by Jo Giese
When Christel told me about Papa, I thought that was the best: stay in your own home, in your own bed, until the end. Now I surprised myself wondering if Papa, a retired naval architect who was sociable and charming, wouldn’t have enjoyed his later years more if he’d lived in a senior community like Babe’s.
The next day, I was down on the second floor in the physical therapy area, riding the bike—I was rehabbing from knee surgery—when a parade of residents started drifting in on their walkers and wheelchairs.
Uh-oh. This was just this sort of scene that I’d dreaded. I was afraid it would smack too much of that scary “nursing home” visit when I was a little kid. I kept pedaling and watching, and in spite of myself I was impressed: from the woman who was improving her balance by walking between parallel bars to the man who was working out with free weights, even if they were only puny three-pounders, these individuals were still struggling to be the best they could be.
When you walk through the front door at the Hampton, in the lobby near the reception desk, which is manned by two staff people, you’re likely to encounter a traffic jam of residents. At first glance, if you’re like me, you’d judge this scene—most everyone gray-haired, old-old, relying on a walking aide—to be depressing. But I came to understand that my first impression was wrong. Over the years, as I got to know some of these individuals—I’d take them out with Babe to Le Viet, a favorite Vietnamese restaurant—I came to understand that most of them had found happiness. Not everyone, of course. Not the tall, handsome, lanky man who barged out the front door and raced down the driveway, his frantic caregiver running after him, desperate to get to him before he ended up in traffic. And probably not the confused woman who spent most mornings sitting in the big upholstered chair in the lobby, across from the reception desk, until she was moved from independent to assisted living because of dementia. But most of the residents were happy. I know that might be hard to wrap one’s mind around—it was a surprise to me, too—but it was true.
Physically, the Hampton wasn’t the most ideal setup for seniors. The sixteen-story building had been built as a hotel but had survived in that incarnation for only two years. After that, it transitioned into a senior-living residence with 146 independent-living apartments, thirty-nine assisted-living units, and fifty-six skilled-rehab units. It wasn’t a tippy-top, super-swanky, expensive place; it was more high-end middle class, like Babe. And because it had never been completely retrofitted from its hotel days, the driveway was too steep for wheelchairs, the bathtubs weren’t walk-in, and the hallways in the apartments should have been wider. But that was me, a nonresident, judging its aging-in-place design shortcomings. Babe never said a peep about any of that. Instead she asked Tracy, the social director, if she was as happy at home as she was at the Hampton.
“I’m perfectly satisfied here,” Babe said. “I don’t like the food, but nine-tenths of the people don’t either.”
Why should I have been so surprised that Babe was still making the best of it? Since social isolation and loneliness are cruelties that often accompany old age, in her new home she had a stream of spirited new friends knocking at her door. It was as if she had pressed a refresh button. For a while, Amanda, from Nicaragua, even had Babe on Latin time: they took lunch at three o’clock, tea at five. Babe had reinvented herself. Sometimes life begins again at ninety-five.
One morning I was walking Tiger, Mom’s Jack Russell mix, across the street at the Gerald D. Hines Waterwall Park. Flo, who played Scrabble with Mom, was strolling briskly with Carl, her ninety-five-year-old walking partner. I don’t remember if they were actually holding hands, but they exuded such physical comfort with each other, they might as well have been. And you would not have guessed that either of them was in their nineties. Except Carl, who was wearing Bermuda shorts, had black compression hose hiked up to his knees. From Flo’s vigor, you also wouldn’t know she had overcome breast and lung cancer. After her husband had died, seven years earlier, she’d moved from Shreveport, Louisiana, to the Hampton to be closer to her children.
When Flo and Carl circled around to my side of the park, Flo petted Tiger and gave me a hug and a kiss. I thought, This is only my third day here, and I’m getting kissed and hugged on my morning walk. I like it. Ed and I had recently moved, and on our walks none of our new neighbors, except for our landlady, had hugged and kissed us. I reported to Ed on the phone, “If we live to be ninety-five, we’d be lucky to live in a place like Babe’s.”
Is it that at this stage, at this age, people don’t see a value in holding back? They form strong, intimate bonds quickly. They’re living in the now, the now now, the extreme now. Because there is nothing else.
This isn’t a new-age Eckhart Tolle Learning to Live in the NOW. This is the real deal. Although some of the residents at the Hampton were probably with-it enough to have heard of Eckhart Tolle, they didn’t need to practice his eight steps toward mindfulness and living in the now. They were already living it. Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab, coined the term nowist for people working in the tech industry who are super-present. At the far other end of the spectrum, now-ist could also describe Babe and her new friends.
I visited Babe monthly, sometimes twice a month, and to have as much time as possible together, I stayed in her apartment—even though because of the heat I always broke out in a bumpy rash on my forehead and had a scratchy, hive-like allergy to her dog. (I ate Zyrtec during the day and Ambien at night.) Sunday mornings I got up early and walked to the Starbucks on the corner for the New York Times and coffee. Since it was especially quiet in the lobby, and Babe and Tiger weren’t likely to be awake yet, and Lovie, the weekend caregiver, was with her, I often hung out at the front desk, chatting with the receptionist who came on at the eight o’clock shift change. Once, I asked Betty Francis how she could stand working there, because, as good as it was, it was also tough. Every week there were birthday postings but also death notices.
I told Betty Francis that just a few days before, Carl’s family had hosted Carl’s last happy hour and had invited all the residents. Babe and I had attended, but seeing Carl, who not so long ago had been walking in the park with Flo, now slumped in a wheelchair, dying of prostate cancer and forced to exit early from his own party because he wasn’t up to the festivities, was too much for Babe and me to take. We escaped early and skedaddled—as much as someone using a walker on a sidewalk with cracks can skedaddle—around the block to Piatta’s, an Italian restaurant, for fresh air and a drink.
After I told Betty Francis about Carl’s party, she said, “Working here is my chance to get love and to give love.” She meant it genuinely, and I could see her point.
And Betty Francis wasn’t singular. I was so impressed by the staff—how thoughtful and upbeat they were, in spite of the crazy-difficult situations that accompany extreme aging—that I stopped by the office of Trubal O’Dowdy, the executive director, and asked him what the secret was. I figured they must have some special employee training program.
“It’s a culture,” he said. “People fall into it, or they don’t.” He explained that if someone wasn’t treating people well or didn’t have the patience for working with people, he’d talk with them, but they probably wouldn’t last. He said they had training manuals for each position, but that wasn’t what did it. “It’s a culture of over-the-top caring and customer service. It’s a happy place to work.”
The next time I was down in the rehab room, a woman who was on oxygen zipped in on a motorized scooter. Riding the bike next to me, she said, “So, you’re new here?”
THE LAST LESSON
About three years later, Joy, Babe’s favorite visiting nurse, phoned, but for once she did not sound joyful. Since I had medical power of attorney, I was the responsible party she needed to inform that Babe had had a stroke, a pretty major one. I needed to know that my mother’s needs had changed dramatically—for her own safety, she would need a hospital bed with railings instead of her king-size bed, a wheelchair inst
ead of the walker, and two people to lift her. At the end of our conversation, at the point where Joy would usually have signed off, she paused and suggested slowly and reluctantly that it might be time to consider enrolling Babe in hospice.
“Let’s play Scrabble,” Babe whispered in a hoarse, post-stroke voice three days later when I visited her.
Scrabble? Play Scrabble? That was what Babe wanted to do on the very day I’d just enrolled her in hospice and they’d rolled in the hospital bed? Okay, if that’s what she wants. I pushed her new wheelchair up to the card table and brought out our tattered Scrabble set, whose aged box was held together with duct tape.
I poured myself a glass of chardonnay and was about to make Babe her scotch and soda, when she declined. “I don’t feel it would taste right,” she said, making a face.
Since she drew the tile closest to A, she got to go first—family rule. We each put down a couple of desultory, no-count, low-scoring words. Neither of us exhibited any of the customary fighting spirit we employed to play for blood and big prizes. Once, I’d won a pair of black leather designer boots off Babe. I still have them. Babe had always played Scrabble like she arm-wrestled: to win.
I was drained by the meeting around the dining room table that had just ended, during which the hospice people—chaplain, nurse, administrator—had told me what to expect from their palliative, end-of-life care. I told them that when I’d enrolled my previous husband in hospice, he’d died four days later. Was this going to be like that? Did Babe have only four days left? They said they couldn’t predict how imminent death was. One of the biggest advantages of hospice was that if Babe had seasonal bronchitis from the high pollen count in Houston, she wouldn’t be rushed to the hospital like last time. (She’d ended up destabilized for a week from that hospitalization.) From now on, just as she had requested in writing in her living will, she’d be treated at home.
For me, the lowest point in the meeting was when the nurse, reciting standard hospice protocol, said I should tell my mother that I loved her, that I forgave her, and that she didn’t need to hold on for us. I didn’t need to tell her I forgave her, because there was nothing to forgive her for. In the fog of signing all their forms—we agreed there would be no heroic measures—I was drowning. (Maybe this would have been more tolerable if my brother and sister had been participating, but they were out of town. The hospice people, to their credit, would repeat this presentation for their benefit a few days later.)
That’s when I took a time-out and silently repeated my personal mantra like a prayer: In spite of what’s happening right now, in spite of the fact that I’m enrolling my mother in hospice, in spite of how hard I’m crying, it’s okay to be happy today. Because Babe wouldn’t want me to sink into depression. Because people don’t like to be around depressed people.
I might have been crying, but I didn’t need to feel sad. Babe had lived almost ninety-seven years. She’d had a very full, wonderful life.
Studying her Scrabble tiles, she said, “I haven’t played in months. Just don’t like it as much. Crazy me.” Unhappily fingering her tiles, she looked at me. “If only I had a vowel, an E. . . .”
Defying a lifetime of strict family rules, I fished around in the bag for an E. Not looking her in the eye, I handed it over, and she took it.
Meanwhile, other new, decidedly non-Scrabble words and phrases were seeping into our vocabulary: aide, Ativan, sundowner’s syndrome.
I still took Babe to Le Viet, our favorite Vietnamese restaurant, along with the two caregivers it required to lift and transfer her. (She probably weighed less than a hundred pounds, but post-stroke, hers were a hundred pounds of almost dead weight.) Le Viet was perfect because the Vietnamese food we liked best—the sizzling crêpe, the spring rolls with peanut sauce—was finger food, and she was back to nibbling with her fingers and not enjoying it a speck less.
Everything was punched with the sting of its being the last time. Our last lunch at Le Viet, our last trip to Central Market for flowers, the last time we’d spread Babe’s beautiful embroidered tablecloth for a special meal, the last time I’d make a last-minute flight to Houston. Babe was still here, but I was already missing her.
The worst time of day was dusk, when the sun was setting. Babe, gazing out the plate-glass windows in the direction of the 610 freeway, would muse about all the railroad cars out there. As a child, she had traveled by train with her mother; her father had been an entrée chef on the Northern Pacific Railroad.
A summer month later, she had just left the bathroom. Lovie was pushing her in the wheelchair, and I said good morning and commented on how good she looked.
“Jimmy always says I look good, but I feel terrible,” she said.
It was the stomach cramps again. (Roberto, the hospice nurse, had explained that we’d all have severe cramps in our innards if we spent our days bent over in a wheelchair.) I thought, Okay, so maybe this is the opening I’ve been waiting for to say those phrases hospice said will set her free.
In the narrow hallway, between the bathroom and her bedroom, I knelt on the carpeted floor in front of her wheelchair. The hallway was a tight, intimate space for this most personal and difficult conversation. Babe, hunched over, looked frail and shrunken in her pale pink fleece pajamas, which were as soft as a baby’s blanket. (I had the same pair, same color. Costco, $14.99.) A cuddly white chenille robe, bunched around her waist, made her look even tinier. I grasped her hands, which I didn’t like to touch because they were so bony it was like holding the hands of a skeleton, and looked directly in her eyes. I told her I loved her, but she knew that. Then, much more slowly, because it was so hard to say, I told her that she’d had almost ninety-seven good years, that if she felt so terrible and she was ready to go, she didn’t need to hold on for us.
She looked at me, puzzled, almost hurt. “But I’m still curious,” she said.
Babe was not ready to go anywhere.
That evening for dinner in her apartment we had roasted chicken, barbecue ribs, broccoli, and strawberries. Babe ate an astonishingly large amount, and afterward Lovie wheeled her in front of the fireplace and I started clearing the table. The next time I looked in her direction, Babe had slumped over, her head fallen, lopsided, on her shoulder.
Was this it? Had she died?
Lovie and I looked at each other, and we agreed she might have had another stroke.
“No need to call the emergency folk,” said Lovie. “She’s still breathing. We’ll just put the pretty girl in bed. We can do that.”
Lovie wheeled Babe into her bedroom and lifted her into bed. I leaned over to kiss her good night. Or goodbye. That’s when Babe came to and said, “You have no idea how much happiness your visit means to us, Josie.”
Then, just as abruptly, she nodded off and was “asleep” again.
Two more months passed. It was the end of summer when Babe announced, “I’m on the mend.”
She wasn’t delusional. The comeback kid had not bounced back—at ninety-seven, you don’t bounce back—but, to everyone’s astonishment, she had inched away from death’s door. She was eating with a knife and fork again, and she could even get up by herself. This progress posed new problems. Warming herself in front of her fireplace, she said, “The nurse says I’m not supposed to walk by myself. How in blazes does he expect me to walk if I can’t walk by myself? It’s confusing, isn’t it?”
That wasn’t all that was confusing. Babe was making such an unexpected, remarkable recovery—we were able to go out for so many more lunches at Le Viet—that I stopped counting the “lasts.” Even though Joy was no longer her nurse, she stopped by when I was visiting, and I asked her if Babe should still be in hospice. Joy said, “Yes, she could have another stroke at any time.”
Summer passed, and by fall Babe said, “I’m getting older.”
“Getting?” Ed said to me.
Going to sleep was the worst part of the day for Babe, and for me. Once Lovie had tucked Babe in bed and yanked up the side rail
ings, and I’d gone in to kiss her good night, when she said to me, “Sleep with me. There’s no other here.”
No other here. Isn’t that the terror we’re all afraid of—the existential loneliness of being separate and entirely alone in the universe? “Your father’s not sleeping with me,” she said.
More weeks passed, and when Babe experienced more misery, when she was so exhausted in the morning, even after a long night’s sleep, that she’d get up to sip her coffee and beg to go back to bed to sleep more, I thought maybe it was time to try that hospice phrase again. Maybe she was holding on for us. “You’ve mentioned that before” was her reply.
Almost one year after we enrolled Babe in hospice, I got an urgent call from Roberto, the hospice nurse. Everyone was expecting me to arrive in Houston the next day, Friday, to prepare Babe’s Mother’s Day party on Sunday. Roberto urged strongly that I come, now.
Ed scrambled to help me leave and tried to calm me down by saying she wouldn’t die before I got there. “She’ll be around for Mother’s Day,” he said. “She won’t want to miss her party.”
Just the week before, she’d attended a seafood gumbo feast down in Beach City, near Galveston, an annual event hosted by a resident at the Hampton. I’d asked her if she was really up to the hundred-mile-round-trip journey on the bus. She’d said, “I don’t want to miss out.”
Before the car arrived to take me to the airport, I said to Ed. “I love you, and I need you to say it to me.”
He hesitated. “I like it when I say it spontaneously.”
I explained that if my mother was dying—the only other person I could always count on to say it back to me—then Eddie had to start saying it back to me, now and at the end of every phone conversation when I called from Houston. If my mother was not in the world, I needed to hear that I was loved. (Even though Ed might have been slow with “I love yous,” he was lavish with praise. My favorite was his saying that I was the best girl in the galaxy. “The entire galaxy?” I asked. “The whole galaxy,” he said.)