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No, not that Suzanne; not Leonard Cohen's lady by the river whose perfect body he touched with his mind. My Suzanne is a 96-year-old woman I visit in a nursing home once a week, whose body is somewhat less than perfect: she is blind, wheelchair-bound due to crippling arthritis, and sharp as a tack. My visits with her began as part of a yearlong training I participated in to become an instructor of Gabrielle Roth's 5 RhythmsTM movement practice. We were asked to contribute 48 hours of community service during the course of our training. But it was obviously a trick; I wasn't about to tell Suzanne at the end of the training that our time was up. Looking back, it's clear that I was committed to her for life from day one, for in a very short time she went from being my "service requirement" to becoming my friend.
Suzanne has a far better grasp of history and geography than I do, and can recite obscure poetry from memory. The aria from Madame Butterfly moves her to tears, and she conducts it with her arms. Lately I've been reading Bitter Lemons aloud to her, Lawrence Durrell's memoir of his travels in Cyprus, a book she loved 40 years ago; she is still able to direct me to particular passages she wants to hear again. When I'm not around, she devours books on tape, and remembers details to discuss with me when I myself would be hard-pressed to give you even the general subject matter concerning the film I saw last night!
So this is not your typical, over-medicated, glazed-over dementia patient that you often find sitting around in nursing homes staring into space. In fact, she boasts that until very recently, she never took so much as an aspirin for a headache her entire life! Now she reluctantly submits to a bare minimum of pain pills—perhaps one a day—and she also sometimes needs help to fall asleep. But basically, this woman is seemingly indestructible. She has fallen out of her wheelchair several times just since I've known her, once literally landing on her head, miraculously escaping with only a huge lump and a purple and blue face, but nothing worse. Suzanne always puts on her prettiest outfits on the days I visit, as well as lipstick and perfume, and relishes the Hershey bar and fresh fruit or other treats I bring, as she can't stand the food at the nursing home; she says it's all white.
But today everything changed. Instead of finding her sitting in her chair, freshly coiffed and eagerly awaiting our visit, I discovered her lying in bed, in diapers, moaning in pain. Loudly. She was clearly mortified to have me see her like that and shouted me out of the room immediately. I inquired with the director about what happened, and learned that, once again, Suzanne had fallen out of her wheelchair, this time while attempting to negotiate the transition into her bed. Thus far, x-rays had revealed nothing broken, but a blood clot had been discovered incidentally.
I know: it seems unthinkable that a 96-year-old blind woman, confined to a wheelchair, would be getting herself in and out of bed on her own, but that is very simply the reality of this and probably most nursing homes: there just aren't enough aides to provide the necessary care for everyone on the unit, every minute of the day. Suzanne has told me of many evenings when she has rung her bell and shouted for help for well over an hour without getting a response. She has no family to advocate for her, no money for better care, and sadly, no options or power over her own destiny at this point. I do what I can for her as a volunteer, but it's a drop in the bucket, and meanwhile, I have my own family horror story to deal with.
My mom, 85, has advanced Alzheimer's, getting noticeably worse daily, and is still living at home being cared for by my Dad, also 85, and also getting worse, in terms of caregiver stress, burnout and frustration. He has several aides come in for a few hours on most days, but he is still doing all of the shopping and cooking, despite the fact that Mom refuses nearly all foods except salami, French fries and ice cream. My brother and I live four hours and seven hours away, respectively, and though we try to visit as often as possible to help out, it is not nearly enough, and meanwhile, every day brings another sad story, but I'll spare you the details; there are five million Alzheimer's patients out there, and fifty million sad stories a day.
Well okay, maybe just one, because at least this one contains an element of humor: Mom was standing directly outside the bathroom door, asking where the bathroom was. (This was several years ago, when she could still formulate questions.) We called out to her that the bathroom was immediately to her right. She looked to her right and saw the laundry hamper that stands just outside the bathroom door. She opened the hamper, sorted through the dirty clothes, then called out, "There's no bathroom in here!" When I relayed this story to my cousin, the son of my mother's brother who is also stricken with the disease, he emailed back, "By any chance, when your Mom was looking through the hamper for the bathroom, did she happen to come across my Dad's car?"
But lately the stories aren't the least bit funny anymore, and despite my Dad's repeated refrain, learned from an old army buddy, that "Better days are coming," the fact is, my already-limited supply of optimism has been severely challenged lately; the trajectory of life is just not looking great to me at the moment. Even my own peer group has, seemingly overnight, gone from being youthful baby boomers to a bunch of guys constantly speaking of chronic pains, undiagnosed ailments, mysterious lumps and rashes, insomnia, and very real cancers of the skin, breast, ovaries, penis and lung, not to mention major financial crises and worries all around. As the 40th anniversary of Woodstock is upon us, I seem to be hearing much more about colonoscopies than Jimi Hendrix, (unless of course, it is the well-known specialist, Dr. James Hendrix of Sloan-Kettering.)
As for me, if I can keep my brain chemistry afloat two days in a row, I count my blessings. (And thankfully, I have many.) My grandmother used to constantly remind all of us that "Youth is wasted on the young." Later on she switched to a German phrase, repeating it endlessly: "Yungevesen unt altegevorden," which means, "I was young, and I got old." That is perhaps the most succinct, Buddhist summation of the nature of life I've ever heard. It covers the whole damned thing! I never truly believed it would apply to me, but I reached my 57th birthday a few weeks ago and if I'm interpreting events correctly, apparently I too was young, and I too am now getting old. If you don't believe me, ask my joints. Any of them—big toes, knees, fingers, you name it.
The cup-half-empty people would generally quote Dylan Thomas at this point in the discussion:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The half-full folks might do better to pick up a book written by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi some years ago, called From Age-ing to Sage-ing. I resisted reading it all these years, because as far as I could tell, it didn't apply to me; until a few weeks ago, I wasn't quite age-ing yet.( And I will also, for the moment at least, skip Shirley Maclaine's more recent book, with the not-so-novel title, Sage-ing While Age-ing. What was she thinking? Now she has me considering writing a novel called Punishment and Crime.) However, since Amazon allowed me to read the first few pages of Reb Zalman's book, I liked what I heard and finally broke down and ordered it. He writes, "Aging doesn't mean diminishment or exile from the ranks of the living. As the period from which we harvest the fruits of a lifetime's labor, it gives us the panoramic vision from which spiritual wisdom flows...[but] people enter the country called ‘old age' with fear and trembling. Feeling betrayed by their bodies and defeated by life, they believe they're condemned to lives of decreasing self-esteem and respect...they expect to suffer from reduced vigor, enjoyment and social usefulness."
Uhhh, yes, exactly! That's precisely what I'm starting to get wind of, even though both Buddha and my Grandmother warned us that this was coming a long time ago!
"Elders," on the other hand, says Schachter-Shalomi,
can move from merely age-ing, (and hopefully tone down the rage-ing) and instead enter a process of "sage-ing," which is to consciously evolve into their role as "wisdom-keepers who have an ongoing responsibility for maintaining society's well-being...they are pioneers in consciousness...Serving as mentors, they pass on the distilled essence of their life experience to others."
Yet meanwhile, I'm seven years past due on my AARP membership, on general principle. I'd rather pay more for my hotel rooms than join a club like AARP for old people, and then, to add insult to injury, they want to give me a free tote bag for joining. Did I ever once need a tote bag in my youth? Who was toting anything? Toking, maybe. And if I had to tote, I was always the guy, and still am, with the colorful Tibetan hand-woven bag slung over my shoulder. I also adamantly refuse to pick up the local free paper called "Fifty Plus." I guess I'm in denial; I want to believe that 57 is the new 17, minus the acne. After all, I'm still trying to sort out what I will be when I grow up. But after visiting my friend Suzanne today in the nursing home, and after making my daily SKYPE video call home to the folks, and after popping four Advil to chill out the inflammation in my joints, I finally figured out exactly what I will be when I grow up: old. As for whether I merely age, defiantly rage, or gracefully sage, the verdict is still out.
