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Should elders be encouraged to include dead figures among their intimate network? Near the end of a long life, just when one would most welcome intimate relationships, many of one's contemporaries, precursors, and even children are no longer alive. The people with whom one had been intimate in the past or with whom one could perhaps form new intimate relationships are no longer available, at least for several of the kinds of interactions defined by Moss and Schwebel (1993) as intimate. Does that mean that intimacy is no longer possible? The comment of a 91-year-old widowed man suggests an intriguing, positive response to this question. He said, consider myself still married. I go to the cemetery once a week and put flowers on my wife's grave Another such response came from a very old man who said he stays in touch with his dead wife by talking to her now in prayer. Perhaps the term intimate is not the one to use for such interactions. The term implies a dyadic interchange in the real world. While these men were indeed describing a kind of dyadic interchange, one could say these interchanges occurred in the spiritual world. In fact, in past writing, I have used the construct attachment for such phenomena. Although they are based on past dyadic interactions, they now are dyadic only in the minds of the survivors and reflect what once was more than what is now. Note that this situation need not diminish the intensity of the interaction and may be similar to many real-world interactions that are presumed to be intimate but in which the partner does not really reciprocate. I am thinking of the finding of one of my graduate students long ago, who, in her research on friendship, found that many people nominated by a respondent as best friend never even mentioned in their own best-friend list the person who had nominated them (McCormick,1983). Let us consider the five components of intimacy listed by Moss and Schwebel (1993): commitment, caring (positive regard), cognitive intimacy, physical encounters, and interdependence. It is possible to maintain two of these, commitment and caring, with those who have died. One can be committed to the ideas and principles of someone with whom one can no longer actually interact. For example, a middle-- aged man reported that whenever he had to make an important decision, he thought about what his dead father would do in those circumstances. Certainly most people continue to care for someone who was once important to them, although psychoanalytic theorists (e.g., Bowlby, 1979) believe that one should cut one's ties to the dead in the process of mourning. In fact, when the irritations and ambivalences of frequent interaction are gone, one might care more than one did when the person was actually present. Actually, while Moss and Schwebel repeat the commonly held belief that is equated with positive regard, the feelings of those in the sample of very old San Franciscans we studied (Troll, 2001) included strong negative feelings as well as strong positive feelings toward relatives. Although most writers on family relationships assume that only positive feelings reflect or closeness (Roberts and Bengtson, 1990; Rossi and Rossi, 1990), it would seem reasonable that the essence of adults' emotions, particularly toward people close to them, is complexity (Troll and Fingerman, 1996). Where there is love there is also likely to be some hostility- or vice versa. hate him lovingly, said a respondent in one of the studies. With this complexity as the basis, ongoing attachment, influence, and care may be seen in relationships between the living and the dead. A third component in Moss and Schwebel's definition of intimacy, cognitive intimacy, can also be maintained symbolically, albeit in a limited, one-sided sense. This sort of cognitive intimacy occurs when the person who is alive continues to think about the person who is dead, as the strong feelings of the San Francisco respondents indicate. …
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