Golden Age

"We’ve got a bingo over here!”

I wasn’t sure who was more excited—-Mrs. Harey that she finally won a game or me for being able to collect her prize for her. I picked up a blemish-free banana from the tray of goodies, eagerly eyeing the fun-sized candies that my charge couldn’t have with her diabetes. The activities director, Donna, mouthed “later” in my direction before pulling a new stamped ball out of the gold cage.

“B 7!”

I handed the fruit prize to Mrs. Harey, clearing her card with one hand while hurriedly scanning the card belonging to the ever-silent Mr. Trent. No luck for him.

“What’s your name again, dearie?”

“Ann.”

“I have a grandson about your age. Haven’t seen him in forever.”

“O 62!” I placed another marker on Mr. Trent’s card, smiling happily at him before remembering that his opaque eyes couldn’t see me.

“Are you going to be coming back on Thursday?”

“Yup. I’m here for every bingo game. Dad told the bus to drop me off here after school those days so I can help.”

“How nice—you’re such a sweet girl. I like talking to you.”

“You, too, Mrs. Harey.”

“B 11!”

“Bingo! Bingo for Mr. Trent! You won!”

Two days later I practically skipped into the nursing home, anxious to start knocking on doors and inviting people to bingo. Maybe I’d get to push a wheelchair or two this time—-that was always fun. My first stop was Mrs. Harey’s room, but when I got there, Dad was just leaving, carrying two large trash sacks of gaudy polyester clothing.

“Mrs. Harey’s not here anymore, Ann. Go on and find Mr. Trent, ok?”

“Where’d she go?”

My dad sighed. “She had to--go home.”

“Ok. Can I put my schoolbag in the workshop downstairs first? He always jerks on it as we walk down the hall.”

The tall man squatted a little and pulled the backpack off my shoulders. His name tag was heavily smudged with water stains and grease, his name and position of “Maintenance Supervisor” barely legible anymore.

“I’ll take it down for you. Have a good time, sweetie.”

~

It seemed appropriate that my first job at fifteen would be at the nursing home. As a dietary aide (kitchen help), I was given the pleasure of serving dinner to thirty to forty elderly men and women in each dining area. With all these residents placed under my care, it is a wonder that I was ever able to remember names, let alone establish relationships with them. There was a handful that I always knew well, a few for the irrational demands they made, others just because of who they are--bored older people with a need for attention and love. They have bad days sometimes, leaving staff frustrated, exhausted, and occasionally in sympathetic tears. Residents have likes and dislikes, fond memories and nightmares, cherished pictures, and days or months without visits from loved and not-so-loved ones. That never matters, though. Residents have “lived their lives.” Facing the inevitable downhill slide into death while virtually locked inside the brick and mortar building, they have to watch their caretakers grumble about sore feet, PTA meetings and dinner plans. There’s a special kind of jealousy in nursing homes, residents eyeing me from the windows of a public institution as I collect car keys to go to my private home. I drive by now, having left over five years ago, and still see faces watching me as they’ve watched the previous hundred cars, wondering who, where, why…and remembering.

~

“Don’t step there!”

I jerked my foot back behind the heavy steel cart laden with half-empty metal tins of ground gravy-smothered beef, canned carrots, and liquefying Jell-o. I raised my eyebrows at the charge nurse scurrying away after a woman with mountains of long white hair gathered in a messy bun put-putting down the hall. Sarah, the LPN, came up behind me.

“Ever hear of granny farts?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, Alma’s got granny splurts.”

My eyes glanced at the puddle of gravy inches from my foot, a dozen more trailing to where the tall woman stood with her walker jammed against her room’s doorknob. It didn’t dawn on me until I noticed wadded white cloth that was definitely not a bib under the woman’s abandoned dining chair and flecks of green that were a day too early to appear in the meaty sauce.

“Who cleans that up?”

The nurse gave an eerie cackle worthy of an elderly witch as she pulled me by the hand to the service closet, my cart gaining momentum and crashing resoundingly into the water fountain.

~

You don’t just learn about biohazard spills as a nursing home employee. You learn about routine, about people who might be considered humans with rights—-some other day, some other place. What is “right” or “appropriate” fades under the weight of state regulations and the emotional strain. It would then often seem cruel that the community television is left tuned to the Lifetime channel, although compared to the CMT marathons the nurses like to watch, anything would be an improvement. There the female residents will sit, twirling wedding rings that connect them to long-dead husbands, blankly staring at a screen that shows the best, and worst, of a woman’s life. While the movies about abusive and homicidal exes seem just ludicrous enough not to be taken seriously, there is a serious mood change when the comedies begin to play. For these women, there is nothing left to laugh at. Every lighthearted moment reminds them of what they no longer have to offer, no longer can experience.

Unlike the utopia of The Golden Girls, most haven’t sought out and maintained close female friendships. Having made no alternate plans, blindly assuming they would stay married or live with their unwilling children forever, these women are trapped in an institution. It doesn’t matter how many times they stop us and say with the most innocent of Rose’s expressions, “Back home I didn’t have to wait this long for dinner. Back home I didn’t have to eat things I didn’t want. Back home I didn’t have to be ignored like this…” Our inner Dorothy gets frustrated quickly, wants to yell that this isn’t St. Olaf—-get in touch with reality already! They chose to be here, isolated and alone in a sea of the forgotten, by not looking ahead to these unavoidable days, preparing something-—anything. We can’t understand how they didn’t see this obvious turn of events coming. They can’t either.

~

Esther won a place in my heart, proving daily that I was a valuable employee. Cranky to the core, this lonely and depressed woman insisted, loudly, that no one cared for or loved her. She would sit, staring blankly with blind eyes at the stained ceiling tiles while lamenting her situation, resisting any attempt by the nurses to get her to take medication, move to the dining room, or wait patiently for her dinner. Before much of any shift had gone by, a page over the intercom would inevitably summon me to Esther’s side to “talk some sense into that crazy old bat.” I would sit next to her. Rub her hunched shoulders and rounded back. Assure her that I cared. As she was diabetic I would slip her sugar-free cookies I hoarded in the store room during snack time and find some textured pillow or quilt for her to trace her fingers over. This would quiet her until dinner. I made sure to deliver her tray personally to set up her favorite mashed potatoes without gravy and coffee with five sweeteners stirred gently in, knowing she would listen closely to the liquid sloshing in the cup. I was the only employee who had the “magic touch” with her. She was the only resident who would ever call me by name.

When Esther died, I came home from college for her funeral. She was hardly recognizable in the make-up and beautiful strands of pearls, surrounded by tearful family who had never visited her until now. I wondered if she knew all along that the next time she got “gussied up” and saw her loved ones would be while in a casket. I wondered if she truly enjoyed the last eight years of her life eating hydrated mashed potato flakes and sugarless cookies. Drinking coffee that was never “quite right.” I wondered why it was that she died unexpectedly just a week after I had quit—-and stopped. I couldn’t think that. I still can’t.

~

Not everyone is alone here. There are the odd married couples who were able to convince Medicare that staying together was worth the cost, but concerns about staff members accidentally interrupting a possible sex life sometimes keep these couples from living in the same room. After all, old people don’t need sex, no matter what Blanche might claim in her high Southern voice. They apparently don’t need that daily intimacy that carried them through their thirty, forty, fifty years of marriage, to feel their shared history carrying them together through the hard transition to institutional living. According to the administration, what they need are children to visit, bringing cards, flowers, candy, and the occasional new sweater or box of quilting supplies. A novel or two. Birdseed for the feeders hung outside windows. Intimacy exists only as a word in the manual regarding resident abuse—-something to be avoided at all costs. If a resident is lucky, perhaps her daughter or son will come regularly and take an active role in making sure more “wants” are met, desires granted—-to a point.

~

Purdy’s daughter. This woman was the chigger bite that put the itch in witch. She showed up precisely on time for every meal, her Chanel suit glinting in the minimum wage air. Nurses ignored her, grateful for one less mouth to feed, but the kitchen staff had to deal with her barrage of nonstop complaints. I would pull out the labeled containers from under the thick layer of circular ice chips: chocolate pudding, pureed pears, pureed beets, and a milk-soaked sugar cookie. Everything had to be labeled, scooped, and selected just right. Purdy’s daughter was not above a lavish temper tantrum full of insults and curses if even one container wasn’t the right color or had a sloppily-labeled cover. I had heard my share of tirades. So had Mrs. Purdy.

Smart black heels clacked on the waxed floor as she trotted back to her ever-silent mother, the nearly comatose woman rarely even blinking in acknowledgement of the temperature-specific meal or her daughter’s gossipy banter attacking every person they knew. I had been told that Mrs. Purdy had been a great philanthropist and community volunteer in her day. A woman who served in preschools with a firm yet loving hand. I wondered if somehow after months of having every meal served with a dose of verbal arsenic that Mrs. Purdy didn’t wish she could raise her atrophied hand and smack the Maybelline right off that Botox-perfect face. But she didn’t. Mrs. Purdy understood something about feeling helpless—-being a vegetable would do that to you. Her daughter was just as powerless, reluctantly aware that demanding chocolate pudding instead of lemon or vanilla meant nothing. Every spoonful of barley cereal dribbling from silent lips proclaimed that “health and wellbeing” was a subjective term, that money couldn’t soothe the ache in her heart. The aged hand laid ever still, comforting the daughter silently crying under the cover of hatred.

~

I first met Ruthie when I was six years old, walking hand-in-hand with my father to see his new workplace at the local nursing home. Upon spotting my father, Ruthie cried out, “There’s my husband! Did you bring my little boy with you?” Dad told me not to mind her and kept walking. That night when I returned home, my mother got an earful. “Mommy, Mommy! Daddy has another wife at work and she thinks I’m her son!” I was too young to understand dementia, so my mother said that she was crazy--her standard term for any behavior from making meringue from scratch to doing the Macarena. When I started to work at the nursing home, however, I realized that Ruthie’s behavior couldn’t be summed up as “crazy.”

Many nurses told me that Ruthie had gone insane after teaching kindergarten for forty years. I figured it was just a fantastical sort of Alzheimer’s. She called everyone taller than five feet her husband and any children were immediately claimed as her son. She played the piano sometimes, usually jazzy scales and peppy versions of “Yankee Doodle” that she had taught in her younger years, but as time went on she seemed oblivious that the piano had never moved from the corner and instead mimed her masterpieces on the tabletop. Addicted to mashed potatoes, gravy, and bananas, Ruthie would mush them together, eat most of the mess and fling the rest at whoever was currently annoying her (usually Esther). Ruthie’s biggest quirk, however, was her husband. While no one truly knew what happened to the man, she insisted repeatedly every day that she had killed him. New families would come to visit their recently admitted grandparent, walk by Ruthie, and be told by a woman with this Silence of the Lambs grin, “I killed my husband.”

Although she was certain that she was a murderess, Ruthie was quite confused on how she did it. Her methods changed nearly hourly, drawing from the same fifteen scenarios: she put him through the meat grinder, knocked him down the well, beheaded him with a nail file, stabbed him in the stomach, threw him off a mountain, strangled him with his tie, hung him from the ceiling fan, ground him in the meat grinder then threw the pieces down the well, poisoned his mashed potatoes, ran him over with a truck, shot him in the head, shot him in the back, clubbed him with the shotgun after shooting him, had her lover dispose of him, or fed him to the dog/bear/bobcat/goldfish. She pulled out the goldfish story most often when she was playing unknown games with an incomplete deck of cards while a staff member nervously fed the tank of giant goldfish in the corner. It was hardly professional, but I couldn’t help but laugh at her antics and the disquieted visitors scurrying frantically in the opposite direction.

~

Not everyone can handle family even under the best of circumstances. While I feel angry for those who were left behind, forgotten amid a plethora of job responsibilities, little league games, and homework assignments, I can’t really blame families for wanting to avoid this place. I can’t blame the residents who try to escape one way or another. There were many days when if I hadn’t had to come, I wouldn’t have.

After quitting the job at the nursing home, I would avoid that brick building like the plague. It is mortality at its worst. It is the last resort. It is just as bad as Sophia feared, her Shady Pines. The eventual breaking down of personalities under the stresses of being locked up 24/7 for having committed no other crime than just living beyond usefulness never stays entertaining for long. Under the sheen of craziness lurks the sort of depression that is avoidable yet ignored—-that couldn’t possibly happen to me. But it will. The aging process will take its toll on my parents and on myself. We will, someday, be Esther. Mrs. Purdy. Alma. Ruthie. The difference will be only that we have all agreed that none of us will ever be placed in a nursing home. We will find friends, family, somebody to share our last years, care for us as we care for them. We will be prepared. That choice alone will save us.


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