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What the Hell Are We Going to Do About the Boomers?
Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers’ return to infancy
My relatives are losing their minds. Literally. There’s a mother whose strokes in her hippocampus have left her with no short-term memory. Walk out of the room for five minutes, and upon return, she asks, “When did you get here?” The knobs have been removed from her stove so she doesn’t burn the house down, forgetting there’s soup on it. An aunt sleeps 18 hours a day, like a cat, and occasionally lapses into a waking dream state in which her long-dead mother is still alive. She still insists on driving her car to the grocery store. There’s a father who lives alone in a huge house, drinks half a liter of rum a day, and regularly calls in the early evening, emotional, drunk, lonely, and with nothing to talk about but stories of his past that we’ve all heard a hundred times before. There are older relatives needing constant care from daughters and sons or being tended to in homes that cost upwards of $20,000 a month. All of them refuse to give up their independence, insist on being attended to, and cling to their life’s wealth as if it’s the only thing saving them from drowning.
They go on living, on and on and on and on, as huge, necessary chunks of their lives — mobility, money, memory — flake and break away, leaving them demanding more and more from the remaining young.
Speaking of money, vast swarms of financial predators, large and small, circle them. They get daily calls from India about computer protection programs they never purchased. They’re bombarded with emails promising a return of what they lost or never had — better memory, more money, greater mobility, youthful skin, regular bowel movements, and a good night’s sleep. Hair. Sex. The scams get more inventive every week.
Last week, my father-in-law received a call from our “daughter.” The girl on the phone had all the names down — his, hers, ours — and said she had flown to some Midwestern city because her “aunt” had died, and now she needed money. Unbeknownst to the criminals, we had just left his house that morning. A friend’s older uncle received a call from a stranger claiming to know his “secret,” which would be revealed to the world unless a few thousand dollars’ worth of Walmart gift cards…
