The making of a Scrooge

Charles Dickens wrote “A Christmas Carol” 166 years ago. He created one of literature’s most famous characters, Ebenezer Scrooge, who exhibited many signs of an older person in deep psychological trouble.

Geriatric specialists didn’t exist back in Dickens’ day. They do now. Recently, three Inland Northwest experts discussed why some modern elders end up angry and isolated, like Scrooge did.

And they weighed in on whether bitter older people can truly change for the better, as Scrooge does in the end.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock. Even the blindmen’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways.

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance.

Scrooge, cranky and mean, isolated himself by choice.

“Often when someone isolates socially by choice it’s because they are depressed,” said Dr. Lesley Blake, a geriatric staff psychiatrist at Eastern State Hospital.

“Scrooge had no pleasure in anything. He was so negative. Older people who are depressed and isolated often get angry and contentious. That’s their way of dealing with the situation.”

Most people age well, Blake pointed out. They accept life’s disappointments, but the “Scrooge minority” bear grudges about how their lives turned out.

“They were never named CEO or chair of the PTA,” Blake said. “Most of us get over that, but they don’t.”

Isolated older people suffer more health problems and often die younger than active and engaged seniors.

Becky Tiller of Spokane, president and owner of Tiller Care Strategies, has worked in elder care for 24 years. She said that isolated elders are also at greater risk for dementia.

“We’re social creatures,” she explained.

There he was, alone again, when all the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays. (The door) opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in.

“I have come to bring you home, dear brother! Home, for good and all. Father is so much kinder than he used to be, that home’s like Heaven!”

Dickens reveals little of Scrooge’s childhood home life, but he implies it was hell, before the father turned kinder. The boy had been left alone in his boarding school during many holiday breaks. No mother is mentioned.

Bitterness often stems from unresolved childhood grief. “It stunts them,” said Tiller.

And as Blake explained: “A lot of people who have problems as they age lost a parent early on, either through death or being put in orphanages or the parent was in jail.

“Older women are more able to deal with grief. For older men, it is seen as a weakness. They use a lot of denial. And then they take it out on other people.”

Tom Carroll is director of senior services for Catholic Charities Spokane. From the Dickens passage above, he extrapolated that Scrooge’s father, instead of examining his own hurts, had “inflicted those hurts onto the next generation.”

Scrooge, in turn, inflicted his childhood hurts on everyone around him in his adult life.

This dynamic happens all the time in real families, too, the experts said.

“The bitterness starts to feed off itself,” said Tiller.

Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller.

Scrooge was so tight with money that his name is still synonymous with cheapness. He was almost as miserly with himself as others. This can be a deadly combination in older people.

Blake worked as director of geriatric psychiatry at Northwestern University before moving to the Inland Northwest five years ago.

“I treated patients in Chicago and (some) were excessively wealthy,” she said. “I would do home visits, and people who lived in these amazing high-rise penthouses had nothing in the fridge. They wouldn’t use what they had.”

Studies show that after people reach a certain point of financial stability, more money doesn’t buy more happiness. Lottery winners, after an initial euphoria, return to the same level of life satisfaction – or dissatisfaction – they had before the big win.

“Most wise individuals realize that money is just a tool to help ourselves and help others, too,” Carroll said. “Money is only good when shared with others.

“Even the richest people in the world don’t take it with them. That’s why Carnegie built libraries. And J.P. Morgan built museums. To go on in perpetuity, people need to create something that generations after them can enjoy.”

To Tiny Tim, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a man, as the good old city knew. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh. His own heart laughed. That was quite enough for him.

Can older people really change? The experts’ unanimous answer: Yes.

“I don’t think it’s ever too late,” said Tiller, “if you can look at what causes people to be angry and hostile and if you can work with them on accepting and forgiveness.”

Often, it takes just one understanding person to thaw an older person’s frozen emotions.

“Sometimes I hear an elderly person say, ‘You are the first person to listen to me.’ It changes their outlook on everything,” Carroll said.

Blake said, “We have to reach out to them. They are not going to come to us. It doesn’t have to be a professional, just someone with a caring heart.”

The experts said it’s worth it, because if bitter elders change, they enrich the younger generations, just as Scrooge became a second father to Tiny Tim.

“I value so much what we can learn from our elder population,” Tiller said. “There’s this saying, ‘When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.’ It’s very true.”