Friday, September 05, 2008
The Nursing Home
At the nursing home I met a ninety-six-year-old woman who is still sharp-witted but more or less bound to a wheelchair. Like so many others who live at the facility, she propels herself with her legs, taking little steps and rolling along that way, steering with her hands. I met her by the entrance to the dining room. She was waiting for dinner. “All it is around here is wait,” she said, smiling wanly. “Wait for this, and wait for that. I’m getting tired of waiting.” She could be my guide to the underworld.
The woman is very much alone. She keeps to herself, avoiding conflicts with other residents. She doesn’t watch TV. Her husband died half a century ago. She never had children, never remarried. She always speaks despairingly, but in a cheerful tone and with a smile, so that I can’t be sure of her actual mood. She’s happy to share the story of her life, but she doesn’t speak compulsively. She answers my questions but seems resigned to her abandonment.
For me, she is an island of sense in the vast sea of the place where my father-in-law is also marooned. He is more thoroughly lost, having recently suffered a head injury in the midst of fine health. Before the accident he had jogged daily, practiced yoga, and worked at his office. Although retired from teaching, he was completing a book project. Now his speech is incoherent. In his best moments, he believes that the nursing home is a professional conference facility where, to his frustration, nothing ever goes according to plan. The meetings never quite convene. What discussions there are fizzle out in indecision. Nevertheless he soldiers on. He waits. We visit regularly to interact with him, but that still leaves him mostly alone, unengaged, confused.
Around him, the nurses and attendants pursue their cyclical chores. Although pleasant and competent, they are the machinery of a waiting pen to which many of us are destined. Some residents are able to participate in birthday parties and Bingo. Others sleep in their chairs, move about at a snail’s pace, chatter, babble, or mumble. Shells of their former selves, they suffer from Alzheimer’s, senility, or catastrophic injuries. Among these people, the more alert constantly try to escape and have to be pulled back from the doors periodically.
Nothing had prepared me for this unsettling vision of the future. This ever-expanding realm of modern health care had been unfamiliar to me. I had lived as if the stretch of life between the end of personal independence and physical death – that battered, broken shore – existed on another planet populated by alien life forms. And now I feel helpless in the face of the neglect that characterizes that realm. Long-term care facilities are immensely expensive, which means that the staffs are necessarily small and the care minimal. Even as this system drains away the life savings of middle class parents and grandparents, it does little to care for their minds and emotional lives. I don’t want to call them “the elderly.” I’ve begun to feel that the term is a step in our dehumanization of them, a way of feeling okay about all of this because it doesn’t involve people like us.
The fact is that it takes a village to care for an aging relative, and our villages are extinct. Our extended families are over-extended. As a society, we haven’t faced the healthcare crisis in general, let alone the challenge of caring humanely for an aging population. America long ago turned its back on the truth of death and dying. That is a truth that we’ll all one day live. Can we find a way to guarantee for our loved ones and for ourselves a certain level of dignity and human belonging?
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A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:
Joe Chaney -- The Nursing Home / More essays by Joe
Louise Collins -- More essays by Louise
April Lidinsky -- More essays by April
Jonathan Nashel -- More essays by Jonathan
Jeff Nixa -- More essays by Jeff
Ken Smith -- More essays by Ken
Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- More essays by Jeanette
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About the series
Michiana Chronicles is a series of radio essays by Jonathan Nashel, Louise Collins, Joe Chaney, Jeanette Saddler Taylor, Jeff Nixa, April Lidinsky, and Ken Smith.
Michiana is the region of north-central Indiana and southern Michigan roughly centered on South Bend, Indiana.
Michiana Chronicles airs on Fridays at 7:35 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. on WVPE (88.1 FM), the home of public radio in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana.
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