Aging Gracelessly
Eileen Manion
“By the way in which a society behaves toward its old people, it uncovers the naked and often carefully hidden truths about its real principles and aims.”
Simone de Beauvoir
Every time I look in the mirror, I see traces of both my grandmothers:
Nana, my father’s mother with whom I spent vacations; Grammy, my mother’s mother with whom my mother and I lived during the school year from the time I was five years old.
Both useless as models as I contend with the challenges of old age.
Growing up, I thought of Grammy and Nana as opposites.
Grammy seemed uninterested in children, although she’d produced six — or maybe because she’d had six; only three survived to adulthood.
Nana had only one child, but seemed happy to spend time teaching me to read, embroider, play Scrabble and card games.
I saw their houses as very different. Grammy’s — built in Queens for Irish and Italians escaping Brooklyn and Bronx slums — was dark, dusty, located on a busy four-lane street with the noisy BMT El a block away. Lots were tiny: you could see your neighbors, they could see you.
Nana’s northern New Jersey home was older and had more “character,” with wood paneling, a polished wooden banister. Where Grammy’s remains dingy in memory, Nana’s seems full of light, for the lawn and garden were much larger. Neighbors were far away and the street was quiet, traffic-free.
As to food, Grammy had about ten regular meals: beef, lamb, or chicken stew, boiled pork tenderloin, a rectangular slab of frozen fish or macaroni and cheese on Fridays. Vegetables came from packages stored in the freezer, for Grammy was a convert to the corporate food revolution that gave busy housewives convenience at the expense of nutrition; she longingly anticipated the day we could get all we need from a pill.
I thought of Nana as the more creative cook. She often leafed through Women’s Day to find new recipes — interesting things to do with ground beef or chicken breasts. She cut out food ideas from magazines and newspapers, collected them in a loose leaf binder to consult when she wanted to try a new dish.
Nana was an accomplished seamstress. When I was a child, she sewed most of my clothes and continued to fashion skirts that I wore in university. Nana also made clothes for my dolls, dressed dolls to be sold at her church bazaar, crocheted bedspreads, table cloths, and endless antimacassars.
If necessary, Grammy could sew on a button, darn a sock, or fix a falling hem, but that was the extent of her needle work.
Nana had more social and intellectual interests than Grammy. She attended Women’s Club meetings, wrote lengthy book reports for one of their committees, played bridge, did volunteer work for the March of Dimes, wrote long letters to friends, her sisters, and to me.
Grammy read little aside from the daily Long Island newspaper. In the afternoons, she watched soap operas. I don’t remember her ever writing a letter.
While Grammy was a practicing Irish Catholic, Nana was a Methodist. Grammy wouldn’t miss Mass on a Sunday or holy day of obligation, but I don’t remember Nana going to church. She’d married a Catholic, raised her son in her husband’s faith, but never converted, despite the fact that “mixed marriages” were frowned upon. I think she was embittered by the church’s rejection, for she had very little to do with my grandfather’s family.
“Outside the church there is no salvation,” we were told in Catholic school and when I was about seven, I sadly informed Nana she was going to hell.
***
Both my grandmothers seemed old when I was a child and now, instead of their sharp differences, I see that they also had similar ways of being in the world.
In bed, they inevitably wore nightgowns, never pajamas. Getting dressed meant donning a “foundation garment” — reinforced corset with garters for the stockings they wore summer and winter. Over that, they’d put on a “house dress” — neither ever wore pants. They had nicer dresses for shopping, seeing relatives or friends.
Although Nana, an enthusiastic gardener, grew and “put up” her own tomatoes for years, in other respects she was as much a convert to processed food as Grammy. She preferred cakes made from mixes to those made from scratch. And why bother baking cookies if you could buy Oreos or Fig Newtons? Once instant coffee came on the market, that’s all both drank.
Both grandmothers were widows; their husbands had died in their early sixties, leaving them with mortgage-free homes but limited incomes. Having lived through the Depression of the 1930s, both were thrifty; they saved, washed, and reused aluminum foil, plastic wrap.
Once married, neither grandmother worked outside the home. Women of their generation just didn’t — it would be an affront to their husbands’ ability to support them. Even after their men died.
Neither Grammy nor Nana ever left the house unless they had a specific destination; the idea of walking for exercise was completely foreign to them. I don’t think either owned comfortable shoes.
Nor had either of them ever learned to drive. Neither liked to travel. The big move of Grammy’s life was from one borough of New York City to another. For Nana, it was from a Pennsylvania farm to suburban New Jersey.
I don’t think my grandmothers liked each other– they rarely visited although they lived only about an hour’s drive from one another. When my mother and I visited Nana, Grammy stayed home.
I think Grammy knew my mother and I preferred Nana and was jealous. Nana sometimes complained that Grammy was “selfish” since she tried to monopolize my mother’s time and attention.
As my grandmothers aged, their lives narrowed; friends died or moved away and they did not make new ones.
Both died in nursing homes. Grammy became too forgetful to stay alone while my mother was at work and I was in university. Today we’d probably say she had Alzheimer’s, but at the time (1967), she was labeled “senile.”
About ten years later, Nana fell downstairs, broke her hip. couldn’t reach the phone, so she lay on the floor for more than 24 hours before neighbors found her, called an ambulance. From the hospital, she went into a nursing home.
Was the fall caused by a stroke? Maybe, since she had trouble talking when I visited her. She seemed to give up on life and died a few months later.
Before the 1940s, nursing homes as we know them didn’t exist. Grammy had little choice but to provide a home for her mother. That’s just what grown up children did.
The nursing home industry began in the 1950s and today nursing homes in the United States are thriving businesses, often owned by private equity firms who do as much as possible to cut costs and increase profits. The scandals associated with the pandemic have not changed their business model, nor has federal inspection increased.
Here in Quebec, nursing homes are also chronically understaffed and residents suffered dis-proportionally during the first months of the pandemic.
“Covid -19 …requires us to rethink who we are and what we value,” according to Richard Horton in his recent book on the corona virus catastrophe. If going to a nursing home seemed dreadful before the pandemic, now it can be a death sentence.
How to avoid ending up in one?
I read all the advice on aging I can find and try to follow most of it, keeping body and brain active, eating well, maintaining social ties. Reading the news certainly makes us anxious; some of my friends are afraid to leave the house although there are other dangers besides Covid-19 — muscle atrophy, isolation, depression.
I’d like to think that there’s a way to insure I won’t end up in a nursing home, as both my grandmothers did, but no one can guarantee they won’t be disabled by stroke, heart attack, fall, dementia.
To be old in 2020, during the pandemic in North America, is to live a strange paradox. On the one hand, we hear a heightened concern for the “most vulnerable,” including people over 70 with “underlying conditions,” which so many of us have. On the other hand, we encounter a collective shrug as so many of the elderly are dying, especially those in nursing homes. If the virus doesn’t kill them, the isolation imposed to protect them does.
“What’s going to happen to me?” a friend who has Alzheimer’s often asks.
“I don’t know,” I reply.
