“87”  

By Timothy Anderson

 ~ ~ ~

My grandmother is slowly changing my mind about the process of aging. It’s been subtle, this change. She, the original model of “making the best of the worst” during hard times, now lives in the Seattle area.

For a time after we moved her west of the Cascade Range, Billie Lopeman enjoyed an apartment overlooking Puget Sound, with sweeping views of Vashon Island and the Tacoma Narrows. For 70 years, ever since leaving Montana, she’d dreamed of a view of the water.

At first, the place seemed perfect for her, despite two flights of treacherous stairs. Taking lots of sunset pictures, she embraced the view as wonderful and refreshing. But as her remaining friends and relatives died, one right after the other, there were fewer people to share her pictures with. One can only stand so many solitary sunsets before wondering, “what’s the point?”

In time, the state took away her driver’s license. Forced into reliance on others for everything, she considered a move into an “adult living facility;” not quite a nursing home, and just shy of assisted care. She wasn’t exactly helpless and the idea suited her so she became one of the first residents to move into the place when it was dedicated early last winter. Once she saw the new living unit with its railings, “new” smell, bright colors, and a view of the greenbelt, she gave up her apartment on the Sound without hesitation and moved.

Billie’s new apartment came with everything she’d need, and without a lot she didn’t. Gone were the stairs and young kids next door partying all night.  Traffic noises and jets constantly flying low overhead were also a thing of the past.  She was transitioning to an adult community where she wouldn’t be so alone and so isolated. Billie tried reassuring me when I first heard her plans. "It’s not a nursing home, Tim.  I am not ready for that!"  

And I wasn't ready for it either.

~~~

Today, like most days I’ve spent with her here, was a day of non-events. I did the wash, mopped the floors, folded the clothes, and sat with my grandmother as we discussed the nature of being 87.  It was a nothing special day. But still the mundane remains very present because so much of everything I take for granted confronts me with each minute I spend here.

87 is certainly not for cowards.  It’s about being hunched over, and not being able to see anything worth a shit. It’s about dirt getting on everything and being aware it’s there but unsure if you got it all when you last cleaned.  87 is about keeping track of medications. Everything is deliberate. Like walking slow and doing your best not to bend over too far, or losing your balance entirely, and falling.  At this age, a lot of energy is spent worrying about falling down and not getting back up. Mentally.  Physically.  Spiritually.

87 is about trying to be independent but accepting that you ARE dependent. And that when your grandson tells you to "sit down, I'll take care of it," he is telling you you've earned this chance to let whatever needs doing be done for you.  After 87 years of doing everything possible for others, it’s time to receive blessings in return.  

87 is about a retirement home for "active seniors," a catchall term that seems to define everything and nothing all at once. Grandma is comparatively more active than many of those around her in their 50's, even if their walkers don't squeak as much as hers.  87 encompasses wondering how much longer a person should be able to stand “active living” before it becomes “assisted living,” and then the dreaded “full care.” The residents are always watching such progressions and the betting types among them seem to know that a lot of these 50 year olds will be beating Billie to an assisted living facility. She tries not to think about these things but they are always dangling in the back of her mind. Billie has never been real good at straddling fences. She comes from the “either you are or you aren’t,” black and white world of certainty. The ambiguity of aging seems to have snuck up on her and she really isn’t sure what to make of it.

I’ve witnessed this truth in private and in public. Recently at the local Albertson’s I watched as my grandmother slowly made her way through the grocery aisles. Leaning on the back of the shopping cart for support, and picking her way down the middle of the aisles, every movement seemed painfully slow. The slowest motion of her reaching up to grab products perched high on the shelves. The tentative grasp she had of other items. The way each decision seemed to take a long time. In our productivity measured world, my grandmother represents drag.

There are huge efficiency costs in accommodating elderly people like her. In a “just in time” society, with its maximized profits, computer modeled efficiencies, and less-is-more manpower solutions, my grandmother brings the whole system to its knees. The aisles of the grocery store have to be wider, the lighting brighter and the overhead signage huge. Never mind the challenge of the checkout, with its programmed transaction time per customer dictates holding helpless checkers to hopelessly high productivity targets. All of these calculations and formulas unintentionally ruined in one moment by an 87 year old woman “just getting a few things from the store.”

It does no good for me to step in and help. She takes such offers as insults to her independence. So I helplessly observe such moments in full cringe. Times like this are neither graceful nor affirming. But today’s low margin stores seem oblivious to her, as they are oblivious to many of their other “non typical” shoppers needs.

The worst affirmation of this comes at the “12 Items or Less” express line, with its promise of no hassle, speedy checkout. Grandma compromises millions of dollars of investment when she rolls into this lane. Scanners are not efficient when she takes each item out of the cart, slowly and painfully, one at a time. As the line of impatient customers behind us grows and I watch the nervous checker worry over her crumbling productivity numbers, my grandmother takes five times the amount of time normally spent per customer. I feel the impatient anger directed at us from everyone behind us who feels delayed or that this old lady is gumming up the system.

Such concerns don’t matter at these “active seniors” places. In fact, the entire facility seems to celebrate anyone who is creative enough or quick enough to gum up the works. The halls are wide. The pace is deliberately slow. If anything, there is too much time for everything. I suspect that especially for those who lack mobility, time drags painfully and immeasurable towards futility.

The high point of the day for those who live such lives is the socializing that happens in the lobby. Talk is the lubrication of such communities. The active seniors gather, usually about 10 AM, but sometimes closer to 10:30 if the news was really good last night and no one got to bed on time.  Who is ill, who is going to the doctor, and whose grandkids just did what is the lifeblood of the day.  And there are always those residents whose families don't come, and who have no news. They stand quietly at the edge of the lobby.  Lingering, these people take the morsels offered by the others and cling to them as if they were their own. I see such offerings as if they are shared communion bread, passed freely about with great reverence. At times the loneliness I sense is overwhelming and I can’t imagine the sustenance of only having the current events of others to share. That they've ended up here, now, and that they never saw any of this coming seems incomprehensible. Our society teaches us over and over again how to stay young. We aren’t taught how to age with grace, acceptance, and dignity.

Following the morning social, I watch them as they hobble back to their rooms after hearing the same stories, and after they’ve shared their identical accounts of the same pains, and the news of who passed on and who is about to.  It’s a ritual, this lobby, this place of hopeful news.

Yet I also have grown to understand that customs must run on such precise schedules.  If people gather too early, not everyone is up. If they gather too late, the lobby social hour could infringe on lunch. Early afternoon naps loom. The predictability of getting old is both micro and macro. There are lunches to fix, laundry to do, dogs to walk, and Medicare and Medicaid billings to fight over. There are afternoon doctor’s appointments, dentist’s appointments and running errands in Rideshare vans. It’s all very predictable because this is what you do when you are 87.  A quiet resignation fills this place that although you haven't done much, it’s all still very tiring.

The routine stop/starts again around 1:30 or 2 PM. The mail comes, representing a second communal time of the day. The postman cometh and hopefully as the crowd gathers, there will be a letter.  A card.  News, from somewhere, anywhere but here, that can be opened and read aloud so that all around can share in this new, artificially joined history.  Everyone lives cocooned here, perched next to the mail slots, living through their solitary lunches on the hope that today, someone has remembered you. I often see the forgotten residents at mail time, and their eyes are filled with sadness.

87 is not for cowards.  

I’ve become one of the regulars at this place now.  All these seniors know what my house looks like, because grandma has shared the images with those gathered around her at mail time. Here, I am not Tim.  I am "Billie’s grandson."  When I walk with her down the hall, they smile at me, and they take my hand, and on a really good day, sometimes the younger ones bake me cookies or share their paper. They know my river froze over and that my sunsets are from God Himself.  They know I sleep in a log bed, that I had myself a moment two years ago where I could have died but didn't.  The cowboys, the men still living, talk to me about my Powerstroke and ask "How’s your Billie doing, Tim?" And as I relate the struggles of being 87 and out living all three of your husbands, they nod because they imagine that this woman has lived through what they just can't imagine. And that they'd rather not.  

She is the oldest resident in this facility for active seniors, and she worries that they may make her leave, forcing her into an assisted care facility or a nursing home, long before she’s ready. Other times it seems her status as the oldest resident, and as one of the most independent people at this active seniors facility, guarantees her place here. Billie Lopeman gives hope to others; if she's still kicking at her age, they can be too.

I think if anything, this is the reason why at 87, I have watched my grandmother change many people’s outlook about getting old. These strangers, folks who are so much younger than she, they want to spend their time with someone who is still so active.   Whether these companions are other residents or my friends, I’ve stood silently and watched as they’ve come to check up on her, wash and cut her hair or check to see if she has laundry that needs washing.  They come to see her old black and white pictures of a mostly forgotten Montana homestead and listen to her stories of growing up on the Front Range.  They come to share their cookies, their own pictures and their small dogs.  They’ve come to talk about the weather, the other residents, and the future.  They’ve come to be with someone who has made it to 87, because maybe 87 isn't so bad when it’s done right, and maybe her version of 87 will rub off on them.

They’ve also come because, like me, they know we are all learning that even at 87, life can be very compelling.  Especially on an ordinary day when even so late in the game, life is not passive. And it’s certainly not for cowards.

© 2004 Timothy Anderson