Another Country:
Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders
by Mary Pipher, Ph. D.
Reviewed by Jennifer West
The other "country" of Mary Pipher’s book is the country of old age, a land with a different language, different customs, and different values. “Another Country” attempts to be a field guide to this country for baby boomers who are find they may need to care for those who have always cared for them.
There are more older people in America today than ever before. People are living longer, but in a culture that does not value age. The older people of Pipher’s book grew up in real communities, whether rural or urban, where people looked out for one another, and where children and grandchildren lived nearby. Today, families can be scattered and communities seem to have broken down. Older people are isolated while adults struggle to divide their time among their kids, their jobs, and their aging parents.
Pipher enjoys and admires older people. She writes: “The old face physical problems, the loss of friends and family, and their own impending deaths. Many of them do so with courage and dignity, even humor. I wanted to learn how they do it.” Writing from her experience as a therapist, she gathers stories are often depressing but understandable. For example, an elderly woman hallucinated that rats were running through her house. In interviewing her, Pipher learns the woman lives alone and would like her busy family to visit, but will not insist. So she invented her own “visitors”. After the family begin visiting her regularly, the rats “disappear”.
Aging may seem like a gloomy subject for a book but Pipher handles it well and remains optimistic. She stresses that if age is another county, we must all learn to speak its language.
Mary Pipher is the author of the best-selling “Reviving Ophelia”, which charts the troubled passage of girls into adolescence, and “The Shelter of Each Other”. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, where she is a clinical psychologist in private practice. She is also a visiting assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, and a commentator for Nebraska Public Radio