Related topics: •  Excerpt From Another Country

Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
By Mary Pipher, PhD
Riverhead Books
328 pp paperback $13.95

From the large shelf of literature on aging, whose advice should be heeded? It could be the appeal from Cato, a Roman politician, "We must fight old age as we would a disease," or from Florida Scott-Maxwell's classic work, "The Measure of My Days." Old age, she wrote, "is an internal and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high."

In the pages of "Another Country," which brims with well-crafted and often lyrical language, Mary Pipher gives hints that she will be following the counsel of Scott-Maxwell. Pipher, a psychologist and therapist with a practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, is in her early 50s, what she calls "the mid-autumn of my life." Time now, she believes, to explore and "understand the country of old age which most of us one day will inhabit." That was the intellectual nudge to start writing. The pragmatic one? "I want to be prepared."

As her guides, Pipher chose mostly middle-class rural Midwesterners in their 70s, 80s and 90s. Many were clients seeking therapeutic help to cope with disintegrating families. Some were entire families themselves, with elderly adults and their grown children all sharing mental health problems, like a cold everyone catches together.

Pipher takes us into the lives of, among others, the resilient old, the self-pitying old, the anxious old, the suffering old, the hearty old, and the joyful old. Her 10 chapters mix stories, analysis and commentary, to laudable effect.

One positive result of this richness is to persuade readers to move through the text slowly, the better to savor and reflect. My own reading of "Another Country" took a month. That was 10 or 15 pages a day, sometimes dipping into the book two or three times a day, and other times reading a half-chapter during my evening three-mile walk around a neighborhood track, where the hurried and panting set leave the outside lane to us contemplatives.

Pipher has been a practicing psychologist long enough to have seen the shiftings -- national mood swings -- in the way generations see each other. Her observations are credible, and often wry. In the Midwest, she writes, "we've gone from Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes to Minnesota, land of 10,000 treatment centers. ... Even when we have the best of intentions, moving across generational boundaries is hard. We think our parents are ridiculous for worrying about appearances, manners, causing offense, or what others think. We worry more about meeting our own needs and expressing our feelings. Our parents see us as selfish. Their generation is less analytical than ours. There is less self-reflection and picking apart motives. We see them as uncommunicative, and they see us as endlessly massaging our fragile egos."

What's the solution? Pipher believes -- no surprise here -- in communication, "the talking cure." Here again, though, the elderly, unlike the younger generation, prefer internalizing to verbalizing -- especially if verbalizing means opening up to a professional. Why spill the inner beans to a stranger, and have to pay for it, no less?

"Why don't old people like therapy?" Pipher asks. "First of all, the idea rarely occurs to them. When they were young, they kept their problems to themselves, prayed or talked to a relative. In the rare event they talked to people outside the family, they sought out ministers for spiritual guidance, close friends, doctors, bartenders, or hairdressers.

"Most likely, they did other things to deal with stress. Some people drank and beat their kids, but the majority coped in relatively healthy ways. My dad fished. My grandfather went to the pool hall and played checkers. Aunt Grace gardened and raised songbirds. ... (This age group) learned to whisper words like cancer and divorce. They were taught that even to speak about an event somehow made it more real. Thus, one way to protect yourself from painful events was not to talk about them, to pretend they didn't exist. Psychotherapy flies in the face of this theory."

Amid the many strengths of "Another Country" lies a weakness. Pipher is reportorially diligent at relating what clients tell her about their emotional pains or distresses, but seldom are we informed about what Pipher tells them by way of remedies. Perhaps this is professional reticence, obeying the unwritten rules of therapy: be non-directive and avoid "telling anyone how to live." Or is it, in this case, the author's oversight?

The book points to the latter. In one story, Pipher does not hesitate to recount how she helped ease the depression of a woman by offering a specific course of action. This was Sister Theresa, a Roman Catholic nun in her late 60s who toiled as a hospital nurse. Exhausted by 15-hour workdays, she suffered panic attacks, cried often, had personality clashes with her roommate -- a talkative, pushy nun in the same religious order -- and was unable to pray her way out of these problems.

"It was clear to me that we weren't using the same language," Pipher writes of her early therapeutic sessions with Sister Theresa. "I asked how she took care of herself, and she answered that God took care of her. I asked if she had talked to Josephina (the irksome roommate) and she answered that Josephina was her cross to bear. I asked what she thought caused her anxiety attacks, and she said that she needed greater faith in God. ... When I suggested that she take better care of herself, she said she believed in putting her own needs last."

So it went until Pipher learned that Sister Theresa had been an ardent swimmer as a schoolgirl but hadn't been in a pool in over 35 years.

Go swimming again, Pipher said. She arranged with Mother Superior to let it happen. The result? The next session, the nun came "in looking 10 years younger, glowing with enthusiasm, and laughing for the first time in our relationship. When I asked how she was, she hugged me and shouted, 'I love to swim.' She laughed at her own booming voice, and for 15 minutes she described the pool, the cool water, and the way swimming made her body feel. ... At the last session, she said about swimming, 'I can't believe God would object to my doing something that helps me this much.'"

In recounting these and other salvational stories -- whether about elders saved from the hell of depression or other ones that sometimes come with old age -- Pipher makes it clear that she herself was helped. She was taught well by the elderly people she came to know, whether personally or professionally: "The great lesson to be learned in this last developmental stage is acceptance. That lesson, well learned, brings serenity."

Safe to say, Pipher is a better person for having written "Another Country." Having read her compelling work, I can say that it also offers that opportunity to the reader.

-- Colman McCarthy is a former Washington Post columnist and book reviewer who directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Washington D.C. He is the winner of a 2001 Excellence in Journalism award for an opinion series from the Northern California Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

First published October 20, 2000
Last updated December 20, 2007
Copyright © 2000 Consumer Health Interactive

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