It takes a village to love an elder
I am sitting on the little bed as my dad lies on it, his shrinking body kind of curled around me. His eyes are mostly closed, though intermittently he looks at me and I can detect the quietest smile in the wrinkles that branch out from his lids. I hold his hand and sing Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” to him while he accurately taps the rhythm of it on my elbow. The music is coming out of my iPhone resting on the bedside table. Also on the bedside table is a framed picture of a beautiful looking family I know almost nothing about.
Tony, a slight man with a head of bushy silver curls, and another man walk in the room and Tony lights up when he sees me, much more, truth be told, than my own dad lights up when I walk in the room. “Tony!” I exclaim. “I hope it’s okay we’re hanging on your bed. My dad was taking a nap here when I arrived,” I tell him.
Tony smiles approvingly and says some gibberish (he has aphasia). He shows me a coffee table book that he’s carrying under his arm and says some more gibberish. “Beautiful,” I say. “How do you know Tony?” I ask the man with him.
“Tony and I have been friends for 50 years,” he says, proud with a strong note of sadness. “We were professors together in Hawaii. Tony was a chemistry professor. A Ph.D. in chemistry.”
I’ve known Tony for six months now, seen him weekly, and I had no idea about either of these things. What I know of Tony is mostly non-verbal—his unconditionally loving and gentle presence, his contented smile that reminds me of a wise turtle, the sounds of his passionate, but never aggressive gibberish. The only time he’s ever said a clear phrase to me, it was when I asked him if I could clean his glasses, which I did, and when I put them back on his face he said, clear as day, “Thank you.”
I was shocked and haven’t heard a clear word since. No matter. I love Tony’s turtle smile and his gibberish. I’ve never known him any other way.
“Tony and my dad are roommates,” I explain to the melancholy man. “They’ve become like brothers. They share clothes and sometimes take naps in one another’s beds.”
He chuckles sweetly and looks surprised. “That’s wonderful.”
Then he points at the coffee table book under Tony’s arm: “I brought Tony this book of pictures of Hawaii. He doesn’t really read anymore, but I thought maybe looking at the pictures would be nice for him?”
I realize now how out of his element the man is, how nervous about this interaction with his friend Tony, who is no longer the Tony he knew. “That’s a perfect idea,” I reassure him and can see relief wash over his face. He tries to get Tony to put the book down on the nightstand next to the picture of his beautiful family, but Tony doesn’t understand what the man is saying and soon wanders away, the man trailing after him.
As I’m driving home, I start thinking about how much easier it can be for me to see the elders in the community that my dad lives in with fresh, delighted eyes than it is for me to see him this way. When I look at my dad, curled up on Tony’s bed, I see deterioration. I am searching his face for signs of suffering or contentment, attached to creating the conditions for the latter. I am always in existential free fall, trying to understand where the man went who used to steam the wrinkles out of his suit each night meticulously and teach me about Buddha and the red-lined Bible. I’ve gotten better and better at adapting to each new version of him, figuring out how to connect, but it’s never without a weighted heart.
With the other elders, it’s different. I see them fresh—no past selves, no projections, no particular expectations. I laugh easily when Gail rolls her eyes and says something sassy about her adult children and almost start weeping when Harvey grows tender during trivia (yes, there is trivia in a memory care unit and it’s marvelous). I watch another woman—I don’t even know her name—float through the hall with her gorgeous, long silver hair and her one glove; it’s like she’s always dancing in a good dream. I think she was probably someone very special in the past, but I think she’s someone very special now. There was a theater production in the garden—an original, one-of-a-kind collection of monologues and poetry meant to be a tribute to the Beat generation. One woman, who didn’t care for Allen Ginsberg, dressed as Ruth Bader Ginsberg instead, and read a stately version of her biography aloud. I love that woman with all my heart.
There is a budding romance, a devilishly handsome man with a black cat that lives in his room, and a gender non-conforming person who carries around a stuffed animal everywhere they go. All of them captivate me.
When it comes to raising children, we talk about the need for the proverbial village. We understand that teachers and aunties and neighbors can sometimes see our kids with less attachment and projection than we, their parents, can. We want so much for them. We desperately need to prevent their suffering. But when it comes to our elders, we don’t often talk about how these same dynamics exist.
For my dad, living in a community has been a blessing in many ways, but one of them is that there are so many people to see him with new eyes. The professionals have fresh and trained energy for making sure he is well taken care of, the kind that can get painfully depleted among family caregivers. Rita, who has perfectly manicured pink nails and magenta, short cropped hair, offered my dad a tiny coconut smoothie the other day, saying, “Here you go, baby,” and I was touched by her tenderness with him.
But it’s not just that—it’s also the fresh energy of the other family members in the community—other adult daughters and wives, nieces and former co-workers (it is mostly women) who are part of the ecosystem of noticing and loving. And it has been a blessing for me to have the delight of witnessing beautiful strangers. That delight can co-exist with my grief over my dad each time I visit. It would be so different—so much flatter and sadder and depleting—were we not losing him alongside the gaining of solidarity and intertwining and support that a memory care community offers.
Tony’s friend will never look at Tony without the film of past versions of him clouding the picture—the Ph.D., the clear speech, the skilled way he used to pop up on a surfboard (I don’t know if Tony surfed, but perhaps?). But I see him without any of this film, and in fact, the possible past versions of him only light up my imagination.
The hospice nurse, a very no-nonsense woman whose pragmatic pluck I really appreciate, called a few days ago and we chatted about a fall my dad had that morning. He was fine, she said, just a goose egg. We discussed his diminishing ability to walk and even stand steadily. We talked about his skin, his appetite, his changing meds. Before we hung up she said, “I just have to say, I adore your dad. He is just the sweetest man. When I heard he fell, I almost started crying.”
I was shocked. She doesn’t seem like a sentimental person at all, so that was part of it, but more so, it was because there is so little of my dad left. He has almost no words left. What was she perceiving as “sweet?”
“That’s so wonderful to hear,” I said. “If you’d know him in his full force, you would have loved him.”
But I knew, even as I said it, that she didn’t have to. She was able to love him now, as he is. And that is a sacred gift.
I am so grateful Courtney for your continued opening of the window into this process with your father. It is so beautiful and inspiring to me as a writer and a human. And what a powerful reframe that whatever type of care facility your father is in, is a community.
I have friends in Taos who are tending a vision of creating an elder and youth center.. coupling those needs for village with each other.
Thank you for writing this. My mother and I are working on transitioning my father to memory care in the next couple of weeks, and we are so heartbroken about it. We're trying to see the positive side of it all, though, and this post really helps me look for the blessings.