Never Sit If You Can Dance

by Jo Giese

  To shake off the disappointment and loneliness, I ventured out in search of a place to get my nails done. This wasn’t a bimbo move. I didn’t need some glossy mani. What I craved was warm contact with a motherly woman who would lessen the panic that so often accompanied my youthful adventures. At the time, I didn’t realize that in seeking to get my nails done—to hold hands with an older woman to calm myself down, to be babied—I was reconnecting with (or regressing to) the primal security and comfort my grandmother had offered me.

  Babe’s mother, my grandmother Josie, had been my best friend. From the fifth year of my life until she went into a nursing home when I was twelve, we shared a bedroom, a closet, a dresser, and a lifetime. Josie was a woman of the nineteenth century whose stern wedding photo showed her dressed from head to toe in acres of white Victorian lace. She was the sort of grandmother who tended a row of African violets in saucers on the kitchen windowsill, who wore an apron, and who’d been a professional baker in Chicago. (Because my parents thought it was a disadvantage that I had to share a room with my grandmother, they compensated me by giving us the best room, the one that overlooked Lake Washington. Only there was no hardship—I had my grandmother and the lake!) Although by then we were a family of five, I knew that her gooey chocolate pudding pie, sticky cinnamon buns, lemon pies decorated with the prettiest peaks of swirling meringue, and German breakfast pancakes as thin as French crêpes were made especially for me. In return, I gave her manicures. I wasn’t steady with the clippers, but I loved doing her nails because it meant I could hold her soft hands as long as I wanted.

  When I told Babe that Ed and I would be leaving for China, I mentioned that on the way home we’d stop in Singapore.

  “Your dad and I loved Singapore,” Babe said. “Your dad wanted to retire there.”

  He did? That was the first I’d heard of it. While Babe reminisced about Singapore, I schemed how to include her on our trip.

  For many, a longed-for bonus of travel is the chance to unplug, disconnect, a digital detox from office and family. But when you have a mother who was once a traveler and who is still curious about the world, you discover that if you want to, it’s easy to stay connected.

  The first misty morning at the Mutianyu section of the Great Wall, Ed and I arrived so early we were almost the only people clambering up the steep, uneven stone steps. On the drive back to Beijing, the pumpkins and cornhusks piled at roadside stands looked pretty much like the autumn farm stands back home. But the evening street food in Beijing—raw embryos, crickets, and grasshoppers—didn’t look like anything back home. I downloaded the photos and sent them to Amanda, Babe’s caregiver. First thing the next morning, I called Babe, who in Houston was a day behind, enjoying her first scotch and soda of the evening. Amanda pulled up a chair for Babe in front of the computer screen.

  “I feel like I’m on the trip with you!” Babe said. Babe, the ninety-five year old postmodern, digital armchair traveler.

  I felt the same way. When I spotted the pair of petrified walnuts that Mark Ma, our guide, had inherited from his grandfather and used to massage his hands and fingers to hold off arthritis, I wondered, What will Babe think of this? When LaMu, our guide in the Tibetan area of China, told us her mother was married to two brothers who were yak herdsmen and she didn’t know which was her biological father, I couldn’t wait to tell Babe about that. Even though I was on the other side of the world, it was easy to bridge the span so Babe didn’t feel lonely or left out.

  My experience didn’t keep me from sinking in and savoring the present moment. Instead, communicating almost daily from halfway around the world added an extra dimension to the idea of personal photojournalism.

  In Yangshou, a sleepy rural village outside of Guilin in southern China, we met a seventy-seven-year-old woman who lived in an ancient stone house that had been in her family for 350 years. Out on her unpaved patio, where roosters and chickens scratched in the dirt, the homeowner smiled coquettishly as she modeled a “raincoat” made out of stiff bamboo fronds. This petite old woman also demonstrated that she was still strong enough, using both hands, to crank the heavy stone wheel to grind soybeans into soy milk for tofu. Inside, in a room off the living room, a coffin—shiny black lacquer with red and gold designs—was lined up against a stone wall next to a cooking area that had a hot plate, a skillet, and a rice cooker.

  Our guide explained that in this village it was the tradition that when people reached seventy, they acquired their own coffin.

  Standing next to her coffin, the owner put her hands together in prayer and smiled for my iPhone. It seemed to make that spunky seventy-seven-year-old, who appeared to be in excellent health, content to have her coffin so close.

  The next morning, some 8,500 miles and a world away, Babe, in her apartment on the fourteenth floor of the senior high-rise community, was trying to make sense of the photo of the tiny, gray-haired woman standing next to a coffin.

  I explained that, yes, the coffin was inside her house, out in full view, right next to the kitchen.

  “Do you want me to keep a coffin in my apartment?” she asked.

  “Only if you want to.”

  “I could start a new trend,” she said.

  I didn’t remind her that she’d already chosen to be cremated and there was that urn waiting on the top shelf of my sister’s bookshelf. Since 1998, Dad’s ashes had filled his side.

  I absorbed Babe’s “Go!” so fully that when the first woman won the Iditarod dogsled race in Alaska, I dropped everything and took off for Nome to do a story on her. When the lava started flowing on the Big Island, I spent New Year’s Eve nearby, at the Volcano House.

  Luckily, when Ed and I met, Babe’s “Go! while you can” was a good fit for both of us. We pledged to go as far as we could—always with hiking sticks—for as long as we could: hike in Torres del Paine in Chilean Patagonia; slog across the marshy Gangtey Nature Trail in Bhutan; and in Dharmasala trek in the snow-packed lower Himalayas, where we happened upon a chai tea shack in the middle of nowhere. (My brother joked that we hiked away from the Four Seasons and we hiked back to the Four Seasons. He had a point: we were in rough environments, but we were not roughing it.)

  As newlyweds, we were pretty much inseparable, and we had a deal: since we’d met in our sixties, we agreed that we’d go almost anywhere together, as long as neither of us had been there before with a previous love.

  Travel was our way of amassing a personal history fast. It allowed us to say, Remember when we were in Tanzania, Lijiang, Marrakesh? It rescued us from constantly referring to the interesting lives we’d led and the places we’d traveled before we met.

  One evening I was discussing Babe’s “Go! now” mandate over dinner with George Landau, a diplomat who had been a US ambassador to Paraguay, Chile, and Venezuela. I explained that Ed and I needed to do as much as we could while we still could. I felt like a travel clock was ticking and time was running out.

  George dismissed my urgency. “You can keep doing what you’re doing until you’re eighty-eight, at least!” George should know. At ninety-two, he was about to leave for a diplomatic meeting in Geneva.

  I continued to travel—usually to places Babe had not been—and I always sent photos.

  LESSON 13:

  SOMETIMES LIFE BEGINS AGAIN AT NINETY-FIVE

  For someone who liked to party, Babe ended up at the best senior community. She’d been living at my sister’s in Houston, and at a certain point my sister had started vetting senior homes—that one was too snooty, that one too religious, and this one was just right. And it was.

  At ninety-five, Babe, along with Elma, her full-time caregiver-companion, and Tiger, a chubby Chihuahua–Jack Russell mix, moved into a private two-bedroom, two-bath, unfurnished, independent-living apartment on the fourteenth floor of a sixteen-story high-rise community for seniors. One reason this primo apartment was available was probably because its large plate-glass windows looked out onto Interstate 610, and even at fourteen st
ories up, the freeway buzz from twelve lanes of urban traffic was omnipresent. My sister figured that wouldn’t be much of a problem, since by now Babe was hard of hearing. So Babe moved in with a half gallon of Chivas (enough to share), dozens of framed family photos, and probably too many multicolored afghans that Great-Aunt Alvina had crocheted.

  During Babe’s first week, I arrived in time to join her for dinner downstairs. (That’s when I showed up in that drab black travel outfit.) The dining room tables, set with crisp white cloths, had arrangements of fresh hydrangeas and roses. Geneva, on my left, was carefully dressed in a white pantsuit with gold trim and matching jewelry. She asked me to read the menu to her. “I can’t see,” she said.

  So this was the person Babe had told me about. Babe, who was self-conscious about being hard of hearing, had said to Geneva, “I’m sorry, but I don’t hear well.”

  “And I can’t see,” said Geneva, “so we’ll be good friends!”

  During her working years, Geneva had been an office manager, and at ninety-two she still exuded street-smart business savvy. She explained that until recently she’d served on the welcoming committee, where it was her job to show new people around. (How exactly a vision-impaired person accomplished that, I don’t know.) “It made me feel that I still had something of value to offer,” she said. She also explained that it ended up interfering with her life too much because each time a new person arrived, she had to drop everything. (At ninety-two, she had that much to drop? Good for her.)

  At ninety-five, Babe was the oldest at the table, and Blanche, at eighty-one, the youngest. Blanche wore her silver hair piled high in a beehive; a fringe of girlish bangs fell over her forehead. She showed me her necklace, which had a pendant for each of her six grandchildren. She’d designed the pendants and named them Crystal Children. They were a popular item at her store, Blanche Fine Jewelry, where she still worked a few hours a day.

  She explained that Hymie, her husband, and Mitty—who were sitting next to each other on the other side of our round table—had been born on the same day, in the same hospital, eighty-seven years earlier. They had grown up together and served in the navy together and were still best friends. This story of their lifelong friendship had the familiar ring of one told many times, but that didn’t make it any less enjoyable for Blanche to tell it again or for me to hear it for the first time.

  Mitty, who had moved in just two weeks earlier, was describing his late wife, who had died four months before, as a shopaholic. According to him, she died with 150 St. John suits in her closet. Mitty had married wealthy, so she’d bought them with her own money. But still. “She was sick. She had a disease,” said Mitty. “But what a woman she was!” This recent widower, who still wore his gold wedding band, said this in such a juicy way, relishing the part of his married life that had nothing to do with designer suits.

  My sister had said Mitty had arrived at the Hampton almost mute. That evening, he was dressed in a turquoise Lacoste golf shirt, and his muteness had melted.

  Blanche ordered the Healthy Choice dinner and, referring to her husband of fifty-eight years, she said to the waiter, “He’ll have the same”—except when the waiter got to Hymie, he ordered exactly what he pleased. As a new wife of barely two years, I was amused by the universal ineffectiveness of wifely dietary interventions. I made a mental note to go easy on my husband’s red meat–vodka–ice cream habit.

  Also at our table was Flo, who had already stopped in and played Scrabble with Babe. Flo, who seemed a good decade younger than ninety-two, was conservatively dressed—plain white blouse, basic blue cardigan. Looking over at Babe, who was wearing my favorite, pale pink Indian kurta with sparkles at the neckline, Flo said to me, “Your mother dresses to the hilt. It gives the rest of us something to emulate.”

  Midmeal—sole, baked potato, peas, tasty enough—I paused and looked around the table from person to person. I was surprised that I was enjoying myself so much at a senior community.

  You see, on that first visit, I was dragging some pretty heavy baggage with me. I’d been scarred by a visit to a “nursing home” when I was just seven or eight. My girls’ club had gone there to distribute gifts we’d made—terry-cloth covers with dog faces that fit over bars of Ivory soap. (Exactly what every old person needs, right?) Although we were told we’d be visiting a nursing home, it was more like a hospital with frail patients nodding off in hospital beds. The sad, yellow-beige hallways smelled exactly how you’d expect. Whose idea was it anyway to drag a bunch of little girls into such a place? The patients’ naked neediness as they reached out for their gifts, their insistence that the little visitors enter their rooms and keep them company haunted me for decades. It’s ironic because as a child I shared a bedroom with my grandmother, the person after whom I was named—Josephine, Josie, Jo—and the person I loved best in the world. But I didn’t think of her as “old.” She existed in a different category—she was my beloved grandmother who let me sit in her lap as long as I needed and hold her hands as long as I wanted. Unlike all the other adults who were busy rushing around, Josie always had Time. For me.

  Although I’d done the preliminary research scouting senior residential communities in Houston and several sounded terrific, I’d done the interviews only on the phone. It was my sister who’d visited in person. So I wasn’t expecting such a friendly, smart, lively, cheerful group of residents as the ones I met that first evening at dinner. You could say they were at their sparkling best because they were putting on a show for the fresh new person at dinner who was interested in them and their stories. But over time I came to know these people, and they weren’t putting on a show for me or anyone else. Also, not once did anyone at the table complain about their maladies. Whatever they were suffering from was not what they were dining out on.

  After dinner, after we rode the elevator up, and after Babe switched on her gas fireplace, she said, “I met that group the first night at dinner. Hymie invited me to join them. What a break that was!”

  Babe had also told me about another incident that first week, when she’d been in the pub at happy hour, sipping one of her two scotch and sodas. She’d mentioned that Dr. Bliss had said she’d sleep better and need fewer sleeping pills if she stopped the scotch. One of the residents had said, “Change doctors! When you get to be ninety-five, you can do what you please!” Babe loved telling me that story, and I loved hearing it. In the five years she’d lived at my sister’s, my sister and her husband had provided Babe with everything—except a group of peers to kibitz and laugh and complain with.

  At first, Babe had resisted the move, protesting that she did not want to live among strangers. She was probably remembering her mother’s nursing home, which was strictly a nursing home in the old, institutional sense—no pets, no cocktails, no privacy. “I don’t think they did anything for excitement,” said Babe. Undoubtedly, she was also remembering the private residence turned group home where Aunt Dell had lived. “It was pleasant but a long way from having fun. Here at the Hampton, it’s fun all day, if you want it.” (After Babe moved into the Hampton, the name changed to Brookdale Galleria.)

  My brother, sister, and I worked together and actually even enjoyed making Babe’s apartment especially homey. My sister did a heroic job of furnishing it with cheerful gold-and-yellow-upholstered furniture, a card table so Babe could invite people in to play gin rummy, a dining table large enough for friends to stay for a bite. I equipped the kitchen with pots and pans, appliances, and bright yellow dishes and stocked her refrigerator, freezer, and pantry, even though the restaurant downstairs served three meals a day. Our brother installed the biggest big-screen HDTV. On the narrow ledge that served as a balcony, we arranged clay pots planted with bright red geraniums. All that helped, but that wasn’t why Babe herself was blossoming in this new environment. Her fluid transition was a dramatic reminder of the Buddhist phrase, “Don’t count me out while I’m still arriving.”

  What also allowed Babe to enjoy this transition, undou
btedly her last, was the fact that she wasn’t “sick” and was a youthful ninety-five. As a friend in the medical field said, “Does your mother have any idea of all the thousands of things she never got?”

  Because Babe never had any debilitating disease—not heart disease, not cancer, not diabetes or dementia, not even high blood pressure or a broken bone. The only surgery she had was for cataracts, and the only medicine she took was a tiny bite of Ambien at night. As Amanda, her caregiver, said, “Babe’s one in a million.” She was one in a million in other ways, too: her doctor was named Bliss, her nurse Joy, and her weekend caregiver Lovie. Now, wouldn’t any of us like a dream team like that? She still had a full head of thick hair, and skin so flawlessly smooth, people asked if she’d had Botox. (Babe squinted. “Bo-what?”) She suffered from peripheral neuropathy, which made her unsteady on her feet, but that didn’t make her “sick.” Back in her eighties, when she’d gotten shingles, Dr. Bliss had said the pain would be so bad she’d wished she’d died, but she hadn’t, and she’d recovered to enjoy this new, final stage.

  My brother and his bride said the vibe at the Hampton seemed like that of a college dorm. Since Babe had never gone to college, maybe this was her chance to experience the drop-in fun of living in a dorm. Of having Carmen from across the hall stop in the first day with a welcoming platter of cheese and crackers. Of having a social group—Geneva-Blanche-Hymie-MittyFlo—to share meals with. Of having neighbors knock on her door with the equivalent of “Want to play?” And in Babe’s “dorm,” no one had to study.

  During my visit, Christel, a Dutch friend of mine, phoned Babe, and I couldn’t help but think of Christel’s Papa, who lived to be almost ninety-eight. The Dutch have a national home-health policy that encourages the elderly to stay in their own houses. For something like a mere hundred euros extra per month, Papa had people checking in on him four times a day, including a midnight visit.