On friendships which cross age barriers

Developing friendships with those outside your age group can be rich, important and expansive.

Posted 10:32 a.m. May 27, 2019 — Updated 10:32 a.m. May 27, 2019

Liisa Ogburn

I was up early to water my plants before the weekend heat arrived, listening to a recent talk by Barbara Brown Taylor. She was sharing what she had learned over twenty years of taking her mostly Christian students from Piedmont College in rural Georgia into Mosques, Synagogues, Temples and other unfamiliar places as part of her "Religion 101" class. The talk was provocative and moving, but what was more moving to me was that Martha Coffey, a lovely 86-year-old who arrives early to sit on the front row of my monthly seminar on aging, had emailed it to me. “Absolutely wonderful and so timely,” she wrote.

While Martha and I are separated by more than thirty years and many life experiences, those differences fall away when we compare favorite books, podcasts and stories. What a gift it is to swim in the same pool as Martha and the many others in their seventies, eighties and nineties I have the pleasure of meeting in the work that I do.

Like it or not, we segregate – especially in the United States -- along age lines. It happens unconsciously in our jobs or while volunteering in schools and neighborhoods and churches alongside the parents of kids our kids’ ages.

It can skew the landscape, or rather define what and who you see within it.

Annie Dillard once said, “How you spend your days is how you spend your lives.”

My husband, a hospitalist at Wake Med, recently remarked that one of the great benefits of his job is the breadth of patients he meets on a daily basis. “It doesn’t matter how young or old or educated or rich you are, some people just have ‘the good stuff.' I leave their hospital room feeling as if they have done more for me than me them.”

David Brooks, in his recent book, The Second Mountain, talks about the first mountain of life defined by pursuing what we think will lead to success. Then when the valley arrives -- in the form of a cancer diagnosis, a death, a divorce, a lost or wayward child, or professional failure —we are forced to reorient ourselves, and perhaps set our sights on a second richer, more meaningful mountain.

Brooks writes, “Understand that your suffering is a task that, if handled correctly, with the help of others, will lead to enlargement, not diminishment.”

Coming out of a version of my own valley, Brooks’ book resonates.

And my life is enlarging thanks to the likes of Martha Coffey, Alice Watkins, Martha Grove Hipskind, Libby Campbell and too many others to name here who now people the landscapes I notice and am drawn to.

Suggest A Correction