Double-decker sandwich generation
We’re spending a few days in San Francisco baby-sitting three grandsons — 3-year-old twins and a newborn — while their parents attend a wedding and enjoy a well-deserved break in Hawaii. Earlier this month, Steve visited his 86-year-old mother in Florida for the last time, before she packs up her house and prepares to move into an independent-living facility near us in Washington.
The phrase “sandwich generation” is increasingly out of date in modern America. In a growing number of families, longer life expectancy means that four generations are now alive, and instead of one generation in the middle ministering to the young and the old on either side, there are two generations in that caretaking role.
Call it the double-decker family sandwich.
This trend carries enormous public policy implications. Health care programs for the elderly like Medicare and Medicaid are approaching a crisis. Private employers like George Washington University, where Steve teaches, have started offering long-term-care insurance policies. But the main responsibility of caring for elderly relatives will fall where it always has, on individual families.
This is often a great blessing. Just recently, two of our great-nieces spent a weekend with Cokie’s mom, Lindy Boggs, at her home in New Orleans. It wasn’t your ordinary family visit, since Lindy lives in the middle of the French Quarter. Instead of “over the river and through the woods,” the girls had to go past the strippers and around the hookers to get to their great-grandmother’s house.
Lindy just turned 89, and was born on a plantation in the Deep South. Yet she wound up a feminist member of Congress, writing a bill that guaranteed equal credit for women. So she had a lot to tell her great-granddaughters about where they’re from, where life can take them and what values to carry on the journey.
A long life, of course, brings the pains and strains of the aging process. We have dear friends, call them Cathy and Stan, who live across San Francisco Bay in Berkeley. A year and a half ago, Cathy’s mother reached the point where she needed more care than her relatives back East could provide.
A trained nurse, Cathy immediately brought her mother to live with her, but it was not an easy decision. Stan is semi-retired from his legal career and spends a lot of time working at home. Their daughter, pregnant with their first grandchild, and her husband were already occupying the guest room. So the only place for Mom was the dining room.
The house was cramped, privacy was limited. At a time in their lives when Cathy and Stan could reasonably expect some peace and quiet, they were taking care of three generations. Their family sandwich was overstuffed with responsibility.
Next week Cokie is going to Mississippi, where her aunt, Tootsie Morrison, is marking her 90th birthday. The Morrisons have done our Berkeley friends one better when it comes to generational bonding: Tootsie has seven children, and every one of them lives on or near the family compound, just across the road from the Gulf of Mexico.
More than 20 years ago we were visiting Philadelphia with the extended Roberts clan and realized that the youngest member of our group, our nephew Zak, and the oldest, Steve’s father Will, were both missing. At that moment we officially become part of the sandwich generation — the responsible slice at the center of the family, looking out for the outer layers.
We’re still in the middle, but the sandwich has expanded. The next generation is piled in there with us, as they assume caretaking responsibilities of their own. A few years ago, when Lindy was living in Rome and had an accident, it was our London-based son who flew to her bedside.
Gotta go. The baby just woke up.
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by e-mail at svroberts@aol.com.