried about loved ones who are, it’s not too late to grab a map or two to help you weather the inevitable storm. And, just in time, a pair of bestselling authors have explored the horizon and come back with a report on what to expect.

Mary Pipher, the Nebraska therapist who wrote the save-our-girls classic “Reviving Ophelia” (Putnam, 1994), and Alix Kates Shulman, who wrote the first important novel to come out of the women’s liberation movement, “Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen” (Knopf, 1969), have written two very different books to guide baby boomers and their parents through what is life’s most troubled journey.

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Both women’s books begin with the deaths of their mothers. Pipher’s mother was hospitalized for 11 of her last 12 months. “She had peritonitis, heart and liver failure, vomiting, chills and legs that cramped and jerked from potassium deficiency,” recalls Pipher, 52. “She was bedridden, bloated and brain damaged. She had skin cancer and osteoporosis.”

With her mother living hundreds of miles from where Pipher was raising two children, practicing psychotherapy and writing her first book, the daughter “always felt guilty.” Either she felt she was neglecting her mother or neglecting her children and patients to take care of her mother.

“Many things didn’t happen the way I wish they had,” she says. “I had spent a year tired, anxious and sad. And then I lost my mother.”

After her mother died in 1995, Pipher set out to explore old age as another culture, another country. She lowered her hourly rates and asked therapy colleagues to send her “any patients over the age of 70.”

As she suspected they would, these older patients had plenty to say about getting old. And much of it was pretty grim. Pipher concluded that, despite an early hypothesis, it wasn’t technology that separated the generations--it was, according to her book “Another Country” (Riverhead Books, 1999), the transition from a communal culture to a culture in which people don’t know one another.

“Never before have so many people lived so far away from the old people they love,” says Pipher, who discovered that even our languages were different. While we all might be speaking English, the words had different meanings. For example, “depression” for older people refers to a time when money was tight and many people were out of work. For baby boomers, depression is a reason to take Prozac.

And their try-to-make-the-best-of-it outlook and gentle style of living are often at odds with the assertive and, yes, self-centered way their children face the world.

Pipher was amused but not surprised when one of her patients, a 64-year-old nun, described feeling alienated by life in the ‘90s by saying, “I have not been educated to do my own thing.”

“A lot of older people don’t even like the word ‘old’ and I don’t blame them,” says Pipher, “because being old in this culture in this time of history is to be a member of a disenfranchised social class.” Perhaps, suggests Pipher, finding other words can be a good first step. “How about elder instead of elderly--that says so much more about honoring those who have lived longer than we.”

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Alix Kates Shulman started to write about the second big turning point in her life--the first was the feminist coming-of-age of a Jewish prom queen growing up in the Midwest--when she realized that her parents were going to die.

Although the title of her book is “A Good Enough Daughter” (Schocken, 1999), her story asks the question, “Am I good enough?” And for the reader, the question quickly becomes, “Are any of us?”

Growing up in Ohio in the 1950s, Shulman was a rebellious, independent girl who dreamed only of the day she could start out on her own. That she did, in print, with the autobiographical “Prom Queen” novel. In both books, she wrote of the excitement and passions that drove her from adventure to adventure and fling to fling.

For decades Shulman and her parents lived separate lives. “I rejected Cleveland,” she says, “and that meant rejecting them. Although I occasionally stayed with them for visits and made sure my children had wonderful relations with my parents, I didn’t give them myself.”

The love, she insists, was always reciprocal. But it was not easily found. “Here’s an example,” says Shulman. “Every time I went to the Midwest for a visit, day or night, rain or shine, my parents always came to greet me at the gate as my plane landed.

“And when they came to visit me in New York? I almost always told them to hop a cab to my place.” But in writing the book, says Shulman, she finally came to honor her parents.

“My parents were 89 and 95 when they died. Toward the end, I was there to witness their lives up close day by day, and that changes your understanding of time and mortality in profound ways. You see time’s relativity, death’s necessity,” says Shulman, 67. “And for children, you discover that while you cannot undo what went before, you can change the ending. As long as you all are still alive, it’s never too late. Never.”

Shulman and Pipher see dying as a kind of gift. “As they approach the end, many old people tend to put their lives in perspective,” Pipher says. “They are frequently more honest, kinder and wiser than before, and they often have important things to say. . . . Parents are often able to forgive children, for being gay, for being atheists, for being performance artists instead of doctors.

“We who will be dying in the next 20 or 30 years can take lessons from them because,” says Pipher, “soon enough it will be our turn.”

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Pamela Warrick can be reached by e-mail at pamela.warrick@latimes.com.