Where my mother lives now
Yesterday I was in New York visiting my 97-year-old mother at the assisted living facility where she’s lived for the past four years.
My mother has been looking thinner lately. Her broken hip and surgery last fall took a bit out of her, and she seems more frail and faded. But fortunately, she’s happy enough and still knows all of us and even manages to crack a few jokes.
I brought her a pizza. It wasn’t the greatest pizza—I’m limited to ordering from the little place down the street—but it was pepperoni, her favorite. And although she ate slowly, she ate steadily: a large piece and a half, and two glasses of water. She always was a woman who loved her pizza.
The place my mother lives now is one of those facilities where management believes it’s good for the residents to be around what might be called “companion animals.” In practice, that meant that we were sitting in front of a bunny hutch wherein resides a rabbit who is a ringer for Peter, munching adorably on a carrot and some lettuce. At our feet was a little dog who has the run of the place, but unfortunately he (like his predecessor canine) doesn’t really have the proper temperament for the job description. In other words, he likes to bark.
The walls of the establishment are decorated in what I’ve come to think of as old age home art. That is, there are prints of paintings that have some sort of hazy, romantic connection to the past. Victorian ladies and gentlemen. Children and their parents, circa late-1800s. Flowery flowers and homey cottages and swinging garden gates.
It all seems designed to evoke memories of the time right before the current residents were born, their parents’ generation really. I’m not sure why that’s the focus, but perhaps to make them feel protected and secure? Or maybe just because it’s the sort of nostalgic art that’s kitschy, popular, readily available, and cheap these days?
My mother was never really into art anyway. She was into people and books. And now, in the basket of her walker, she’s taken to carrying around with her as many books as it will hold. She sometimes reads them when she stops to rest on couches in the hallways as she makes her way about the place. Their presence seems to comfort and reassure her.
When I phone her, she usually reports that she’s been reading. And maybe indeed she has; I wouldn’t really know. I think that her personality is being distilled down to some of its essential elements, and for her that’s family, pizza, and books. Not a bad combo, really; one could do worse at 97.
Not a bad combo at all–much like my 97 year old uncle’s music, history channel, and oatmeal topped with ice cream.
My best wishes to your mother.
Jim
Has she considered getting a Kindle? If she’s walking around with that, it will hold more books than any walker could.
To my mind it’s a wonderful combo indeed! As long as I have books to hold I will not feel alone and throw in a pepperoni pizza(add some onions and mushrooms please) and I should think I could find contentment. Thanks for the update….as a long time reader I so enjoy hearing news of your dear Mother.
May we all be so lucky!
Makes me wonder…. Maybe we all “distill” as we get older? I notice that my interests have gotten sharper, and while I think about more things, it’s for more defined reasons…..
God bless you and your Mom. She sounds like a wonderful person. Thanks for sharing.
my mom went last year at 97. her greatest pleasure was reading. she read more than college professors I know – and had more intelligent things to say about them, too.
oh, she also liked never, ever going out (down the hall) without makeup and earrings and her weekly (upstairs) hair-do appointments.
let’s resurrect the great values that sometimes we scorned during the sex ‘n drugs ‘n rock and roll, anti-Vietnam War days of our youth.
That’s a lot of pizza at one sitting for most elders. It sounds as if she’s doing rather well. I’m surprised and sorry to hear the management hasn’t chosen a better therapy dog. We were able to break the rules and keep a very nice cat with my mom. (The cat earned a soft life and is now spoiled rotten by yours truly, an expert on the subject.)
There’s an older lady in my neighborhood, Hispanic, whom I adore. She’s a terrific eater. She will polish off fruit by the bucketful. Most of her day is spent hobbling around the driveways and sidewalks of our neighborhood assisted by a broom. Her activities, too, are very distilled and pure. Always a greeting, in Spanish, always a “mucho frio” or “mucho calor,” accompanied by a laugh. I don’t know the reason for the laugh. I just know it makes me laugh too.
Your mom has her priorities right. 🙂
My grandma lived to be 102. She was generally clear of mind right up until the end. Not long before she died I visited her at her daughter’s (aunt Grace who was 78 at the time) house. I walked into her room and she was asleep in her favorite chair. I sat down to wait for her to wake up. After about 20 minutes she startled awake, look around the room, and exclaimed, “I’m still alive!”
Curtis,
Perhaps she’s laughing because somedays she thinks you’re ‘hot’ and somedays she thinks you’re a bit too ‘cool’. 😉
Once when I was visiting my mother in her assisted living home and we were having dinner in the dining room, an older lady sitting at our table actually hit on me. Good for her! (Wish we’d both been about 20 years younger.)
When I’m in such a home, if they don’t have high speed Internet service, I’m breakin’ out.
You’re so lucky, Neo, to have your mom, still compos mentis and reading, at 97. That’s wonderful.
My dad is 83 and reads stacks of books. Mostly history. He’s on our team, and would love this blog if he weren’t such a Luddite. But he would be scolding laggers and lukewarmists: he’s an old Goldwater Republican.
I’ve always liked old folks. Really love talking to them, asking them what it was like back in the day. They have a lot of stories to tell. It’s like getting a report from a time-traveler: fascinating. And most of them don’t have much use for the current occupant of the White House. He reminds Dad’s friend Jim of “Huey P. Long — without the personality.” (Jim and Dad remember Huey P. from their days in New Orleans as boys.)
Pld folks home art. Pretty funny. Highlights one of the things that tickle me about myself and it seems my condition isn’t a rarity. I noticed some time back my ego age seemed to have been set around age 17 or 18. So the ego looking out through my far-sighted and cataract-developing eyes is still thinking about cruising the drive-in. And we carry some of the specific artifacts and horizons of that time with us. It is, for example, a real struggle for me not to refer to someone in his fifties as sir. He is, after all, an elder (!) and worthy of the address.
I think the Victorian art is part of the same thing. Somebody running an old-folks home, when his ego age was set, saw the people he thought of as really old liking pictures like that and maybe talking about (in my case) Walter Johnson or Red Grange and having once bet on Man O’ War. So that’s what he puts up for the old folks even though they’d have to be well over a hundred to have the art be of something they experienced in their salad days.
Your mom sounds terrific. I enjoy hearing about her so much! Like your dance posts, they’re a lovely palate-cleanser.
I also tend to recommend a Kindle for elders, for anyone who’s got issues with their hands or eyesight, and for anyone who has to spend a lot of time in bed. It’s light, has adjustable type size, holds a zillion books and keeps your bookmarks (and notations, if you make any – me, I’m just reading for fun!) for all of them at once, is incredibly easy to turn pages on, can be read one-handed or even no-handed (at times, like, say, when my nails are drying and I’m being SUPER-careful, I turn pages with my nose. Or a pencil in my teeth.), and is crystal-clear in bright sunlight (this is what makes it, and not the iPad, my fave).
You do have to be willing to try something that’s not exactly a book. But when I got my Kindle almost three years ago (or is it four? I can’t remember!), I think it took me all of an hour to forget I wasn’t holding a book. When I pick up a regular book now, I usually have a couple of seconds of adjustment to the fact that I have to hold onto it with one hand and turn the page with the other, but it’s actually easier than I thought it’d be to go back and forth.
Thanks for the report, neo. May your mother continue to do well. To be mentally alert and eating pizza at 97 is a blessing we would all like to receive.
I see my mom at 81 for shopping and groceries we have a set day for groceiries and I would take my grandkids over but My son and his ex-wife have decided that grandparents are not to be included in their childrens lives so I cannot take her great grand children by and my son who spent many summers with my mom in florida vacations definitly won’t take them by.
She is fortunate to still have her freedom and lives in an apartment she pays for though it’s not pet friendly. At least she gets to see her son and enjoys that.
her grandson doesn’t disssapoint her even though she asks about him by not ever coming by She just shakes her head and asks what happened to him, I say it’s just the way young folks are now.
I do and will miss my grandkids when Mom is gone though, it does get quiet around here without them, I don’t miss the son he can most likely get by with his new wife and her two kids without us veing a hinderence his new wife was proud to say she would be the one to place me and the wife in the nursing home one day though, LOL we will see about that!