continued
First, we must prioritize aging in the work that’s taking place in our communities—whether it’s community building, activism, direct services, training and capacity building, research or advocacy. The magnitude of this issue, and sheer numbers of our populations, requires an appropriate response in size.
We must also challenge the popular mindset that older people cannot be advocates on their own behalf, and that all elders require is mere treatment or services. We must create the political platforms where they—and eventually all of us—can advocate on our own behalf as older people.
Our responses to these concerns must also be inter-generational, they must tap into the resilience and wisdom of elders at the same time that we draw on the leadership of younger people, or people of all ages. On one level, this would mean that the leadership, experience and historical memory among elders are preserved—or debated and refined where appropriate. But it would also acknowledge that movements evolve, ideas expire, and new responses emerge to challenge the traditional paradigms. And that’s a good thing. Generational differences need not be placed in opposition to one another—they must be in dialogue.
We must also form the types of coalitions that transcend the issue silos, the destructive single issue politics, the “my-issue-is-more-important-than-yours” mentality. These types of coalitions broaden both our understanding and our responses to some of the most difficult questions of our time. For example, SAGE has been working with six national people of color aging organizations to focus federal attention on our collective communities. The themes that have emerged through this work—the broader “problem,” if you will—include economic hardship, discrimination across the lifespan, systemic underfunding, cultural incompetence and a reliance on family, broadly defined.
We must be bold, tease the edges of our mission statements, provoke where necessary. SAGE is also on the steering committee of the Caring Across Generations campaign, led by the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Jobs with Justice, as part of an effort to enact legislation that would create millions of well-paid jobs in direct care work, enforce labor standards for hundreds of thousands of direct care workers—many of whom are immigrants and women of color—provide a path to legalization, and career opportunities so that economic uplift becomes a reality. The premise here is that the aging movement, or the LGBT movement, or however we construct our movement affinities, need not divorce themselves from the broader political left. In fact, we must position ourselves at its center and commit to co-lead these struggles for racial, economic and gender justice.
Finally, we must devote focused resources and attention to issues that have been rendered invisible for a number of unconscionable reasons. In late June, SAGE and the National Center for Transgender Equality brought together 15 trans aging leaders from various disciplines—including the Freedom Center for Social Justice—to ask: what can we do to begin ensuring that transgender and gender non-conforming older adults age successfully, with broad community support, free of discrimination, and financially secure? Whether by focusing on policies related to long-term care agencies, or the ways in which Medicare can better cover the full costs of transition-related surgery, or how the broader network of aging agencies nationwide can better serve transgender elders—the policy responses are plentiful. And as we can all attest: they are nothing less than urgent.
* * *
Nearly two thousand miles away, in the northern part of Colorado, my parents are aging rapidly and grappling with the implications of nearing their deaths. My father is 76 years old, an indigenous, dark-skinned Latino who grew up poor in a segregated part of Southern Colorado in the 1930s and 1940s. Through his boyhood, he remembers signs that relegated Mexicans to separate public spaces. With no other financial options, he entered the military in 1952 and survived both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Though he carried with him—and imposed on us, his family—the post-traumatic stress and violence of that experience in the decades that followed. Today, at 76 years old, he works night shifts as a security guard to temper the chaos in his head, and to earn the disposable income that he and my mother still rely on. He has been a loud-spoken atheist since I can remember even knowing what faith, religion and atheism denoted.
In contrast, my mother is 71, a Mexican immigrant from Leon, Guanajuato who came to the U.S. in the mid 1960s to escape persistent sexual assault, an impossibly poor life and… because she wanted to. She is a devout Catholic; she rejects the angry, reactionary aspects of the Church; and she prays every morning and night. She has prayed nonstop through each near death experience she and my father have had in the last six years. She is also a prolific poet, having published dozens of poems, including a book of collected poems in Mexico, throughout the 1980s and 1990s. I read these poems as meditations on loss, about living in between cultures, about migration and its costs, about her family, here and abroad, and about her own ever-changing relationship to her sense of God.
In the last four months, their health has deteriorated. My mother’s kidneys are failing; she is obese and barely mobile; she doesn’t have the focus or the hand agility to write the poems that have sustained her for her entire life or to read in depth the religious texts that once provided comfort. She sleeps more every day. Our family members from Mexico have been visiting her this year, one by one, over the months, as if in ritual.
My father, who prided himself on his physical and mental health for most of my life, has almost no hearing, and this year lost his eyesight in one eye. He will soon give up driving. He fears blindness; he fears what he will be forced to see when all he can see are memories. His job will soon end and the significant caregiving support he offers my mother will end as well.
Their support system is a network of friends—mostly Latino immigrants whom they have befriended over the years, or working class neighbors who live on their block. These are large families of young and older, people who bring food, and friendship, and breathe life into their daily existence. People whose very actions and presence confirm for my mother the faith she still needs. And they offer my father the debate he craves in order to preserve his disbelief. My sister, a single mother, has served as their caregiver over the years, and I observe the wear in her eyes whenever I visit. I support however I can from afar. My parents worry I will have no one when I become much older, or that I will be murdered in an unspeakable hate crime that they have become too good at describing. And if they heard the stories I encounter through my work, they would worry even more. I live in Brooklyn, and I wrestle with all the questions that occupy those of us who have left home in search of another. I have no answers or process for clarity. I have no defined faith. I have only questions, a love of mystery and an activist calling.
Some of my friends would tell me the theme here is community and support; we have always been our best supports as marginalized people—how else would the lucky among us have made it? Find me a social justice movement, and you’ll find the most beautiful caretakers among them. Other friends would say my parents deserve more. They would point to the state of home-based care, the need for supporting all of us as we age, become disabled and insist—as the disability rights movement has long argued—to “age in place” and not necessarily be institutionalized. And others would ask whether my parents—Latinos, working class, Spanish-speaking and immigrants—would even find quality care in their communities; whether it would be culturally and linguistically appropriate; whether it would be affordable. Or is the issue deeper, my most philosopher and spiritual of friends would question: What happens when we come to an end? How should that inevitably transpire? How should a culture prepare?
For me, the theme these days feels very different. For me, the theme is inspired by my mother, a poet, who taught me always to locate the precise word, to merge craft with emotion, to live by risk and discipline, to end the story in the necessary unfolding of the next one. Illuminate but never answer, she taught me. And I think it’s how she sees her faith.
For me, the theme is family. When we don’t protect elders and invest in elder leadership, we dishonor all that came before us. We become ahistorical. When we don’t focus our attention on aging services and supports, we destabilize not just elder lives but the entire family unit, because we still take care of each other—and the costs are financial and emotional on all of us as children, extended family, partners, friends and caregivers. And when families are understood only as biological supports, or spouses, we misname the ways that many of us, if not all of us, have organized ourselves out of necessity, and in the pursuit of justice and joy. And when we posit these simplistic binaries—religious or secular, male or female, biological or chosen—we forget that our lives are more nuanced, inherently multi-faceted—shaped by something larger than all of us, call it what you will—than any quick categorization will describe.
My mother, the religious poet, falls asleep nightly to scripture. My father, the moody atheist, lays awake all night in wonder. They have aged, and they will soon pass away, I know. They are—at the end of all of this—each other’s notion of faith and family. And I have found myself somehow, at this point, through career trajectory or fate, the queer son, working on justice for our aging communities. My parents have shared a bed for more than forty years. They wake up every morning together. And they wait.
Robert Espinoza is the Senior Director of Policy and Communications at SAGE (Services and Advocacy for GLBT Elders) in New York City. He can be reached at
respinoza@sageusa.org.