Is there a magic formula, like the square-root-of–I-don’t-know that will make you feel good about the decision you make? Wouldn’t it be much easier if decision-making were objective, like trigonometry, or physics? But someone, or something, will not let us get off that easily. The decision I’m talking about has to do with our aging parents. You’re father has dementia and can no longer make simple decisions, like when to take a shower, or what to eat for breakfast (though sometimes I don’t even know). Your father’s brain has slowed to the point where he can’t recall seeing his son and grandchildren earlier in the day, or talking with his daughter on the phone an hour earlier. He can’t walk without assistance, or bathe independently. Years ago, when your father ran a business and traveled the world, he asked you to be his health care proxy. “Sure,” you said, not thinking about a decade or two later. My father is young, vibrant, and healthy. Nothing will ever happen to him.

Now, whenever you call your father, he desperately wants to tell you something, but can’t find the words to express what he’s feeling. So you guess: “Are you looking for a pen? Are you wondering what day it is?” You listen carefully, to every syllable slip from your father’s mouth. Finally, “Oh, you need to get to Florida.” Your father has spent the past 19 winters in Florida. He hates the cold, has told you, more than once, that it would “kill” him if he has to stay up north. You pause, because you don’t know how to answer his question. For the past six months, your father has been in and out of hospitals for various reasons. Even though you know he’ll have a caregiver with him 24/7, like he’s had for the past two years, you tell your father you don’t think it’s a good idea for him to go to Florida. But wouldn’t a warm climate make your father happy? Maybe a mega dose of Vitamin D would do him good. It’s not as if he’s pleading to go to another cold climate, like Woody in the film Nebraska (No spoilers here in case you have yet to see the film). But cold or warm, ice or sand, you still can’t be sure your father will be safe, or better off far from family and doctors who know him best. What if he falls and breaks a hip, or hits his head? What then? Of course, you’d fly south, but wouldn’t it be easier, for you that is, if your father were just a car’s drive away? Still, what if the caregivers in Florida forget to give him his medication? What if one of them fails to show up for her shift?

Your father doesn’t say anything when you tell him you don’t think it’s a good idea for him to travel to Florida. Instead, he gazes out the window, at the snowdrifts, at the ice forming on the glass. His eyelids twitch, he blinks, slowly, then falls asleep. But you know he’s not sleeping restfully because his breathing is labored, his forehead is crinkled, and his lips are tightly closed in a down-sloped curve. Fuck it, you whisper to yourself: I’ll fly with him to the Sunshine State. It might be the last time he’ll feel the sand between his toes, the last time he’ll hear the ocean lull him to sleep, the last time my father will absorb the sun and breathe in the salt-spritzed air.

If you are among the aged (in your eighth or ninth decade of life), and felt you had it in you to last another ten years, what ultimate, far reaching dream would you hope to fulfill? What middle of the road dream would you like to fulfill. Finally, what immediate, arm’s length dream do you yearn to realize?

As he does every morning before leaving for work, yesterday my husband, John, kissed me and said, “Have a nice morning. Love you.” But what he does not say every morning is, “Call me when you wake up.”

I nodded, smiled, and said, “Love you too.” I rolled over, and as I started to doze, thought about why he wanted me to call: Maybe he’s going to surprise me and tell me he’s taking the afternoon off. Maybe he wants to have lunch together. At 9:30, before I even crawled out of bed, I called John.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

My breath quickened. My resting heart rate went from 58 to one hundred fifty-eight.

“What?” I said.

“Pete Seeger died last night.”

Though I had never met Pete, I felt as if I had lost a loved one. I could barely speak, and wanted to cry, but could not, probably because I could not believe he was dead. I did not want to believe that Pete, a musical icon for decades, who persevered after being blacklisted for being convicted of “contempt of congress” in 1957 after refusing to answer questions about his party affiliation, was gone. I did not want to believe that the man who co-founded the Hudson River Co-op, who stood up for First Amendment rights, who at 92 marched with a thousand demonstrators as a part of the Occupy Wall Street protests, was gone. I wanted to believe that he was still going to step up on stage with his seasoned banjo and ask the audience to sing with him, sing “If I had a Hammer” and “Where have all the Flowers Gone.”

But he was ninety-four. I almost forgot that. After all, he had surprised us and showed up at the Farm Aid concert this past September and sang “This Land is Your Land.” We sang with him. And a few days before he went into the hospital, he was chopping wood. I don’t even chop wood, and I’m forty-seven.

That evening, John and I talked about other nonagenarians we know: our neighbor, John’s dad, and the residents of the assisted living facility we perform music for. We talked about how these people might pass: pneumonia, or peacefully in their sleep, like Pete, their overstretched hearts simply unable to beat another beat. We played some of Pete’s songs – John on the guitar and me on the fiddle. We still could not believe, or accept, that he was gone.  But is Pete really gone. I mean did you see all the Facebook postings the day after he died?  Pete’s voice, his music, affected lingering change. Even President Obama said so when he called Pete ‘“America’s Tuning Fork (thank you Wikipedia).”’

It’s two days after Pete’s death and I wonder how many weeks, months, or years until it’s time to say good-bye to my father-in-law, my neighbor, the residents of the assisted living facility, and my own parents.  I wonder how many years I have left, John has left (I know this is terribly morbid, but it’s unavoidably real). Until then, though, there’s plenty of time, and space, for all of us to write, to sing, to speak-out, to do something, anything, that will keep our metaphorical banjo strings resonating. That’s what Pete would want. 

The other day, as I walked out of my condominium into the hallway, my 91-year old neighbor, Shirley, was pushing her walker along the carpet faster than she usually does. At least her daughter was with her in case she fell. But the way Shirley looked ahead, not smiling, worried me. “Is there something wrong,” I asked.

“My mom cut her shin,” Shirley’s daughter said. “It looks infected.”

Shirley, all bundled up in her puffy coat, wool hat, and gloves shuffled forward. “We should get going,” she urged her daughter.

Later that day, I visited Shirley so I could check the injury to her shin (though I don’t practice as a nurse any longer, once a nurse always a nurse). The wound, the size of a book of matches, was covered in powder-white gauze, but the surrounding area was bruised. Shirley’s skin was so thin it looked like parchment paper. I carefully felt above and below the dressing, then touched the other leg, making sure both felt equally warm – that’s one way to assess for adequate circulation. But, as I laid my protein dense palm on her wasted legs, her skin seemed to move, as if it might peel right off of her, like a peach past its ripe stage: dehydrated and wrinkled.

The next day, when I yanked the toaster plug from the socket, I cut my finger on one of the prongs. It bled for a while and stopped only after I put pressure on it for five minutes. I put a Band-aide on it, one of those fun Band-aides with a smiley face. While in bed that night, it throbbed and I had to hold it above my head to make it stop.  The next morning when I took the Band-aide off, my finger bled easily and it had a hole in it, not a deep one, but deep enough that I had to keep it covered. Four days after the injury, it still hadn’t closed. Maybe I need a butterfly stitch, I thought. Instead, I decided to keep the hole uncovered for the rest of the day. By day five the hole started to shrink, and on the seventh day it completely closed. A surface layer of missing skin was the only remaining sign of my hasty plug-yanking maneuver.

A week after I initially check on Shirley, six days after my injury, I knocked on her door, hoping that the antibiotics the doctor had prescribed for her had worked and her wound had healed.

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

“It’s better, see.” She lifted her pant leg, showing me her skinny shin. Instead of gauze, a thick black and red scab the size of a half-dollar covered the wound beneath. I ran my hand along her shin, feeling for swelling and heat – signs of infection. The weight of the scab tugged on her skin, creating a ring of creases, like a starburst.

“Keep an eye on that,” I told Shirley. “You’re skin is fragile.”

Back at my place, I slipped some bread into the toaster. Watching the elements heat up to an incendiary red, I thought about Shirley’s 91-year-old skin. How many years do I have left before my skin is as fragile as hers? I’m only forty-seven. I have forty-four more years to go – plenty of time.

The toast popped. I plucked it from the toaster, then un-plugged the cord from the socket, carefully.

Even though the hole in my finger has healed, on its own – no antibiotics, no gauze – I can’t seem to stop rubbing my thumb against the spot of missing skin.

http://blr.med.nyu.edu/content/archive/2007/spring

The above link is to Bellevue Literary Review’s Fall 2007 issue about aging. You can read some pieces to get an idea of the kind of work they publish. Other selections you can read by purchasing the journal ($20 for 2 issues) They also have FREE study guides related to each piece that might be useful in navigating through the aging process, whether it’s your own issues with growing older or that of a loved one. Here’s the link to the study guides: http://blr.med.nyu.edu/study_guides/aging

Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, when a companion from a local volunteer agency dropped our ninety-year old neighbor, Shirley, back home after running errands, she realized she had forgotten her key. I knew this only because she buzzed our unit number on the callbox outside of our condominium complex, and my husband answered from his cell phone at work (his cell phone is hooked up to the callbox). He buzzed her in then called me on my cell phone (we don’t have a land line) to let me know Shirley was in the lobby. Why am I telling you all of this? Be patient, I’ll get there.

Fortunately, I was home, where Shirley’s spare key hung on the rack by the kitchen. I ran down the three flights of stairs – no Shirley. I ran back up the three flights, now out of breath because I’m out of shape. I found her pushing her walker toward our door, which is directly across from her unit. “Silly me,” she said, blushing. Her voice was tired but clear.

“No worries,” I said. After I unlocked her door, I stayed for a while to talk with her and her companion, an unassuming woman with soft features and a subdued voice. I joked with Shirley: “What are we going to do with you?” She laughed, slipped back a few feet, but grabbed the doorframe to balance herself.

Then her companion spoke up: “Now, Shirley, you really should hide an extra key somewhere so this doesn’t happen again.” Shirley nodded, her pencil-thin lips pressed so tight together the red lipstick she wore looked like a single stripe spread across her face.  “When I come back next week, I expect that you’ll have another key made,” the companion said. This time, Shirley looked at me, her Caribbean blue eyes shiny and round, like pinballs.

When her companion left, Shirley let out a huge sigh. “Why does she have to be so patronizing?” she asked. I bit my lip, nodded in agreement. She’s mentioned that word before – patronizing. She said it when a different companion used to visit her each week to take her places like the grocery store and pharmacy. “She’s a nice girl,” Shirley would say, “But she’s too nosey. She wants to make sure I have the right dress to wear to my grandson’s wedding. It’s patronizing.” She said it again when I asked her how her physical therapy sessions were going: “They’re helping me with my walking, but they always want to know what kinds of things I do at home. It’s patronizing.” I gave her one of those looks that says, “I don’t get it.” Certainly, they were just looking out for her.

As I stood in her hallway, my hand on the doorknob, I didn’t know what to say about her companion, so I said, “For some reason, as people age, we tend to treat them like children.” I hope I don’t do that, and certainly know better than to treat Shirley like a child. Of course, since we’re good friends, she would tell me, right? Though she’s ninety and a bit off balance when it comes to walking, her mind is far from off balance: before I left, she folded her arms across her chest, held her head up high, like Maggie Smith from Downton Abby, and said, “Just to bug her, I think I won’t get another key.”