As longtime resident of Connecticut, and a sometime resident of Iowa, I welcome your state to the ranks of those where civilization as we know it did not end after gay marriage.
But why stop there?
When my father was spending his final days at a hospice, his roommate had a visitor, his son. The two of us stepped into the hall and had a companionable chat. In my father's day, we would have been lighting each other's cigarettes to go with the cups of coffee we're holding. Strangers when we meet, we have dying fathers in common.
"It's amazing how these old guys hang on," he told me.
I concur with my tale of Dad's sentence to imminent death weeks before. He tells me of his three brothers, all married with children. He's the never-married one who has lived with his father all his life, including the past two years' battle with cancer. Something in me envied their comfortable relationship-something missing between my father and me. But I feel sad for him too. His whole life, his father, soon to be gone. What will he go home to? Empty rooms? I get to go home to the turmoil of domestic tranquility-my wife and three kids.
I am a psychologist who works in nursing homes and in my professional life I have seen many family situations similar to that of my father's hospice roommate and his son.
Beyond the four states with gay marriage, other states, localities, and corporations provide some rights and privileges for gay relationships. But there are millions of others who deserve these rights and don't get them.
For many residents, the nursing homes in which I work can mean a bleak existence-days of medicalized routine, punctuated by meals, bingo, and the occasional Girl Scout Troop putting on a show. But for a lucky few, there is no need of a recreation schedule, no need of treatment for depression by the likes of me, no need for bingo. For these folks, if mom can't be at home, the family will bring home to mom. Spending long hours at the nursing home with mom is only a change of location, not a change of routine. When I started in this line of work, I noticed a woman sitting all day with a confused lady in a wheelchair-I thought she was on the staff, except she was a daughter sitting by her mom all day. The mother holding a doll, the daughter wiping the drool off the perpetually smiling face. This woman, like the son of my father's roommate, was the daughter who stayed at home with mom for decades. Now she had transferred her location from home to the nursing home, but not the love or the commitment.
There are many domestic arrangements beyond the unmarried child and parent that do not conform to the traditional marriage of a man and a woman or its recent analogue of two men or two women. My family was friends with two elderly bachelor brothers who had lived together for decades. I have also come to know many other non-married people who have lived together as roommates in non-romantic relationships that could nevertheless be described as committed partnerships. How can you not say, "commitment," when you describe a household that has held together for a generation?
According to the Bureau of the Census, there are more than 37 million non-family households in the United States. All kinds of combinations-women with women, men with men, women with children, men with children-that defy any definition-traditional or nouveau-of marriage.
One of the many objections to same sex marriage goes something like, "It's a slippery slope. Next, you'll be demanding rights for all kinds of groupings?"
And my answer goes something like, "Well, yes."
Without getting into the thicket of marriage versus domestic partnership versus civil union, the position of not extending domestic civil rights beyond couples lacks vision. It's too conservative. Too traditional.
If I were to live with someone in a committed relationship for years-either with a male or female, an adult or a child, I would also like the right to be able to visit in the hospital, and make medical decisions. If I kept home for my brother who worked and supported me, I see know reason why I should not be able to share in his employment benefits, such as healthcare, as would any married person. I see no reason why I shouldn't have survivorship rights to Social Security, 401ks, and pensions.
I am not advocating something unprecedented. Both children and dependent parents have been eligible for social security survivor benefits since 1939.
Why not extend these and the other benefits of marriage to any household with committed relationships?
I'll leave it to others to define and regulate these relationships but I wanted to put in a brief for the liberation of the proverbial maiden aunts. Perhaps if there was more recognition of these rights, then Arsenic and Old Lace's Aunt Martha and Aunt Abby-aided and abetted by their nephew Teddy-wouldn't have poisoned all those lonely old men. They could all have lived happily ever after in domestic bliss-or partnership.
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A version of this appeared in the Des Moines Reigister.
I will be appearing at Burgundy Books, East Haddam, CT to discuss my new book, NASTY, BRUTISH, AND LONG: ADVENTURES IN OLD AGE AND THE WORLD OF ELDERCARE (Avery/Penguin, March 2009), May 30th, Satruday, at 2pm.
