Old People

By Susan Moldaw

I unbuckle my mother’s seatbelt, open her car door, sling her purse onto my shoulder, and watch while she turns sideways, slowly inching to the seat’s edge where she braces herself with the car frame as anchor. She’s arthritic, eighty-eight years old, and a widow. I hold my breath as she moves one leg out of the car, then the other, wobbly and teetering as she finally stands. She clutches my arm as she hoists one leg up from the curb to the sidewalk, then the second leg. And it isn’t a simple two-step; it’s like scaling a mountain for my mother, with an ever-present fear of falling—a not irrational fear for anyone over sixty. I count my own years.

“She’s a fall waiting to happen,” I fret to my sister a few days later, sprawled on my bedroom easy chair. My sister lives out of town; we talk several times weekly. “She needs someone who will walk with her all the time.” I’m preaching to the choir. We both know convincing our mother to hire a companion will take an act of God. What she will allow is housekeeping and cooking help.

A woman goes grocery shopping for my mother at Draegers, cooks meals of red snapper or baked salmon with golden beets. At times she zips a hard-to-reach zipper or fastens a button at the wrist. When I visit, she tries to support my mother as she rises from a kitchen chair. My mother stamps her foot and slowly stands on her own. Afterward, we walk to the family room and sit on a couch with a floral print.

“She’s only trying to help,” I say.

“If I stop doing things for myself, pretty soon I won’t be able to do anything for myself.” My mother is a connoisseur of robes. She brushes a few stray crumbs off her long, pink terrycloth that has a convenient front zipper. Several crumbs remain that I refrain from flicking away—this time. I glance out the window and see the two iron outdoor lounge chairs where my father and I used to sit before he died nearly eight years ago. They seem bare in January, without their summer cushions.

I look back at my mother. “That makes sense,” I say.

On another lengthy call, I say to my sister, “I can manage her, but it isn’t fair to same-age friends who help. She’ll topple them.” Emboldened by righteous anger—her stubbornness might endanger her friends—I sit my mother down in her kitchen, cheery with its brightly colored, hand-painted tiles and African violets in ceramic pots. I steel myself for her to stonewall, as she usually does.

“There’s a lovely employment agency in San Francisco.” I can’t use the agency’s actual name—“Sage Eldercare Solutions”—so I say “Town and Country,” an agency Sage sometimes engages. My mother brightens at the name.  Many people she knows use Town and Country to hire household help. She has used them herself. My mother is reassured by familiar references.

“They have what’s known as ‘care managers,’” I continue. Her eyes narrow. Her breath grows rapid. She looks around the room, as if to spot the nearest exit. “Maybe Town and Country will find someone who can go to an occasional movie or out to dinner.” Weekends are hard since my father died, and she gets lonely, though she’s been a phenomenal widow, calling friends, making plans, and going out. “Nobody wants a widow at their dinner parties,” she likes to say, “though they’ll make room for the widower.”

My mother glances at the headlines of today’s New York Times, scattered on the kitchen table. She takes tissue from her blouse sleeve and blows her nose. She puts the Kleenex back in her sleeve, straightens the paper, and looks up. “All right,” she says. “I’ll talk with someone.” With no hint of excitement, I say I’ll contact the agency.

•••

Town and Country sends a young woman for an interview who comes to my mother’s home. She’s neatly dressed, with a pleasing smile. She sits on the couch, crossing her legs at the ankle.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

She nods and says she has a passion for the arts, is trained as a nurse, and most importantly, she loves people. She directs her comments to my mother and speaks in a quiet voice. My mother leans forward. She loves the arts, and she’s energized by people. Now we’re getting somewhere, I think.

References of potential hires are promised, the agency fees acceptable. But the hapless woman titles herself a “Geriatric Care Manager” in an email to my mother, and the deal is shot. My mother refuses further communications.

“Geriatric,” my mother fumes. “Old people.”

That patience so often extolled in daughters evaporates. I want to bark, You’re old! Just hire her, Mom! but I don’t. Calling my mother old is akin to calling her ugly or useless. I know she doesn’t like old people. Neither had her father. He was ninety when he died. I rein in my anger and muster a weak, “Let’s keep the contact,” and “Perhaps we can revisit this.”

Tad Friend, writing about ageism in The New Yorker, refers to a chapter in a collection on the subject, written by psychologists. They assert that many shun the old to protect themselves from thoughts of death. “Ageism is so hard to root out,” Friend continues, “because it allows us to ward off a paralyzing fact with a pleasing fiction. It lets us fool ourselves, for a time, into believing we’ll never die.”

If my mother’s dislike of older people hides her fear of death, she’s not alone. I avoid my own advancing age. Sixty-five, seventy—why, those numbers sound positively youthful. I’d rather not think too hard about how many years I may have left.

•••

My mother and I go to the San Francisco Fall Art & Antique Show. She decides to take her walker, a collapsible contraption that she’s festooned with dusty dried flowers in shades of rose and blue with one burst of yellow, affixed to the front of the walker with a wide pink ribbon wound round. Using a walker isn’t entirely unprecedented—she uses it around her house—but when she’d take it out before she’d excused it with complaints of temporary foot maladies, or she’d brought it on short trips as a necessary travel aid. This time, she makes no apologies.

Once we arrive, I retrieve the walker from the trunk and snap it open. My mother and I accomplish her departure from the car in our usual manner, and she establishes herself within the walker’s confines, beaming. My mother blooms in society, and dresses to good effect. She wears a dull gold tunic jacket, black silk pants, and black tennis shoes—a concession to the comfort of her feet and only noticeable if you manage to divert your gaze from her diamond antique brooch.

The evening unfolds in a cavernous hall of San Francisco’s Fort Mason, a former military base now home to non-profits, including the Blue Bear School of Music, the Magic Theater, and the San Francisco Children’s Art Center—an art program I took my sons to when they were preschool age and I was not old. Picasso drawings, fine English furniture, gold ladybug pins dotted with sapphires and rubies for eyes, amidst other objets line the walkways, tempting strollers on all sides. My mother greets passersby, old friends from her many years of activity in San Francisco society. A few glance at the walker, but she seems unaware. We roam freely; as the night progresses, the crowds thicken and we get hemmed in.

“Let’s get out of here,” I say, worried she’ll be knocked over. I don’t know how we’ll maneuver.

With a thrust of the walker, she plunges into the morass, scattering women in five-inch heels and men in dark suits with alarmed expressions. Why do I underestimate her? My father knew she was strong; he used Theodore Roosevelt’s foreign policy dictate to describe her: that she spoke softly and carried a big stick. He tried to protect her anyway. “That’s why I married him,” she says. “I knew he’d take care of me.” Who will she let take care of her now—her purse tucked into the basket of her walker for anyone to snatch, her gait unsteady, her bones old?

My mother smiles as the crowds part and we safely emerge at the front door. Someone asks if I need help, but it’s all I can do to keep from laughing— what mettle! what spunk!—managing a “No, thank you.” I steer her into the car and store the walker in the trunk. When I join my mother, she has the show catalogue open. “Our favorite jeweler didn’t come this year.” She turns a page.

“Mom.” I throw my catalogue into the back seat.

She folds a page corner in her catalogue and looks up.

“You were great back there. That walker brings clout.” I check my lipstick in the car mirror and rummage in my purse for the tube. My husband sometimes asks why I wear it. Because I look dead without it, I think, applying fresh color.

My mother turns another page in her catalogue. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll need it,” she says. For the rest of your life, I think, a bit unkindly, though I only smile. Another truth I won’t utter. If I’m protecting my mother from her eventual decline, it’s no stretch to say I’m also protecting myself from my own.

•••

Nearly thirty years ago our family threw a party for my mother’s sixtieth birthday. I still have the guest list. The Bartels. Dead. Scott Carey. Dead. Connie Eisenstat. Dead.

My father.

The list goes on.

We both read obituaries compulsively. In the last few years, several friends my age have died. A neurologist I know says that she won’t get resuscitated if she has a heart attack. “After sixty, you never come out of it the same.” Sixty! I’m shocked. Am I already at the point of no return?

My mother makes younger friends. She likes them better because they’re that much farther away from death. Just recently, she called my friends and me, “young women.” “I’m not young!” I told her. (Neither are my friends.) Medicare, social security—all just a few birthdays away.

•••

I’m reading The Oxford Book of Aging, an anthology of essays, stories, and poems on growing old. A poem by Ruth Harriet Jacobs titled “Don’t Call Me a Young Woman” includes these lines: “I am an old woman, a long liver./I’m proud of it. I revel in it…” Jacobs, in the context of the poem, owns her age, though perhaps she struggles with ageism. Have I mentioned my age? I’m sixty-three. Like my mother, age is uncomfortable to declare.

“Age is just a number in your head,” my mother is fond of saying. Yes—and no. According to Tad Friend, aging is “…the leading precondition for most of the decline-hastening diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.” Age, plus health, may be the winning ticket, so for my mother and perhaps others age really is just a number.

In a book called Countertransference and Older Clients, countertransference meaning, simply, how feelings the professional has about the client may impact care, there was a chart of disabilities that reminded me of aging. I never could get it out of my head. Here are the maladies that got me the most: “Being unable to recall who you were or answer simple questions about your past; Being dependent for bathing, toileting, and being moved from place to place; Never being able to do your favorite activity again; Watching your body waste away inch by—”

I have a sudden urge to throw salt over my shoulder, knock on wood. Writing more feels like tempting fate. “Don’t call me a young woman,” writes Jacobs. “You reveal your own fears of aging.” Perhaps the reason I don’t want my mother to call me young is that it reminds me that I’m not.

•••

There are blessings an observant Jew recites every morning, and though I’m not an observant Jew by Orthodox standards, I say a version daily while I’m still in bed. According to the Mishkan T’filah, Reform Judaism’s prayer book, these morning blessings remind us of the miracle of waking to bodily life: “Praised are you, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who opens the eyes of the blind…who stretches the earth over the waters…who strengthens steps…”

My mother may walk with strong intention but walking hurts.

Bunions and corns and bursas and hammertoes condemn her feet with each step. Heeding my mother’s plight, I exercise my toes every day like tiny soldiers in formation, stretching them, raising them, making the big toes touch because they don’t anymore. Side-by-side they curve to the outside of my feet, the beginning of a bunion I was horrified to notice on my left foot. I rush ahead twenty-five years to a nightmare vision of myself: hobbling, bent over, hanging on to a walker—nothing like my mother’s queenly stance.

•••

One of my mother’s friends—a woman six years her junior— fell not long ago in Hawaii. My mother remarks over dinner at her home one evening, “Hawaii is hard for old people.” We sit in the family room on the floral couch, with trays balanced on our laps, the TV news on. “Yes, it is,” I say eagerly. “Hawaii’s been hard for you.” Finally—an acknowledgement of her age and frailties. I take a sip of tomato soup. On a recent family vacation to Hawaii, she’d been ferried in a golf cart to meals as her primary outings. My mother’s soup spoon clinks against the side of her cup. She looks at me in surprise. She hadn’t included herself.

I hold my soup cup and look into the swirl of red, then glance at her. She doesn’t have a trace of gray in her salon-dyed hair. Neither do I. My appointment for a cut and color is two weeks away. Just that morning I’d considered moving it up because I hate the sliver of gray, widening daily where my hair parts, but I’d used a color wand instead, called “Brush It Away.” I keep one in my purse and travel bag for “emergencies.”

The emergency of looking old.

Leaving her home later that evening, driving on suburban side streets as the sky darkens and my aging eyes struggle to adjust, I think about her mortality, and mine. Odds are, she’ll go first.

I hope she goes first.

I don’t want to think about her death! Or my own. Who wants to think about no longer being in the world? I merge onto the freeway. The lights of the oncoming cars disorient me. I keep my eyes on the road.

•••

In my work as a chaplain I’ve sat with death. The old and some young taking last breaths, sometimes alone, sometimes with family members gathered round. There are many ways one goes, or says good-bye— with love, without love, regrets, or without regrets, sadness, relief, anger. Most people fear a painful death. My fear is dying alone, but that’s not just it. I fear dying before my time, by fire, water, war, or other happenstances of fate, matter-of–factly listed in the Unataneh Tokef, the prayer recited at Rosh Hashanah— the Jewish New Year. I hear the prayer every year at services, and shiver.

I don’t have the courage to ask my mother what she fears. I hope I’ll have the guts when her time comes. Will I have the blessing of sitting with her at the end? Who will sit with me?

•••

I drop by the San Francisco Jewish Community Center one afternoon for Shabbat blessings. Children from the preschool sit on the atrium floor on carpet squares. A singer strums Sabbath songs on a guitar. He sings “Shabbat Shalom—Hey!” and at the “hey!” adults clap, kids belt “hey!” and some kids pop from their spots into the air, landing in a squat, repeating their blast on each successive “hey!”

Sitting at a round table covered with butcher paper, crayons scattered on top, I write “Peace to All” and “Welcome the Stranger” in bright green. I take a large hunk of freshly baked, fragrant challah from a basket offered by a staffer and a Dixie cup filled with red wine. Munching on the challah, I watch the kids laughing and jumping with all the energy of four- and five-year-olds, while images of the life course spin through my imagination: the kids, starting out, me, thriving in late middle, and my mother, bringing up the rear, her body slowing down but her spirit alive as any kid’s—all of us moving into an unknown future.

•••

In fall, my mother and I go to synagogue for Rosh Hashanah. We sit towards the front, my mother walking unsteadily with her walker on the aisle’s downward slope. In front of us is a family who lost their son in the previous year. My mother and I attended the memorial together. I look in my bag for Kleenex but I know she’ll have a supply—she always does. She hands me a wadded-up tissue and we both wipe our eyes as the cantor begins to sing. We listen as sunlight streams, illuminating the blues, greens, reds, and yellows of the stained glass windows. I glance at my mother’s profile, the view of her in synagogue I’ll always remember—the straight line of her nose, the curve of her cheek with its tiny red veins and rosy cast, the same slight brown spots that I so resolutely try to vanquish on my own cheeks on visits to the dermatologist. The image reminds me of my favorite photo of her, also in profile. She’s a teenager, just a few years before she met my father. Her hair is held back by a clip, she’s wearing a print dress with a little girl’s round collar, and she’s gazing starry-eyed into the distance, as if imagining the life she’d someday have.

Sometime during the service, a young woman goes to the bima—the raised part of the sanctuary—and begins to sing. She’s the daughter of a dear friend my age who died just months before. I tell my mother who she is. My Kleenex is soggy, she hands me another, then slowly and gently takes my hand. We sit holding hands as the singer’s voice envelopes us. The dead take their seats with the living and my soul expands, comforted by memory, my mother’s presence, and the connective tissue of love.

•••

SUSAN MOLDAW’s work has appeared in bioStories, Broad Street, Fourth Genre, Literary Mama, Narrative, Ruminate, and others. She’s a chaplain and gerontologist and is currently completing a program in spiritual direction. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.