404

Now, let’s look at how people find meaning as they confront the life transitions of retirement and widowhood.

When we imagine the U.S. retirement age, we immediately think of 65. But, you might be surprised to know, the age for collecting full Social Security benefits is now 66 (and for people born after 1970, it will be 67); and for decades the “true” average U.S. retirement age was under 62 (Munnell & Rutledge, 2013). When we think of being retired, we imagine a short life stage before death. But if you leave work in your early sixties—particularly if you are female—expect to be retired for about a quarter of your total life! (See Adams & Rau, 2011.)

What caused retirement to take up such a huge chunk of the lifespan, and what is happening to this life stage in the United States today? Stay tuned as I scan the global economic retirement scene, and then offer a synopsis of current U.S. retirement trends.

Setting the Context: Differing Financial Retirement Cushions

If you are like many young people, you probably aren’t sure whether retirement will continue to exist once you reach later life. Actually, there are places where retirement doesn’t exist today. In Bangladesh, Jamaica, and Mexico, where more than half of all people over 65 are in the labor force, the elderly must work till they get seriously ill (Kinsella & Velkoff, 2001). The reason is that these nations lack the government-financed programs that propelled developed world retirement into a full life stage.

By the late twentieth century, government-sponsored programs, sometimes allowing retirement as young as the late fifties—were a fixture in more than 160 nations (Kinsella & Velkoff, 2001). But even in Europe, which has universal old-age government supports, retirement anxieties differ from place to place. In Scandinavia, with its shared national goal to “help everyone cradle to grave,” residents feel secure that they will be helped in old age. In Central Europe, where the gaps between rich and poor are wide and economic hardship is common earlier in life, people are intensely worried about their retirement years (Hershey, Henkins, & van Dalen, 2010).

What retirement programs can affluent nations provide? For answers, let’s compare Germany and the United States.

GERMANY: MERCEDES MODEL GOVERNMENT SUPPORT. Germans currently do worry more about retirement because they live in a rapidly aging nation where the government may need to cut back on the funds citizens have long enjoyed—comfortable old-age income for life. Retirement in Germany is mainly financed by employee and employer payroll taxes similar to the system we have in the United States. However, unlike in the United States, in Germany, the philosophy has traditionally been to keep people well off during their older years. When the typical German worker retires, the government has replaced roughly three-fourths of that person’s working income for life. Until recently, Germans have had no worries about falling into poverty in old age. Remarkably, German retirees have had more spending power as they traveled further into old age (Hungerford, 2003).

THE UNITED STATES: GOING IT ALONE WITH MODEST GOVERNMENT HELP. If Germany has offered a Mercedes-like model, government-funded U.S. retirement is more like an old used car; it allows people to barely make it, but in no comfort at all. The reason is that the famous, guaranteed old-age insurance program called Social Security operates as a safety net to keep people from being destitute in old age.

Social Security, the landmark government program instituted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, gets its financing from current workers. Employees and employers pay into this program to fund today’s retirees; then, when it is their turn to retire, these adults get a lifelong stipend financed by the current working population. However, with an average monthly check of $1303 in late 2014, Social Security can barely support the basics of life for older adults (Social Security Monthly Statistical Snapshot, 2014).

405

Private pensions (and personal savings) are supposed to take up the slack. Workers put aside a portion of each paycheck, and these funds, often matched by employer contributions, go into a tax-free account that accumulates equity. Then, at retirement, the person gets regular payouts, or a lump sum, on which to live (Johnson, 2009).

The central role of private pensions in financing retirement reflects the priority that the United States places on individual initiative. We are leery about the welfare-state implications of a federal government plan, preferring to provide tax incentives that encourage workers to plan for retirement on their own.

The dismal message is that, yes, U.S. retirement is becoming a shorter, more fragile phase of life. Moreover, the income inequalities highlighted throughout this book persist into the older years. Just as being single and female predicts earlier adult poverty, the same forces spell financial trouble in later life. But even formerly upper-middle-class people caught in the net of the Great Recession are vulnerable to struggling financially in old age (Collinson, 2014). And as a woman, even if you enter retirement affluent, poverty can be the unfortunate price of surviving until advanced old age.

Now that we understand the U.S. landscape, it’s time to explore other influences that go into the decision to leave work.

Exploring the Complex Push/Pull Retirement Decision

Imagine that you are in your sixties and considering leaving your job. Clearly, your primary consideration is economic: “Do I have enough money?” However, a second force that comes into play in Western nations is health: “Can I physically continue at work?” (De Preter, Van Looy, & Mortelmans, 2013; Wang & Shi, 2014). There may be another, insidious influence prompting your decision: age discrimination.

THE IMPACT OF AGE DISCRIMINATION. Age discrimination in the United States is illegal. People cannot get fired for being “too old.” But because it’s acceptable to get rid of more expensive workers—who tend to be older—for “business reasons,” it’s difficult to prove that “age” was the reason why a fifty-something worker got laid off (Rothenberg & Gardner, 2011).

Encouraging retirement via a special buyout is the preferred positive route employers use to entice Western workers to “go gently” into their retirement years (Ekerdt, 2010). In fact, in Northern Europe, lavish pension incentives often made retiring at age 60 normal, because it didn’t make financial sense for people to continue to work (De Preter, Van Looy, & Mortelmans, 2013). But workers also disengage from their jobs when they identify with being “ older employees,” agree with the negative stereotypes attached to that category, and feel discriminated against at work (Bayl-Smith & Griffin, 2014).

Older workers are supposed to be rigid, make more mental mistakes, be fearful of technology, and be less adaptable at work (McCann & Keaton, 2013). The problem is that these images are false! In one Swedish study, age made people more flexible at work (Kunze, Boehm, & Bruch, 2013). Research in the United States has suggested older workers are more compliant and, amazingly, less likely to take time off for being sick, in addition to generally being more reliable than younger employees (Newman, 2011).

Still, these facts don’t matter much when a laid-off worker of age 50 or 60 bumps up against age discrimination when looking for a new job (van Selm & Van der Heijden, 2013). It’s impossible to prove that “too old” is the reason for a given applicant being consigned to the “won’t hire” pile (Neumark, 2009). However, studies suggest that given hypothetical older and younger job seekers, employers routinely go for the younger adult (Ekerdt, 2010; Rothenberg & Gardner, 2011).

407

THE IMPACT OF WANTING TO WORK LONGER OR RETIRE. So far, I’ve been focusing on the dismal forces that affect retirement: Financial problems keep people in the labor force unwillingly; health issues and age discrimination push people to retire. I’ve been neglecting the fact that the decision to keep working or retire is also a positive choice. Many baby boomers say they want to keep working after age 65 because they love their jobs (Adams & Rau, 2011; Galinsky, 2007). People may retire in order to enter an exciting, new phase of life.

Who is passionate to stay in the labor force until their seventies or up to age 85? As I implied earlier, these older adults are often healthy and highly educated workers, like Jules in the Experiencing the Lifespan box on page 401, who feel tremendous flow in their careers (Adams & Rau, 2011; Wang & Shi, 2014). What about adults who permanently retire? Are they depressed or thrilled after taking this step?

Life as a Retiree

The answer is “it depends.” Retirement at age 65 typically has no effect on well-being (Wang & Shi, 2014); but leaving work early and feeling forced out of the workforce does negatively affect people’s emotional and physical health (Calvo, Sarkisian, & Tamborini, 2013; Zantinge and others, 2014; Dingemans & Henkens, 2014).

Actually, the qualities that make for retirement happiness are identical to the attributes that make for a satisfying life at any age: Be open to experience, generative (Burr, Santo, & Pushkar, 2011), healthy, happily married, and have the economic resources to enjoy life (Pinquart & Schindler, 2007).

Having a serious leisure passion, such as playing the flute or volunteering at church, smooths the way to a satisfying retirement life (Heo and others, 2010). In an uncanny parallel to the research described earlier relating to life purpose, one research summary suggested that volunteering in later life significantly reduced a person’s risk of death (Okun, Yeung, & Brown, 2013). In fact, you can predict whether a just-retired relative will flourish by knowing two facts: Did this person retire on time and voluntarily leave work? (Potocnik, Torera, & Peiro, 2013.) What is she like as a human being? (See Table 13.4 for a summary of these forces.)

How can you expect your relative to spend these years? Because “personality endures,” one key is to look to her passions now (Atchley, 1989; Pushkar and others, 2010). So, a social activist joins the Peace Corps. A business executive volunteers at SCORE (Senior Corps of Retired Executives), advising young people about setting up small businesses. Others decide to take up new “bucket list” goals such as hiking the Himalayas or getting a history Ph.D. Many people open to experience might retire to pack in as much new learning as they possibly can.

408

A dazzling menu of options are available to older adults passionate to expand their minds, from reduced fees at colleges, to older-adult institutes, to senior citizen center classes. Readers might be interested that, in the spirit of mind expansion (not credential collection!), during the next few years, I plan to get my master’s in a liberal arts program specifically for adults.

As my goal and the life agendas of millions of baby boomers reveal, in the Western world, we see the older years as a time to vigorously connect to the world (Ekerdt, 1986). However, there is a different cultural model of retirement. In the traditional Hindu perspective, later life is a time to disengage from worldly concerns. Ideally, people become wandering ascetics, renouncing their connections to loved ones and earthly pleasures in preparation for death (Savishinsky, 2004). Although this plan is rarely followed in practice (after all, our need to be closely attached is a basic human drive!), let’s not assume that our “do not go gently into the sunset,” keep-active retirement ideal applies around the world.

Summing Things Up: Social Policy Retirement Issues

Now, let’s summarize these section messages by focusing on some critical social issues with regard to retirement.

Finally, I can’t leave the topic of old-age poverty without touching on the topic of intergenerational equity—balancing the needs of the young and the old. Given that the U.S. elderly get Medicare and Social Security, and citizens in many other Western nations receive even more lavish old-age aid, it’s easy for social critics to argue that affluent societies are over-funding older people at the expense of the young (as reported in Moulaert & Biggs, 2013). But, abandoning these programs leaves people dependent on their families. That hurts everyone, young and old (Binstock, 2010). Suppose you had to choose between helping your children and supporting your grandmother, and destitute older people roamed the streets? Again, we are in this together. Life is not a zero-sum game.

409

Although we worry about its future, most of us associate retirement with joy. That emotion does not apply to widowhood. In a classic study of life stress, researchers ranked the death of a spouse as life’s most traumatic change (Holmes & Rahe, 1967). What multiplies the pain is that today, widowhood still may strike a pre-baby boom cohort who married in their early twenties and never lived alone.

Imagine losing your life partner after 50 or 60 years. You are unmoored and adrift, cut off from your main attachment figure. Tasks that may have been foreign, such as understanding the finances or fixing the food, fall on you alone. You must remake an identity whose central focus has been “married person” for all of your adult life. Decades ago, British psychiatrist Colin Parkes (1987) beautifully described how the world tilts: “Even when words remain the same, their meaning changes. The family is no longer the same as it was. Neither is home or a marriage” (p. 93).

How do people mourn this loss? Who has special trouble with this trauma, and how can we help people cope? Let’s look at these questions one by one.

Exploring Mourning

During the first months after a loved one dies, one classic study showed, people are often obsessed with the events surrounding the final event (Lindemann, 1944; Parkes, 1972). Especially if the death was sudden, husbands and wives report repeatedly going over a spouse’s final days or hours. They may feel the impulse to search for their beloved, even though they know intellectually that they are being irrational. Notice that these responses have similarities to those of a toddler who frantically searches for a caregiver when she leaves the room. With widowhood—as the poignant comments of the women in the Experiencing the Lifespan box show—John Bowlby’s clear-cut attachment response reemerges at full force.

410

Experts dislike using the word “recovery” to describe bereavement, as it implies that mourning, a normal life process, is a pathological state (Sandler, Wolchik, & Ayers, 2008). Moreover, when people lose a spouse, they do not simply “get better.” They emerge as different, hopefully more resilient human beings (Balk, 2008a, 2008b; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2008). Still, as I will describe in Chapter 15, after about a year, we expect widowed people to “improve” in the sense of remaking a satisfying new life. People still care deeply about their spouses. Their emotional connection remains. However, this mental image is incorporated into the survivor’s evolving identity as the widowed person continues to travel through life.

Now, let’s survey the research messages we get from tracking people’s feelings as they move from early bereavement into what attachment theorists might label the working model—or constructing an independent life—phase of widowhood:

WIDOWHOOD INVOLVES FLUCTUATING EMOTIONS. Interestingly (and in contrast to the image of unremitting pain), one conclusion of these studies is that widowhood evokes contradictory emotions. In following 59 widows, psychologists charted a regular decline in depressive symptoms over time. However, life satisfaction scores showed a different pattern, dipping to a low at the first year anniversary, and then rising during the second year (Powers, Bisconti, & Bergeman, 2014). Other researchers, following a huge national sample of Australian adults, found that, after widowhood, there was a rise in well-being (Anusic, Yap, & Lucas, 2014)!

What could explain this embarrassing finding? One possibility is that, as you saw in the introductory chapter vignette, even people in the happiest long-term marriages may not realize how well they can cope on their own. When you discover that, yes, you can prepare the taxes or fix the faucet and you do not fall apart when finding yourself single after 50 or 60 years, you have a tremendous sense of self-efficacy. As the Chinese proverb puts it: Within the worst crisis lies an opportunity (or, in the last chapter’s terminology, a potential redemption sequence). As I described in Chapter 12, life traumas do promote emotional growth.

This is not to minimize the health consequences of widowhood. Study after study finds that, compared to married adults, the widowed have worse mental health (Choi and Vasunilashorn, 2014; Sasson & Umberson, 2014). In one alarming Canadian finding, 2 in 5 elderly people showed chronic symptoms of depression after losing a husband or wife (Jozwiak, Preville, & Vasiliadis, 2013). The most powerful example comes from the widowhood mortality effect—a markedly higher risk of dying for the surviving spouse after a partner dies (Sullivan & Fenelon, 2014). Who can people most rely on for support during this difficult time?

FRIENDS SEEM MORE IMPORTANT THAN CHILDREN IN DETERMINING HOW PEOPLE ADJUST. Actually the surprising answer is friends. Family members do get people over the initial bereavement hump. But, because they have their own lives, children may need to move on (“Now that it’s been three months, I don’t need to visit Mom every day. I have to take care of my own husband and kids”). Therefore, to cope effectively over the long term, widows need to reach out to friends (Ha & Ingersoll-Dayton, 2008). The vital role friends play in widowhood well-being was showcased in this German finding: While satisfying “family attachments” predicted happiness among married elderly women, if a female was single, her happiness depended on having good friends (Albert, Labs, & Trommsdorff, 2010).

The virtue of friends is that, not only are they companions with whom to share activities, they also may allow you to more openly share your distress. For instance, in one study, Chinese widows living in Canada felt it was inappropriate to discuss their grief with family members (Martin-Matthews and others, 2013). This tendency to clam up (meaning not embarrass people by discussing your pain) may explain why widows report feeling lonely even when in a group (recall the Experiencing the Lifespan Box on page 409). And, in specifically studying loneliness among the widowed, researchers found the best cure for this common condition lay in making a new widowed friend (Utz and others, 2014).

411

At this point, readers may be tempted to urge everyone who has lost a spouse to join a widowed person’s group. This may be a mistake. An underlying message of my discussion is that most widowed people are resilient. We are doing them a disservice by assuming they are incompetent and totally in need of help. Actually, support groups for widowed people, psychologists find, are useful mainly for people who are having unusual trouble coping with this life event (Bonanno & Lilienfeld, 2008; Onrust and others, 2010). Who has special trouble coping with widowhood?

Predicting Which Widowed Adults Are Most at Risk

Some of you might imagine that men should be most vulnerable to having serious problems after their spouse dies. Women are more emotionally embedded in relationships. They can use their close, enduring connections with friends to construct new lives. Imagine losing your only attachment figure and you will understand why, for elderly widowers living alone, suicide is a major concern (Stroebe, Schut, & Stroebe, 2007).

Still, men have one great advantage over women in the reattachment odds—their far higher chance of finding a new mate. To give just one example, 9 out of 10 men in a study exploring dating after widowhood were actually in new relationships. But only 1 of 9 women who said they were interested in dating was able to achieve this goal (Carr & Boerner, 2013). Attend any U.S. boomer event at your local church (or older adult institute) and, like me, you might be struck by this strange thought: Have aliens swooped down and abducted all the men?

Another general risk factor, we might think, relates to whether the death was predicted or struck out of the blue (Schaan, 2013). Did your husband die unexpectedly on the golf course or pass away after years of worsening health? On-time (expected) deaths seem inherently less stressful because they give people a chance to prepare emotionally for the event. Moreover, when you have cared for a beloved partner who has suffered for years, there can be a sense of relief when the person dies.

Perhaps because males might be losing their only attachment figure, one study exploring the widowhood mortality effect showed husbands whose wives died unexpectedly were at much higher risk of dying than other widowed adults (Sullivan & Fenelon, 2014). In contrast, other researchers (Sasson & Umberson, 2014) found losing a spouse hits women harder when that event happens at an off-time (young) age—which makes sense because, as a 30- or 40-year-old widow, it’s hard to find friends who share your experience and can understand your pain.

However, rather than making generalizations based on gender or age, again, in predicting reactions to widowhood we need to adopt a developmental systems approach—that is, consider a complex set of forces. How emotionally resilient is the widowed person? Does that individual have other attachments or a life passion to cushion the blow? (See Carr, 2004.) We also need to look at the person’s married attachment style. People who are securely attached to their partner tend to have other secure attachments in the wider world. Men and women who are insecurely attached, because they generally have more trouble relating, may have trouble forming new close relationships to make up for their loss (Bonanno and others, 2002; Field, Gal-Oz, & Bonanno, 2002; Ha, 2008).

412

We also can’t neglect the role of the wider environment. Widowhood can be a more devastating blow for working-class women because they lack the financial resources to construct a new life (Angel, Jimenez, & Angel, 2007; Sullivan & Fenelon, 2014). In one study, researchers found that, if older adults were living in an area with a high concentration of widowed people, their odds of dying after being widowed were reduced (Subramanian, Elwert, & Christakis, 2008). So moving as a couple to a senior citizen community with all those widows and widowers may have an unexpected survivor bonus in later life!

Finally, we also need to look to the way a given culture treats widowed people. To take an extreme case, let’s travel to a place where being widowed (for women) can have nightmarish aspects that go well beyond losing a spouse.

Among the Igbo of West Africa, new widows must “prove” that they did not kill their spouse by sleeping with their husband’s corpse. Because property rights revert to the paternal side of the family, after the man’s death, his relatives feel free to take the bereaved woman’s possessions and force her off her land (Cattell, 2003; Sossou, 2002). Given this totally male-dominated tilt to their society, it is no wonder that an African widow in her sixties made this comment: “I’ve had so much of this bossing by men. I have my house, my garden. Why should I have a man take my money and spend it on drink and other women? I am the boss now” (quoted in Cattell, 2003, p. 59).

Table 13.5 pulls together the main points of my discussion in guidelines for helping a widowed family member. As a final comment, if you are a child, please allow your widowed parent to develop a new romantic attachment! You might think that new relationships run into headwinds from children mainly after parents’ divorce (see Chapter 11). But, in the dating in late life study I alluded to earlier, when father–child bonds were somewhat ambivalent, daughters in particular were apt to get very angry when their widowed dad found a replacement life love (Carr & Boerner, 2013).

In the next chapter, devoted to the physical challenges of later life, I’ll be continuing this discussion by offering tips about how to sensitively treat loved ones, especially during the old-old years.

Question 13.7

d

Question 13.8

meager/guaranteed

Question 13.9

Pros: Raising the retirement age to 70 will keep Social Security solvent, encourage older people to be productive for longer, and get society used to the fact that people can function competently well into later life. Cons: Depriving people of this money will add to the pressure forcing older people to unwillingly keep working—and for the millions of workers who don’t have other retirement nest eggs and health problems—have the devastating consequence of making people penniless in later life. Keeping older people in the labor force longer will make it more difficult for young people to get jobs or advance at work.

Question 13.10

You can expect mixed feelings of intense loss and self-efficacy.The quality of your aunt’s friendships will mattermost.