Friends and community were exceptionally important for most of the people we spoke to; many of them said that friends in particular had become more important to them in their later years. Neighbours were vital for practical support and feeling part of the community.
Friends and community were exceptionally important for most of the people we spoke to; many of them said that friends in particular had become more important to them in their later years. Neighbours were vital for practical support and feeling part of the community. One of the great joys of being retired was that people had more time to spend with friends. Friends became like family, particularly if family members were absent or lived far away. ‘Friends’ included long time friends, as well as new and younger friends, made through new activities opened up in their retirement years.
Some people noted how important it was to have role models for positive ageing. Marjorie, who describes herself as a ‘reflective thinker’ said that the time she used to spend reflecting on her management style at work or her role in her relationship was now spent reflecting on the qualities of her friendships. As Brian H said: “just having good friends is the answer to a lot of things”.
Friends have always been important to
Marjorie and she finds she has more time for them in retirement.
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Very important. Very, very important. My mother said to me – because I’ve been married for 38 years next week, and I’m married to a very quiet, self-contained person, but sometimes he’s controlling. And my mother said to me a month after I got married [Marjorie], don’t – she was a very wise Scottish woman – she said [Marjorie], don’t ever give up your friends. And so, I didn’t want to anyway, but it spurred me on. She said two things actually. Never give up your friends, and don’t go back to work one day unless you have a cleaning person.
Very wise woman indeed.
She was a wise woman. Don’t manage for one week without it. So yeah, they’re very important. I would have to say that during the years of fecundity – I mean, I was a very hard working person, like 70 hour weeks was my thing. And I had two, bringing up two kids, one of whom had real issues, managing the house, the upward career trajectory and all of that, I saw less of my old friends than probably I would have liked to, but the friendships have all survived. It’s not as if they haven’t. So I tend to – I am more connected to them now than I was. I was very connected when I was a younger, single person. Marriage, kids, career, tends to absorb you. Still saw them and all of that, but I probably have a more frequent connection with them now.
Marlene believes that role models are just as important to have at this stage of life as they are in younger years.
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I was sitting on the Senior’s Ministerial Advisory Committee at the time for the government for the Aged Ministerial and I got an invite to go and hear this woman from America speak and she was 68. At the time I was about 55, thereabouts – 50 something and that just spurred me. There was something in that letter to go that I thought, “Well, if she can do that, then I can do that. In ten years’ time I could be doing what she’s doing,” and basically that’s what I do. Now I do go around doing talks and things like that and I went to school. I put myself back to school and did cert four and it just changed my life a lot knowing that, again, a role model. Somebody that is much older than me that you can look up to and I think that’s very important as well, no matter how old we are. We need role models all the way through our life and I think that’s the meaning of the word “elder,” basically because the elders are always the oldest. I think we used to revere our elders. In Indigenous cultures, they revere their elders and I believe that we revere our elders because of their wisdom and their knowledge. More wisdom; wisdom to live life a better way and not always grabbing and wanting. But I suppose my life has sent me that way as well.
A number of people discussed making a greater investment in their friends now that their children were older and had their own lives. Some people took into consideration not only their family, but where their friends lived when moving house. This was described as a continuation of the process of coming to terms with an ’empty nest’. Living in close proximity to and spending time with friends was an important part of building a new life when children moved out of home.
Brian X thinks it is not always a good idea to move close to family and cut ties with friends.
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I don’t miss not having the kids here to any great extent. You know, they’ve got their lives to live and after all those years in the transport industry, I think it’s a failing for people to move and follow their children because sooner or later the kids will up and move somewhere else and you’ve cut the ties with your friends and relatives and I don’t think it’s a good idea. No, I’m quite happy with my lot. I’ve got some good neighbours and people look after my unit when I’m away and I look after theirs and water their pot plants and do all things that are, yeah. No, I’m quite happy with my lot.
It was important to many people that they had friends of a range of ages. There were advantages to having both older friends with whom they had a shared history and younger friends who could introduce them to new experiences.
Chris appreciates how much he has in common with friends his own age. They are experiencing the same age-related health issues and share similar perspectives.
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You know in talking to your peers that it happens to everyone so you don’t stew about it. It’s just something that happens that you accept and deal with.
That’s why it’s really great to get with your peers around a dinner party because you can all laugh about having exactly the same reactions to things, forgetting exactly the same sorts of things, it’s really good. Because it’s only people of your own age group who really understand all of those things.
Kaye likes to have friends from a wide variety of age groups.
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I’m not old see. I’m not old, see this is the thing. Here, no, not at all. Here, yes. But not in here and this is the big thing and that’s I think where we all differ when we’re older. Because for some people it’s an all over thing when they age. I’m not, up here, no way. I thoroughly enjoy young people’s company. I don’t ever try to compete with them, if you know what I mean. But I enjoy young people’s company. I get on well with young people. I have a friend I worked with her for 27 years at my last job and she would be 20 odd years younger, if not more than me. And we can get on like a house on fire. I went to her wedding. She still comes for coffee, the whole bit. And we’re a different- Her mum’s a bit older than I am, I am old enough to be her mother but we get on well and that’s because you’re young mentally and it matters. It really does. It makes such a difference. You get so much enjoyment. You could be out with a whole group of people and I’m much more interested in what the younger people are talking about than the older people because unfortunately sometimes the conversation gets around to the illness and the- No, no. I prefer younger company. It helps keep you younger. It really does.
Seeing close friends getting older could be challenging. The inevitable decline in health, mental capacity and physical functioning made people aware of their own old age and eventual mortality.
Marjorie finds it confronting to witness the beginning of her friend’s mental decline.
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Look, I found it very confronting to be honest. This particular one who has been a friend since 1971, so how long is that? That’s 40-odd years, isn’t it, 44 years. And we travelled together, and we’ve maintained a friendship during that time. In fact, there were four of us who travelled together. All from, well most of my friends are from different backgrounds. They came from middle class backgrounds and I was the working class girl who met them through University basically. That’s social mobility, isn’t it? And she has experienced, she’s a single woman, and she has experienced quite severe memory stuff. I am finding that very confronting. And in fact, she was having a memory test earlier this week and I emailed her yesterday and got an email back this morning. I emailed her how did it go, and I am finding that very confronting in my head, but very confronting when I see her and I’m with her. However, I put that into perspective because there were four of us and we were all very close friends, and one died eight years ago from liver cancer. So there’s the two of us left who are fully functioning. One who is mentally deteriorating, and one who died prematurely from a terrible disease. So I count myself lucky. But I do find this mental one confronting.
Having close friends pass away was difficult for many people we spoke to, particularly people in their 70s and 80s who survived many – if not most – of their friends. Sometimes the awareness of this came as an enormous shock; Dot described needing someone to go with her to a polling booth on election day and discovered, on flicking through her address book, that all of her local friends had since passed away. However, people largely accepted this as an inevitable part of the ageing process. Given that their friends had lived long and full lives, their death was comparatively easy to cope with (see Death and dying.
Katherine has outlived a number of her closest friends which, while she misses them, she has come to accept as part of life.
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I think that I am, if anything, healthier than I deserve to be.
What makes you say that?
What makes me say that? I just see lots of people around me who are dead, and younger than me. I’m going to America next year, and I had hoped to see some dear friends of mine, but when I went and looked them up, they’d both died this year. And they’re only 74, so I that think I’m lucky in my genes, my mother lived until she was 95. Her brother lived until he was 92, and he only died then, because he was knocked over by a motorcycle ridden by an unlicensed driver when my uncle was out on a date with his girlfriend. So I have hopes that that side of my family’s genes will persist. My father died relatively young, at 75, but he died of emphysema brought on by smoking. And the smoking was brought on by World War II, so I have to blame World War II for the early loss of my father.
[Death] it’s part of life. I don’t regret it in the sense that I think it’s unnatural or anything. I miss them, I would like them be still alive so I could call them up. Same thing with my parents. I just have to accept the fact that human beings die. Every living thing dies, and there is no point in fussing about it once it’s happened. Accept the fact.
Some people found it more difficult to make friends in later years, particularly if their energy levels, mobility, hearing and vision were compromised. They noted that it took longer to get to know people when they did not always feel they had a lot of time left and did not have the energy or capacity to do lots of things together. Making new friends presented particular challenges for participants who moved into aged care facilities and suddenly lived in close proximity to many new people.
Leonie feels she has less capacity to build new, close friendships because of the limited activities she can do.
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With a close friend you know you can do those sort of things but to try and get to the stage of getting to close friendship takes some time. And takes a lot longer when you get older because there are fewer things that you can do together because both of you have different things that you need to do or look after or if the other person has got a husband or somebody else they look after well then that makes it just that more difficult.
Contrary to his expectations,
Fred has not made many male friends since his recent move to an aged care facility.
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And also I thought that coming to a place where there’s a lot of people living, although this is a fairly small section of it, that I would find other men in my position that I could make friends of and get used to and talk to, but that hasn’t really eventuated. There’s a couple of people I do talk to, but generally I haven’t been lucky in finding companionable people. That’s possibly my fault to a large extent, but there aren’t that many men here. Of say about 32 people in this section, 24 are ladies, widows and the others are men of varying interests and so on, so it’s not easy to – socially I haven’t found it easy to settle down. As I say, some of that may be my fault, because I’m a loner in many ways. And just, it’s controlled living which one is not used to. That’s what I mean by institutional living.
However, like Fred, people who were not making many new friends stressed that they had always been that way inclined. Some people had never needed a lot of friends and did not feel the need to make more, simply because they were getting older.
Maree has always been content having one close friend and this has not changed over the years.
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Sometimes [my longstanding friend] and I go out for dinner. I used to play bridge until I got sick. But other than that I’ve only got about two friends. I’ve never made a lot of friends. Never have all my life, only just had one or two friends.
She’ll ring me up before she goes [shopping] and says, “Do you need something?” Oh yeah, you can bring me home this or bring me home that. But I don’t like relying on anybody. I’ve never relied on anybody.
Those who were always very social still found ways to continue making friends, even if it became more difficult to do. Organised groups, such as church, exercise classes, craft groups and voluntary work provided the means of getting to know new people (see Interests and activities); see Volunteering. Many people continued to make friends and gather new groups of their friends together informally, just as they had always done.
Over the past year,
Lorna has gathered some friends together at her place for a weekly catch-up over tea and some of her baking.
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So now I’ve got the latest thing happening, Saturday afternoons I have the ladies afternoon, I had this wonderful cousin she turns 91 – I’ve got to ring her granddaughter tonight to see if they’ll come round Saturday week – she turns 91 in a fortnight but she started, she was like me I think, she was getting short of friends and relatives you see, they’re all dying off, and she started popping in of a Saturday afternoon after she’d done her bit of shopping and she’s ‘oh, I’ve come in for a cup of tea’. I said ‘right I’ll put the kettle on’. And so then [my neighbour] over the road she started popping over with the paper, she brings me the Weekly Times every week, so she came in and I said this day ‘well, you’d better have a cup of tea with us’. So she came and had a cup of tea and then next Saturday she came again and so this started to happen. My sister-in-law lives the second door down and she said me one day ‘I hate Saturdays, I find Saturdays are really a bit of a drag’. I said ‘oh, maybe she should come up and have a cup of tea with us’, well this started over 12 months ago, now every Saturday afternoon I have the ladies for afternoon tea so every week I whip up a nut loaf and a few biscuits or something. I always bake a bit of something and we have it on the kitchen table down there and we have these wonderful afternoons, we talk everything from sex, religion and politics, we do the rounds. [My cousin], who was a very shy little thing, [my cousin], she and I always got on well despite of the family business and all the hoo-ha that went on there, and she says, ‘oh Lorna, look I do look forward to my Saturday afternoons, I think they’re so funny the way they all talk’, and we have these wonderful chats, so your life is what you make it, got to get to it and put a bit of effort into it don’t you.
Having good neighbours was also very important to people we spoke with. For most people, neighbours were distinct from friends in that friends were people they socialised with and relied on emotionally. In contrast, neighbours provided practical support such as collecting their mail when they were on holidays, helping to bring shopping in and ‘checking in on them’ to make sure they were alright.
Edith’s neighbours step in to help her out, knowing that she does not have any family living nearby.
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My next door neighbours are very good. I think if I screamed, I know that they would either come and see if I was all right, or maybe if I screamed out help, I know that they would come and see if I was all right.
So is there a sense of community in your neighbourhood?
Not so much in the neighbourhood, it’s just my next door neighbour, and because I’ve lived next door to them for seventeen years. We were never inside one another’s places or anything, but if I go away, they will keep an eye on my property. If they go away, I will keep an eye on their property, so just the two of us, we just look after one another, I presume you’d say, because they know that I haven’t got any family close by, so they just, like I said, I just feel that I know that they would look after me if I had a problem.
Len’s neighbours are helping him out while he is unwell, but they are not friends who socialise together.
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They know that I’m physically crook at the moment and they come and get my rubbish bin and put my rubbish bin out. Most of the time they even put the rubbish in the bin and they just take it down the track. No, they’re nice people. Somebody came and cut a few bushes out of my garden. That’s where I’m getting old, I’d be the oldest person in this block of units.
But you don’t actually socialise, it’s more looking out for each other rather than?
Don’t socialise, no. If you want to socialise you go along to the City of Sterling and they’ve got a department there and you can involve yourself in anything you want to – knitting, if you want to go knitting, I think that’s out of my line. Anything you want to do they can organise it.
Those who identified with particular cultural groups often had a wide range of friends and acquaintances from which they could draw support and ask for practical assistance. However, some participants pointed out this assistance and sense of belonging to a community could have its drawbacks in terms of autonomy and obligations, for example responsibility for looking after grandchildren (see Attitudes of others.
Olga can rely on her Sri Lankan family and community.
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My son-in-laws are very good, they’ll come and help me with whatever I want in the house. And all my friends also, they know that I’m alone, they will always ask whether anything needs to be done, or if I’m sick, to go and get something for me, or something like that.
So you have people you can rely on.
Oh, yeah. My whole – the community practically will do anything if I ask them to.
A strong sense of community was important to many people. Being part of a close-knit community was about the connectedness they felt when they knew people in the neighbourhood. This included having good neighbours and having friends close by, but also getting to know people through seeing them down the street or being friendly with shopkeepers and other local service providers. Having good services in the area that met most of their needs was also important (see Housing.
Marjorie is determined to stay in her own home and cites her community as being a key reason why this is important to her.
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I would – we have lived in this house for 38 years and I sometimes think I hope I never have to move out of the house because I’m part of this community and, you know, simple things in terms of not just neighbours, but friends live nearby, the dentist is up the roads, the doctor’s up – you know, there’s all that stuff that I wouldn’t want to – and I like the house. And I thought about it, I would be able to, even if I was on my own, afford to bring support into the house to enable me to stay here.
What are the reasons why you wouldn’t go down that track?
It is partly the community, having a history of community connectedness, that’s how I’d describe it. And moving physically into, and having to reorientate yourself into a different community. And it will never be the same as the one that you’ve spent 40 or 50 years in.
Many people we spoke to felt a strong sense of obligation to ‘give back’ to their community. Voluntary work fulfilled this sense of obligation for those who engaged in this (see Volunteering. They took into account their responsibilities to the community when choosing charities to support or how to vote. Consideration of the needs of young people and being a role model was also important.
Gil feels that he and his partner have set a positive example for their suburban community of the reality of a same-sex relationship.
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But living up in suburbia, we’ve been very lucky to live up here, and we’ve been nearly 30, 40 years here, and I think my partner and I have done a lot of good for two gay men living in suburbia. And all around – they’ve all moved out now and grown up and got married – but all around, all the neighbours had kids, you know, boys, and all the neighbourhood would come down and jump off the roof into the pool, and they’re all now married and got kids of their own. So we’ve got a good model for the gay community in terms of showing that gay people are not monsters and predators.
It is important to
Robyn that action is taken to ensure a positive community for young people and families.
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Well, I’m very interested in my community and how that evolves as a really positive place to live. I’m a bit of a thinker so, from a strategic point of view, things like access and equity, justice, support for young ones to find their dream and then be able to follow it. Support systems for families so that they can have – you know, we talk about the theory of a well-balanced life, the home, the work-life balance. They’re slogans and unless you actually work towards them very hard and figure out what it actually means to you, then you can quite often just get trapped into the work and then lose the balance of your family. What that does is that the family loses and the community loses. So, I really do take very seriously, the dynamics of our positive community.
