Parenting | Michael R Lewis, ASJA

April 24, 2014January 3, 2024

Dealing with an Older Parent’s Remarriage

“It’s never too late” is the mantra of the Boomers – never too late to start a new career, to change physiques or hair colors, to start new hobbies, or find a new mate. While life expectancy has increased from previous generations, the likelihood of having considerable time after the death of one’s mate remains high. And the Boomer Generation is unwilling to waste precious time with regrets or feeling sorry for themselves.

With death comes grief – sometimes terrible, devastating sadness that seems as if it will never end. But it does end for most people. Dr. George Bonanno, a psychology professor at Columbia University who studies grief, explains that most surviving spouses initially oscillate between periods of deep sadness and distress and recalling good moments of laughter and joy. For most, this period lasts from six months to a year, the periods of sadness gradually lessening over time.

However, as 80-year-old poet and children’s book author Judith Viorst notes, seniors have already experienced “bad stuff” – holes in the brain from which names and dates have dropped, ailments you’ve never heard of, and attending funeral after funeral of dear friends and family. Death is not unexpected, and many have prepared emotionally to some extent for the eventuality.

A New Start

Baby Boomers are increasingly recognizing that their moment will not come again, and that there is no time to waste when you cannot see past the horizon made clearer by the death of a partner. Many feel, having fulfilled their responsibility to others as a spouse or parent, that they are finally “free to be me” for the first time in decades, to take roads not traveled and revisit choices made in their younger years. By and large, Boomers are generally confident in their abilities, resilience, and self-worth. As novelist Barbara Neely said when turning 65, “I look in the mirror more often, smile at the lovely lady, and hope I look as good as she does when I reach her age.”
Inevitably, a widow or widower will turn to other people, seeking to rebuild the social life they experienced before the death of their spouse or partner. Dating after 65 is both similar and different than dating as a teenager. There are the same butterflies, the same uncertainties about how to act, and the same insecurities about attractiveness, social position, and expectations. At the same time, there is less pressure because everyone has their scars and secrets.

With age, men generally become more tender and less aggressive, while women become more assertive and have little need for outside validation of their worth. By age 65, many people are comfortable in their own skins and are willing to accept others as they are. More importantly, the possibility of romance and the joy of intimacy never dies.
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While widowers over the age of 65 are more likely to remarry than widows due to the greater pool of mates from which to choose, widows are also remarrying at a greater rate than previous generations due to extended life spans. As University of Washington sociologist Pepper Schwartz says, “We are looking at very long periods of time. If you get married at 65, you could be together for 30 years. That may seem like a long enough time to get married.” Schwartz was engaged at age 67.

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March 7, 2014January 3, 2024

How to Help and Elderly Parent Deal with the Death of a Spouse

Velta Lewis died the morning of May 15th in the arms of her husband in the home they had purchased upon retiring three years previously. Her death, nine months after the diagnosis of lung cancer, occurred shortly before the couple expected to celebrate their 52nd wedding anniversary during a two-week trip to Paris. My father was devastated. Over the following weeks, I would find him sitting alone in their darkened family room – no television, no radio, no conversation to break the silence – staring with red-rimmed eyes into the past, trails of tears upon his cheeks.

If you have experienced the death of a loved one, you understand how grief can stun, even take you to your knees. In the midst of your own pain, it is easy to forget others who suffer. However, in the case of a parent whose spouse has died, it is at this time that your strength and compassion is most needed.

Members of the Greatest Generation were no strangers to death. My dad had experienced the passing of his grandmother as a young boy, and witnessed her body resting in the parlor of their house for final viewing, as was the custom in those days. He had spent almost a year in Europe during World War II, losing buddies to the ravages of battle. In the ensuing years, he and my mother buried parents, relatives, and friends, the funerals becoming more frequent as they grew older. They were religious people, neither fearing death, sure of their place in eternity.

But generally, the natural order of life is for husbands to go first, not wives. They had worked and saved over the years, expecting to enjoy 5 to 10 years of travel and seeing grandchildren before Dad’s time to go. Mother dying first was unnatural in the grand scheme of things – unlikely, but not impossible. In fact, according to the U.S. Census figures in 2012, husbands are 3.2 times more likely to die before their wives, with 36.9% of women older than 65 widowed compared to 11.5% of men over age 65 who are widowers. To my father, all of their shared preparations for their final days were suddenly pointless.

6 Causes of Miscommunication – Using Plain Language Effectively

The purpose of communication is to convey information from one person to another. Through the choice of written and spoken words, ideas, concepts, emotions, thoughts, and opinions are exchanged. Unfortunately, miscommunication is common – the listener or reader fails to understand what is said or written. Dale Carnegie, author of “How to Make Friends and Influence People,” said, “90 percent of all management problems are caused by miscommunication.”

When you consider the tensions between men and women, young and old, friends, and family members, it seems that most people are guilty of poor communication. But it’s possible to develop effective communication skills by learning how to speak and write simply and clearly, using plain language that’s easily understood by most people.

Common Miscommunications

“If you have time, try to mow the lawn this afternoon,” said the father as he walked out the door to go to his office. His teenage son, head down, concentrating on breakfast, grunts in reply, “Uh-huh.” To the father’s dismay, the yard remained untouched when he returned home. The son, when confronted by his angry father, excused his lack of action with the explanation, “You said ‘if I had time,’ and I was at the mall all day.”

This scene is repeated every day in thousands of homes across the country. The father was guilty of not saying what he really meant: His intent was to instruct his son to cut the grass that afternoon, even if that meant he had to rearrange his schedule or miss another activity. In an effort to avoid seeming controlling, the father added the false condition “if you have time,” expecting his son to interpret the underlying meaning of his statement. His son naturally focused on the conditional “if you have time,” rather than the direction ”mow the lawn.” As a consequence, both parties felt unfairly treated by the other.

Similar misunderstandings arise at work, in schools, on the playground, and at home. Whether in speaking or writing, misunderstandings arise due to poor word choice and the failure to realize that communication includes two equally critical components: the speaker and the listener, or the writer and the reader. As the NBA Hall of Fame coach of the Boston Celtics Red Auerbach said, “It’s not what you tell them…it’s what they hear.”

6 Ways to Build & Improve Your child’s Vocabulary for Success

In 1937, Johnson O’Connor, then the director of the Human Engineering Laboratory of the Stevens Institute of Technology, performed a detailed study of vocabulary use and familiarity with research subjects, ranging from high school and grammar school pupils, to professors and businessmen. He determined that the largest vocabularies are possessed by “major executives,” and the size of one’s vocabulary correlates to his salary. Johnson also concluded that a large vocabulary was an “important concomitant of success and financial prosperity.”

In the years since, other research have confirmed additional benefits of larger vocabularies: Higher high school achievement, higher reading achievement, even higher IQs. Educator and writer E.D. Hirsch, Jr. asserts that there is no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary: “Simply put, knowing more words makes you smarter.” Therefore, a sizable vocabulary is a great asset for your children to achieve success in the 21st century.

The Value of Vocabulary

Words are important because they allow you to convert thoughts with precision and concision and share them with others. Nathaniel Hawthorne, an 18th Century American novelist and author of the classic ”The Scarlet Letter,” may have expressed the power of words best: “Words…so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become, in the hands of one who know how to combine them.”

The combination of words – skillfully used – have empowered, entranced, and enthralled us in the hands of orators and writers throughout history. Verses of religious texts, Lincoln’s memorialization of the dead in his Gettysburg Address, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s message to a nation deep in the throes of economic depression, unemployment, and uncertainty (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) are just several of many memorable phrases and passages that will be eternal.

Words are essential to imagination, the ability to form new images and sensations that are not experienced through the physical senses. Words convey emotions, memories, concepts, and facts, and are the basis by which humans communicate. Being able to say what you mean in words that others understand without confusion is essential to understanding. As Mark Twain said, “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”