July 1, 2021

 

 

 

 

The obvious first question that must be asked when we are facing the question of where to live when we are old is simple: Where will I be safe?

I have known that for a long time. But a few days ago something happened, something that I’m going to have to tell you. There is no way around it.

I fainted.

For days I had been experiencing crazy moments when I felt the blood running out of my head and the darkness closing in. It happened many times, usually when I was physically at rest, working at my computer, once when I was reading from the small screen on my phone. I strongly suspected a reaction to the blue light of my screens and made adjustments; I wore my special glasses and spent less time writing.

Then one morning when I felt especially unstable no matter what I did, the threat of passing out seemed so likely that I retrieved my call button from my bedside table and hung it around my neck before sitting down in my recliner.

So that’s where I was. I did not, could not, fall. I woke again with my arms on the arms of the chair, jerking and trembling.

Not immediately able to get in touch with reality, I wondered if I had fallen asleep and had a bad dream, then remembered that I had known I was going to pass out. I fumbled for that call button. Two nurses came, then the chief nurse who made the decision that I should go to the hospital and let experts figure out what happened and why. While she was still squatting at my knee the fire department EMT’s appeared at my door.

The purpose of this tale is not to talk about my problem. The heart monitor I am wearing now for a whole month will surely reveal something. Meanwhile I am good and expecting to be better.

I would much rather tell you about Margy.

I was just walking in the hall. This was a couple of weeks before I faded away in my own recliner. I was exercising, adding steps to my FitBit report, when a voice called out to me.

“You! Hey you! Come in!” I recognized the voice as one I had heard a few times in the dining room.

The name on the door read Margaret, but I knew everybody called her Margy. She was sitting in her wheelchair, cuddling a doll against her chest.

“Who are you?” Her voice was strong, unnecessarily loud.

“I’m Frances.”

“What?”

“Frances.”

“What is your last name?”

Again she had to hear it twice but then repeated my name correctly.

“Do you live here?” she shouted.

“Yes,” I told her “310.”

“What?”

“Number 310, just around the corner from you.”

Her eyes were bright, intense in a colorless face, with little patches of scalp visible here and there between thin strands of gray hair. The doll in her arms had a bald baby head, protruding from its blanket.

“How long have you lived here?” she said, each word a production, no careless eliding of sounds.

“Since December.”

“Do you like it here?”

“Yes. I like it.”

“You do!?”

“They take good care of us here.”

“Yes. They take care of us. And I like it here, but I want to go home.”

She turned “home” into a long word, heavy with yearning, then added, “I want to go to my house where I lived before.”

I thought then of my own beautiful house, a family treasure now surrendered to strangers. What could I say?

“Maybe you need someone to take care of you and nobody is there to do it.”

“I know,” she said, resigned. “My family comes to see me, though. Five of them came today.” She emphasized the five, making it seem an outrageous number.

“They left and they didn’t take me home. But they let me keep the baby.”

I knew she always had “the baby.” Sometimes she brought it to the dining room, giving it up reluctantly to the attendant who promised to “put her down for a nap.”

“I’m glad you have your baby.”

“She’s really my daughter’s baby, but she has three. I can’t take all of them.”

We talked about the baby, how sweet she is and I felt I needed to agree that she looks a little like her grandma.

“I’ll bet you were a beautiful young woman,” I told her.

Smiling a bit slyly, she said, “Well, I thought I was.”

She let me go after I promised to come and visit her again. “Because I like to talk to people,” she said.

I love it that Margy is my neighbor. She is 102, ten whole years older than I am.

The conversation I had with her, I had with myself a couple of years ago. I had noticed that I could do everything and didn’t need help until suddenly I was dizzy and afraid to drive the car, until I was sick and had to have surgery, until I hurt my back and couldn’t pick up the tissue I dropped on the floor, until fire season arrived with a hot wind blowing, the power going out, and I needed to leave and couldn’t put my suitcase in the car.

A mile away from my home an elderly man fell, out-of-doors and out of sight of the road and his neighbors. He lay on the ground for three days and nights, before somebody found him, barely alive.

A decision I didn’t want to make kept throwing itself in front of me until, tired of arguing with myself, I made it.

In the past few days I have thought numerous times about the differences between what happened here when I fainted and what could have happened if I had fainted alone in my big house in the hills with no nurses down the hall. Not that I would have died or anything, but the preparation for a crisis was totally different and help much farther away.

Margy and I are not unique. We are just good illustrations of what I said in the beginning.

The first, most obvious question for an elderly person facing life alone is this: Where will I be safe?

That’s what brought me here. That’s why Margy is here.

It is not the only question, of course, just the first.

The need for safety requires careful scrutiny of any place we consider and the willingness to trade for it something else that we treasure, maybe multiple things, but most likely the place we call home.

 

 

Some names were changed to protect the person’s identity.

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