The elder and the automated system

a story of indifference, rage, and blessings all the while

Heya, it’s a little hard to publish anything not on Gaza or campus protest or children being killed and starved in a time when all of that is going down. On the other hand, I’m weary of saying something about any of it when I don’t actually feel like I have anything new and powerful to say that other people aren’t already saying beautifully. So, just registering that with you all, the Examined Family.

A reminder: paid subscriptions are a real foundational part of my professional life these days, the fuel that keeps me writing about the small, but not small at all, things about family life that matter so much to so many of us. Thanks for considering it.

We’re on the line with a man named John, which might feel comforting, since my husband’s name is John, but the potential comfort is cancelled out by the trace of annoyance that I can hear underneath this stranger John’s responses. No, for that you would need limited agent authorization. Yes, there’s also full agent authorization but that requires notary.

This guy John of an unnamed investment management company could choose to experience my mom and me in lots of ways at this moment as we try to figure out how to handle a transaction regarding my dad’s retirement account. Sure, we could be heard as annoying—a couple of women with no f-ing clue what an agent authorization, limited, full, or otherwise, actually means. Or we could be seen as delightful—two women taking on the world, full of self-effacing jokes, and creatively worded questions. Or something in between?

Why not put the man on? John seems to be thinking. I think he’s chosen the first interpretation. I imagine him to be a dirty blonde in his 30s, someone who screwed up a lot in high school and is now paying his dues answering the phone for this customer service line until he can get back on track to become a real investment banker type who drives a sports car and eats a lot of sushi without worrying about the cost.

Well, John, we’re not putting the man on because he’s got dementia, and at this very moment is probably sitting in his “office”—among his old pipes, which he no longer smokes, and his giant map with all the pins where he’s traveled, places he no longer remembers. He’s probably got his earbuds in, happily tapping his foot to the beat of The Beatles as they play from his ancient iPod. He does, John, remember, the lyrics quite faithfully and this is a real blessing in our small, loving lives. The man whose name is on that 401K doesn’t remember how the money got there, or even how it was earned. Let the record reflect: he was a bankruptcy lawyer. Now he’s an old man with a specter of professional time lurking inside of him, causing him to bring his wife the clock at 5pm totally flummoxed as to why his body feels like it’s supposed to be going somewhere. I can assure you John, he has even less of a clue what agent authorization is than we do.

John tells us we’ll have to use the voice-activated security system in order to do anything with dad’s account. He’ll patch us into it and a robotic woman’s voice will tell my dad that he needs to say: My voice is my password, after the beep. I wonder: How do they decide this voice should read as feminine? But there’s no one to ask. We are suddenly in a land of tubes and commands.

The beep will sound, and my dad will nervously say part of the sentence, but not all of it. We’ll get kicked back to John, who will tell us that we have failed. Would we like to try again? Yes, I guess so, though John’s irritation, my dad’s amorphous sense of having let someone or something down, and my own rage are all mounting. The robot lady will tell my dad what to do; he will try, this time even getting the first part of the sentence right (go Papa!), though too slowly for her, an angry beep cutting off the end of his shaky sentence. Robot lady is indifferent and conclusive. Another fail. The last time he tries, his now anxious brain turns into a trawl on a fishing boat, catching whatever random words come—password, we, are voice?

Photo by Fredrik Öhlander on Unsplash

The wind is knocked out of me by the sounds of the collection of words he’s dragged out of his brain in desperation. It’s a familiar pain, one I felt a lot before his diagnosis and in the early days after. Someone at Maya’s preschool orientation asked him who he was with, and he said, “That and that,” pointing at me and my mom, a panicked look in his wide eyes. Gut punch. Once he left me a voicemail on my cell phone complaining about the noisy family staying at the house when we were the noisy family at the house. Gut punch. A waiter asks him what he’d like to eat and he looks up vacantly. Gut punch.

I don’t feel these gut punches as often now. The reality of his dementia has settled into my psyche, like a snow globe that’s glitter finally came to rest on the base. But encountering cruel systems or people shakes it up again. It’s one thing to experience him losing a word or a memory or a capacity when it feels unavoidable—the steady if non-linear evolution of the disease. It’s another to watch him suffer, made to feel inadequate and confused, by something or someone avoidable. In a life full of so much loss, I desperately want what he bumps us against to be gentle and creative.

When we get kicked back out of the automation hellscape, my mom and I try to explain to John that the system isn’t built for people with disabilities, that it moves too fast and is too unforgiving. John is not interested. He has no power over this. He also seems, though I suppose I am interpreting him as much as he’s interpreting me, to have little empathy for the triad of needy sweeties on his line. I resist the urge to ask him if he loves an elder, if he’s ever watched them struggle with one of the myriad shitty systems we have designed for younger, more able-bodied people. I resist telling him about my dad’s unparalleled kindness and bright, dying mind. I resist asking to speak to a manager—what so I can blow off steam to someone else who has no power? (I will email the accessibility people later and try to start a conversation with them about this and how my dad, and so many others, could be served differently.)

After clarifying our next steps, we say goodbye to John. I print out some forms while chatting with my mom. I put my head in my hands and say, “That was kind of heartbreaking.”

As the words escape my lips I think, not kind of. And also, this is what she deals with all the time.

“Yes, it was,” my mom says, but not like John. And not like someone bitter with a lack of past recognition, like a veteran teacher telling a newbie, duh, they’re animals, in the teacher’s lounge. No, I told you so is laced into her voice. Just a plain admission. Yes it was. It is. It will be.

“It’s not you, Mom. It’s them. They’re so bad at explaining things,” I tell her.

“Thanks sweetheart,” she says. “I’m really grateful to you for helping me figure this out.” And I hear: It was. It is. It will be. But we are together.

I cancel my next call. I was supposed to talk to my literary agent about my book ideas. Instead I just want to lie down on the living room rug in a starfish shape and cry. I think about the automation of everything and how cruel it can be. I think about John driving off into the sunset with his take-out sushi. I think about my dad—his body ready to leave something for somewhere at 5pm everyday. I think about the money in that account and how lucky we are to have it, even if my dad has no idea where it came from or how to get it out.

Before I hung up with my mom she said, “Oh, your dad is back. He wants to say hi.”

“Hi Papa, how you doing?” I say.

“We’re pretty good I think,” he says. “How are you doing?” His voice is filled with tenderness and affection, his brain no longer a fishing trawl, but a Care Bear stare.

“I’m okay,” I say. “Just dealing with these dumb systems.”

He laughs, and I can tell by the tenor of his laugh that the memory of the robot lady is long gone. And this too is a real blessing in our small, loving lives.