The aging are not easy to care for, and the reality is, we are all moving in that direction, whether we like it or not.
My mother is 95-years-old. I spent a few days with her a couple of weeks ago in her long-term care facility.
Stopping by the nurses’ station down the hall from her room, I asked the young lady whom I assumed to be a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant), “Is it okay to get coffee here?” She was placing scrambled eggs and oatmeal before one of the residents, whom I recognized from an earlier visit, just a few months ago. He was no longer in “independent living,” and had regressed to the point where he needed assistance with eating.
“Sure,” the CNA said, without looking in my direction, and then, upon more careful inspection, sizing me up as a guest and not a resident, added, “just bring the mug back, please.”
The news airing on the TV behind her was ignored by the residents in the room, though its volume was loud enough to reverberate all the way down the hallway, where I was headed.
Glancing at the TV screen, I noticed that the show’s hostess was interviewing Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers, co-stars of the 1960s TV popular comedy, “Leave it to Beaver.”
It was the 60th year celebration of the classic sitcom. I had grown up watching reruns, which I faithfully viewed each afternoon, while Mom was in the kitchen, preparing our evening meals.
I found myself longing for the young Wally and Beaver, and not the aging actors I saw on the news channel.
Turning away, carefully balancing my coffee cup, I moved down the hallway, sidestepping one resident who was bent over his walker, head down, taking tiny serpentine steps, and then I yielded to another, who was moving dead-eyed toward me in his mobie.
The people occupying the retirement center’s hallways and dining rooms were once pharmacists, real estate agents, ranchers, doctors, and small business owners—the very kinds of people I had looked up to as a boy. While I was watching Leave it to Beaver weekday afternoons, they were busy working, making a living, and hopefully a life. Now, with the voices of the mature Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers fading in the distance, I passed them—one holding a hand rail, another peering out her room from her wheelchair, another whizzing by me in his mobie.
With them before me, and Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers behind me, I froze—standing in the middle of the hallway, as if for a moment time had stopped.
Only it hadn’t.
It moves on.
Relentlessly.
Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and professor at Harvard Medical School, observes that today people are putting aside less in savings for old age than they have since the Great Depression and despite the fact that more than half of the very old now live without a spouse and have fewer children than ever before, we give virtually no thought to how we will live out our later years. And mainstream medicine has been slow to apply the knowledge it has to make old age better.
Gawande quotes Dr. Felix Silverstone, a geriatrician, who explained why so many mainstream doctors are not attracted to geriatrics. They don’t want to cope with “The Old Crock,” he says.
“The Old Crock is deaf. The Old Crock has poor vision. The Old Crock’s memory might be somewhat impaired. With the Old Crock, you have to slow down, because he asks you to repeat what you are saying or asking. And the Old Crock doesn’t just have a chief complaint—the Old Crock has fifteen chief complaints. You aren’t going to cure something he’s had for fifty years. How in the world are you going to cope with all of them? He has high blood pressure. He has diabetes. He has arthritis. There’s nothing glamorous about taking care of any of those things.”
Neither do we like taking care of The Old Crock.
But The Old Crock will be you…and me, if you aren’t there already.
Like taking care of the Old Crock, making proper preparations for that time is neither glamorous nor exciting.
But it is necessary.
Mom had been asleep when I left the room earlier in search of that my cup of coffee, but shortly after I returned, she awoke. Using her walker to steady her as she stepped in my direction, she exclaimed in surprise, “David, you’re still here.”
“Of course I am, Mom, I’m here with you, and I promise, I won’t leave without telling you,” I assured her, once again.
And glancing sideways in the mirror, catching a glimpse of my graying hair, I prayed that someday, someone, would be there to say the same.