MARY SANCHEZ COMMENTARY
Baby boomers face their biggest challenge
By MARY SANCHEZ
The panic strikes during the most mundane parts of my daily routine.
Dial mother’s house, the same number she has had for more than 40 years. And the phone rings ... and rings and rings. Has she fallen?
On the weekly grocery store trip, I feel the adrenaline for the 30 seconds I leave her alone at the curb so she doesn’t have to walk the uneven pavement of the parking lot. I rush to pull the car around — quickly, before some creep spies her as an easy target for a purse snatching.
Both of my parents reached this stage of life, when children are still children but become guardians for the simple reason that we can walk fast, turn quickly and lift the things that need to be lifted.
Father is gone five years now. Mother is bravely carrying on as her mobility wanes. “Frail” is the first word that usually comes out when friends inquire about my mother. Thankfully, it is usually followed by “witty” and “pretty spry for 87 years old.”
I thought of my mother when I heard the news that the first baby boomer has applied for Social Security benefits. For almost 62 years Kathleen Casey-Kirschling has had the distinction of being the nation’s oldest baby boomer. Now she’s retiring to a home in Maryland with her husband, who is also turning 62 next year.
What brought mother to mind was the realization that we do not as a nation grasp what this demographic shift will mean. Not financially, not legislatively, not emotionally. The baby boom generation of 80 million will soon enough be edging toward death. Who will care for them, and how?
By next year, 365 more boomers will join Casey-Kirschling every hour, turning 62 and becoming eligible to tap into Social Security.
The commissioner of Social Security is fond of referring to this new turn for the boomers as “America’s silver tsunami.” Tsunami, of course, never portends to anything positive.
In 10 more years, the pool of funds that is Social Security will be upended — meaning that more will be going out than will be coming in.
Medicare currently covers about 44 million people. By 2030, the number will be 79 million.
Technically, I’m a baby boomer as well, but barely. I arrived at the end of the birthing boom that lasted from 1946 to 1964. And so I expect to feel the effects of how society shifts as my elder boomers continue to age.
Few people want to discuss, much less fully plan for, their own demise quite as honestly as baby boomers need to right now. We’d all like to think that we will “grow old gracefully,” be able to look back on a “purpose-driven life” and a bookshelf full of other soothing clichés about aging.
Yet how many realize what the end is really like these days? We lurch toward death, suffering a fall, a stroke, a heart attack — and then recover. But often not to the same level of health as before, until the next medical incident and a little more physical strength is sapped. Dying really is a process.
It’s an expensive process as well, but the costs are not as apparent as they should be. According to AARP, 34 million people, usually women, provide an average 21 hours of uncompensated care a week to an elderly relative — a lot of them while still trying to work full-time. This has had an effect on productivity in the workplace and family finances.
Equally concerning is the fact that the average caregiver is a 46-year-old working woman. Often she will find it necessary to cut back on her own work to care for a relative, eroding her wages, benefits and the money she can offer her family. The danger is that, over the long term, people in this situation limit their ability to save for their own retirements.
With the vast demographic shift upon us, will this burden be too much to bear?
Baby boomers like to tout the impact they’ve had on every aspect of life — how they have changed the nation, often for the better, by ushering in new forms of equality, reforming education and even revolutionizing attitudes about aging (“40 is the new 30!”).
Soon the boomers will face their own mortality. Like my mother, everyone who reaches their “golden years” deserves to live them in dignity. But for that to happen, boomers need to begin seriously considering how they will live out their last years and, yes, how they will die.
It will be their greatest challenge yet.
To reach Mary Sanchez call 816-234-4752 or send email to msanchez@kcstar.com.
