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Our Neglected Age
by
Rachel Marie Stone
My friend John was 92 years old, suffering from multiple kinds of cancer as well as a wound from World War II that had earned him the Purple Heart but had never healed. And he was going blind.
He had been remarkably spry into his late 80s, but had declined rapidly over the past few years. For a while, friends and neighbors had looked in on him at home, bringing food and coffee, chatting about the news, watching some of the football game. A woman was hired to help, staying with him for much of the day and tucking him in at night.
Bu then she had to leave. And, though he’d sworn he’d only leave his home in a body bag, he’d joined the ranks of the 1.5 million Americans living in nursing homes. As many do, he quickly declined. He hated the food. The coffee was weak and never seemed to be hot enough. He refused to leave his room.
So every Saturday night, I cooked something he loved—steak, usually cooked rare, and some kind of chocolate dessert—and brought it to him on china dishes along with a cup of good black coffee. His appetite, even for good food, was poor, put to the end he nearly always drank the coffee. He would clutch the warm cup in hands as dry and withered as the branches of an old tree, and release a barely audible but unmistakable sigh of satisfaction.
You could tell he loved the feeling of the warm cup in his hands; that he felt as lordly and dignified as a young person who has recently acquired a taste for coffee. I’d always bring a cup for myself, too, and we would drink and talk while I nonchalantly cut his meat and put it on the fork, pretending not to notice that he couldn’t see the food well enough to put it on the fork himself. If I stopped to buy fresh donuts at the apple farm, I’d bring some for Jack, along with coffee from the bakery.
We carried on these sacramental feasts until John’s mouth and throat filled with lesions, until he could no longer eat or drink, until he slipped away quietly. I never left him without kissing him and hugging him and telling him how I loved him, and that I would see him next time.
My father once talked to a young man from rural Mexico, whose beloved grandfather had also lived a very long life. He told what might well be an archetypal, even mythic story of a good death—though it is true:
This grandfather had three sons, who worked the family land where they also made their humble homes. The grandfather, having long ago been widowed, awoke each morning in his own bed and proceeded to the first son’s house for coffee and breakfast, to the next son’s house for lunch and a nap, and to the third son’s house for dinner and conversation. These daily rounds, facilitated by the ministrations of his daughters-in-law and sons, continued for years until one day, after completing his usual routine, the old grandfather went to bed and did not wake up. Thus ended his life on earth.
My father, listening to this story of an aging man who spent his days with family, considered him the richest man in the world.
Despite what you might think, the largest age demographic in America is not the “next generation.” It is people over the age of 65, according to the 2010 U.S. census.
There are more older people in the U.S. population than ever before.
And yet, aging in America is regarded with fear. It’s the kind of thing that must be held at bay with cosmetic surgery, Botox, and “anti-aging creams.” We don’t like to think about nursing homes, much less visit them.
For various reasons, the elderly in the US are often patronized, casually ignored, and even horribly neglected and abused. Though mistreatment of elders usually occurs at the hands of family members,
a study of 2,000 nursing home residents
in various institutions reported that 44% had been abused, while 95% said they had either been neglected or seen another person neglected.
So it was not without reason my friend John rebelled at the thought of going into a nursing home. Strikingly, the majority (60%) of nursing home residents have
no
visitors, which isn’t surprising when you consider that
more than 50% of nursing home residents have no close relatives and an incredible 46% have no living children.
When you compound those numbers with the astounding estimate that as many as
nine out of 10 U.S. nursing homes are understaffed
(and many of those staff are underpaid), you can begin to see why my dad—who’s been visiting nursing homes regularly for most of his adult life—considered the Mexican grandfather who died in his bed to be so very rich in spite of his material poverty.
When he was a cardinal, Pope Francis remarked that ignoring the elderly amounts to
“covert euthanasia.”
We’re guilty of this by the simple fact that Pope Francis’ comments on World Youth Day about women and the gay community received widespread media attention, while these remarks merited little to no attention whatsoever:
“A people has a future if [they] go forward with both elements: with the young, who have the strength, and things move forward because they do the carrying, and with the elderly, because they are the ones who give life’s wisdom. […] We do the elderly an injustice. We set them aside as if they had nothing to offer us.”
My friend John played the saxophone in multi-racial jazz bands in New York City in the 1930s and served his community as a volunteer firefighter for 50 years without once missing a meeting. He was similarly faithful as a church member and Sunday school teacher, and the consummate family man. His hair turned prematurely white after he used his bayonet to gently probe the sands of Iwo Jima for hidden explosives to deactivate. After being shot, he spent more than two years in military hospitals battling infection and fighting to keep his life and his leg. When I was a ballet-obsessed 10-year-old, he built me my very own barre out of repurposed scraps.
What could a young evangelical have taught
him
about cultural engagement, creativity, self-sacrifice, faithfulness, generosity, thrift, courage, or suffering? What young evangelical could not have failed to learn a thing or two from his long and remarkably full life?
I certainly did.
As the ranks of older Americans continue to swell, we who are young must reject the cultural narratives equating aging with decline and increasing irrelevance. We must resist the falsehood that it’s
our
generation that really “gets” it and realize how much older people have to teach us.
And we must remember to call and visit the older people in our lives—bringing coffee and compassion, leaving behind the condescension—remembering they were once as young as we, and that, if God wills, we will one day be as old as they.
Rachel Marie Stone
is the author of
Eat With Joy: Redeeming God's Gift of Food
(IVP). Follow Rachel on Twitter
(@Rachel_M_Stone)
and read more of her work at her blog:
rachelmariestone.com.
Editor's Note: Image by
zeitfaenger.at.
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