Elder Orphans: A Hard Knock Life?
/The following post was created as part of the assigned work for Henry Jenkins's PhD seminar, Public Intellectuals. The goal of the class is to help communication and media studies students to develop the skills and conceptual framework necessary to do more public-facing work. They learn how to write op-eds, blog posts, interviews, podcasts, and dialogic writing and consider examples of contemporary and historic public intellectuals from around the world. The definition of public intellectuals goes beyond a celebrity-focus approach to think about all of the work which gets done to engage publics -- at all scales -- with scholarship and critiques concerning the media, politics, and everyday life. Our assumption is that most scholars and many nonscholars do work which informs the public sphere, whether it is speaking on national television or to a local PTA meeting.
“It’s a hard knock life for us
It’s a hard knock life for us
’Stead of treated
We get tricked
’Stead of kisses
We get kicked
It’s the hard-knock life”
After the world went nuts over Jay-Z’s 1998 hit single, “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem),” Charles Strouse, the composer of the original song from the musical Annie that Jay-Z sampled, was asked for his reaction to it. Aside from being a little worried about all the “swears” and use of the “N-word,” the Broadway veteran liked it and said, “In some areas, there's parallel thinking between me and Jay-Z...'Hard Knock Life' had to reflect the fact that the kids in the story were underprivileged and exploited."
Jay-Z didn’t share Strouse’s point of view about the grubby band of orphans singing about their sorry lot in life, saying, “They ain't singing that song as if they sad about it. 'Ok, this is our situation. We gonna make the best of it,’ and went on to say:
“You know, I knew how people in the ghetto would relate to words like, 'Instead of treated we get tricked' and 'Instead of kisses we get kicked'…It's like when we watch movies we're always rooting for the villain or the underdog because that's who we feel we are. It's us against society. And, to me, the way the kids in the chorus are singing 'It's a hard-knock life' is more like they're rejoicing about it. Like they're too strong to let it bring them down. And so that's also the reason why I call it the 'Ghetto Anthem."
You can watch “It’s a Hard Knock Life” from the original 1982 film version with Carol Burnett and Albert Finney above, or you can watch the later 2014 version with Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx (although if you love musical theater, I recommend avoiding the later version like the plague, as you will never be able to unsee Cameron Diaz’s performance as Miss Hannigan).
Where am I going with this, you ask? Well, first of all, Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” is a great song, so if you’ve never heard it, you’re welcome.
Second, I think we can learn from his point of view about the resilience and strength of the underdog when it comes to growing old on one’s own, and on what it means to be an “elder orphan” in America.
Helen Dennis and I wrote about the somewhat unfortunately named “elder orphans” in a book chapter on retirement:
“The term ‘elder orphans’ is referred to in gerontological circles as ‘aged, community-dwelling individuals who are socially and/or physically isolated, without an available known family member or designated surrogate or caregiver.’ An alternative term ‘solo agers’ was recently introduced by author and life planning coach Sarah Zeff Geber. Geriatricians, gerontologists, retirement planners and others concerned about older adults aging alone are focused on the ‘acute’ issues solo agers may face, such as making plans for what would happen should they need legal guardianship or become incapacitated with no one to advocate for them.” (Dennis & Marnfeldt, 2021)
It’s true, growing older without a family support network has the potential to put people in vulnerable situations. A quick Google image search will tell you what the world thinks growing older alone looks like—apparently a lot of looking out the window:
figure 1
The thing is, being a solo ager is not rare and is even becoming the norm. A 2020 survey by the AARP found that 12% of people in the United States over the age of 50 live alone, are un-partnered, and have no living children. Living alone also increases with age, especially for women who have a longer life expectancy, and are typically partnered with someone older than themselves to start with. In a 2021 profile of older Americans published by the Administration for Community Living, 20% of men and 33% of women over the age of 65 lived alone.
figure 2
Profiles of “kinless elders” that often emerge in the press are exemplified in this December 2022 New York Times article, “Who Will Care for ‘Kinless’ Seniors?” by Paula Span. Most coverage of older adults in the mainstream press emphasizes a decline narrative, whether it’s a decline in health, mental capacity, or social capital. A more positive narrative is one of resilience and resourcefulness.
In Span’s article, two kinless older women, Lynne Ingersoll, a 77-year-old retired librarian, and Joan DelFattore, a retired English professor, are featured. Both women arrived kinless in elderhood, one by choice, the other by circumstance.
Ms. Ingersoll didn’t know she was on a path to become an elder orphan. The path only became clear in retrospect as she slowly outlived her parents, her partners, her pals and her pets.
“My social life consists of doctors and store clerks—that’s a joke, but it’s pretty much true,” she says now, as she manages to take care of herself, despite multiple debilitating health conditions.
figure 3
A contrasting profile to Ms. Ingersoll’s is one of Joan DelFattore, a woman who deliberately fashioned her life to become an elder orphan. She said she knew from a young age that she didn’t want to be a wife or a mom, and she knew she preferred living alone. With that, she says she “went about constructing a single life.” The retired professor is healthy, still engaged in her work as a researcher and teacher, and has a wide circle of both personal and professional social connections.
figure 4
Ms. Ingersoll would presumably argue that she too “constructed” her life based on her preferences as a younger woman the same way Prof. DelFattore did. She didn’t want to live alone, and yet she does. She had no children, but she had three life partners over the years who all predeceased her.
She’s living the hard knock life of an elder orphan in her later years due to many things out of her control. She can take care of herself now, but in a year or two or five, who knows? Where will she live, and will she be able to make that choice for herself?
In 2016, a survey of an Elder Orphans Facebook group was conducted among over 500 of its 10,000+ members aged 55+. It found that 45% of its members had lived alone for 20 years or more, with 42% saying they lived alone just because they wanted to.
In a section of the survey on vulnerability, respondents were asked if they believed they could take care of themselves as they aged. Answers were pretty equally distributed across three buckets—those who said definitely yes (28%), those who said probably yes (35%), and those who were hedging a bit with “maybe/maybe not” (33%).
Asked about their top choice for where they want to live as they age, it comes as no surprise to those of us in the field of aging and gerontology that almost 50% of the Facebook elder orphans say their wish is to remain in their own home, with another almost 30% adding a more detailed version of that, saying they want to live in a “Tiny affordable house in a village of people like you.”
figure 5
Only 2% said their top choice was to move in with another family member, and just 1% said they wanted to rent a room in a home they shared with someone else. A surprising 12% said they’d choose “affordable” assisted living.
I say surprising because they keep using that word—“affordable”—and I do not think it means what they think it means because there is virtually no “affordable” assisted living in the United States, unless you have a minimum of $3,000 bucks a month to spare and want to live in one of the Dakotas.
And yet, I get it.
Keeping the “affordable assisted living” myth alive is far better than contemplating a terrifying possible future where a kinless elder might have no alternative but to be placed in the modern day equivalent of an orphanage for older people—a nursing home.
It’s not a stretch to think that older adults are more freaked out than usual about the possibility of being placed in a nursing home, given what we’ve lived through over the last three years. From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic through January 2022, over 200,000 residents and staff in nursing facilities in the U.S. died, and the death rate for people living in nursing homes was more than 23 times the death rate of people over age 65 who did not live in nursing homes.
Two hundred thousand people dead. What’s an elder orphan to make of that?
Maybe, like Jay-Z, elder orphans have metaphorically revised the “Hard Knock Life” lyrics in their heads?
“It’s a hard knock life for us
It’s a hard knock life for us
No one cares for you, a smidge
When you’re in an orphanage”
That’s probably too optimistic for most budding elder orphans or other reality-based individuals. They probably think more like Tracey Pompey. Ms. Pompey, a nurse’s aid for 30 years who believes she lost her father due to neglect in a nursing facility, said:
“People get desensitized to things like this…
If it happens to a child or a dog, people won’t shut up.”
figure 6
The people in the elder orphans Facebook group are probably more aligned with Ms. Pompey’s sentiments, as they understand the risk of the social (and literal) death they face being orphaned in late life.
I wonder if their mindset is less Jay-Z and more Killer Mike in the 2017 “Hummels & Heroin” episode of South Park, where he voiced the original song, "They Got Me Locked Up In Here.”
The episode is a parody of the opioid epidemic set against the nursing-home-as-prison paradigm that was as salient in 2017 as it is today and probably will be in 2050. The first stanza ends with nursing home placement as indictment:
“🎶 They got me locked up in here
They got me locked up in here
And I’m sitting, doin’ hard time
Pissin’ in a metal bowl
Eatin’ shit from a lunch line
(They got me locked up)
In here, nobody knows you by your name
You just a number
Livin’ under bitch-ass rules of a broken game
They put me here to die,
Left me angry and alone
For the crime of being old
They threw me in this nursing home”
Jay-Z’s “Hard Knock Life” from 25 years ago was about rooting for the orphan kid, the underdog, in an “us against the world” vibe that felt at once cautious but hopeful. Killer Mike’s rendition of the orphaned elder is decidedly more dark and hopeless but also reflective of what many people believe to be true.
Contemplating this harsh reality made me reach for Jay-Z again and his 2009 single, “Young Forever” from the “Blueprint 3” album, in which his optimism is unfettered by caution:
“🎶So we live a life like a video
When the sun is always out and you never get old
And the champagne’s always cold
And the music is always good
And the pretty girls just happened to stop by in the hood
And they hop their pretty ass up on the hood of that pretty ass car
Without a wrinkle in today
’Cause there is no tomorrow
Just some picture perfect day
To last a whole lifetime
And it never ends
’Cause all we have to do is hit rewind
So let’s just stay in the moment
Smoke some weed, drink some wine
Reminisce, talk some shit, forever young is in your mind
Leave a mark that can’t erase, neither space nor time
So when the director yells cut we’ll be fine
Ah Forever young”
Sometimes we need to cling to “forever young” in our minds to escape from hummels and heroine, but, most days, it’s just a hard knock life for us.
Biography
Kelly Marnfeldt is a doctoral candidate at USC’s Leonard Davis School of Gerontology, where she also received her Master of Science in 2019. Her research interests broadly include the impact of caregiver burden, the meaning of justice for victims of elder abuse, and the intersection of vulnerability and autonomy for people living with dementia who wish to age in place in their communities.
