Death is an unpleasant fact. At a certain age, it becomes a fact that is harder and harder to put out of mind. When you are seventy-something and living in a retirement community it can become pervasive.
Such is the case at Riderwood, a retirement community in suburban Maryland where my widower father lives. The man who sat with you at dinner last night might be in the hospital the next, in the nursing home a week later, and dead a month later. On the other hand, they might die suddenly of a stroke. As if you needed any reminder of life’s fragility in this age group, death notices are prominently published in the lobby. You can check out their names as you get your mail.
I spent most of my day yesterday with my father in his retirement community. Mostly we hung around Riderwood. I joined him on his daily exercise. During allergy season, this means an indoor walk between the campuses’s many buildings. If you know the stairwell system you can walk a loop continuously indoors for the better part of a mile. This is possible due to the many enclosed elevated walkways between buildings.
With no interruptions, it would be a brisk walk of twenty minutes or so. However, it was hard to us to walk for more than a couple minutes before stopping. My father is extremely sociable and he seems to know half of the community’s thousands of residents. When he sees someone, most of the time he wants to find out how he or she is doing. The said answer usually is, “Could be better”. Very often, we learn that someone’s spouse or friend is ill.
Illness and death comes with this territory. The successful master of retirement living at Riderwood has to roll with death’s punches. You are in a compulsory boxing match with death. You need to keep your wits about you so you can avoid the punch, for there will be another one tomorrow. Invariably though you know that your body will betray you. In that event, Riderwood is prepared for your decline. When you can no longer navigate inside your own apartment, there is a campus assisted living facility. Next to it is a nursing home, where my mother spent the final five months of her life.
Most Riderwood residents understand that they are living on borrowed time. Their apartment may be their latest home, but their final days will likely be spent awkwardly in assisted living, then precariously in the nursing home. There, likely quite gradually, death will take them. This is actually the good news. Since the nursing home is local, your Riderwood friends can come to visit you. It is not as good news to spend them in a nearby hospital, surrounded hopefully by family, but likely bereft of the companionship of many of your many Riderwood friends.
Once or twice a year, Riderwood holds a memorial service for those who have died. Since my mother passed away last November, she was on the list of residents to be memorialized. My father asked me if I would attend the memorial service with him. He dressed for the occasion in his darkest suit. My mother would have been proud.
Outside the chapel were the pictures of many of those who had died. I found a picture of my mother when she was about my age. Inside the chapel, an organ played solemnly. My father and I took our seats on the right side of the chapel, which was reserved for families of the deceased. We looked at the names in the order of service. My father checked the names of the residents he had come to know. As the names were read, I realized that a number of spouses must have died within a few months of each other. Morris Questal must have went first. His wife Julia was not too far behind him.
The service was non-denominational but certainly had a theistic theme. “Oh God, our helping ages past, Our hope in years to come, Be thou our guard while life shall last, And our eternal hope”, we sang. The Riderwood Balladeers, a sometimes off-key men’s chorus of seventy-plus Riderwood residents sang Gentle Annie by Stephen Foster, Think of Me and Sevenfold Amen.
Altogether one hundred and six names were read aloud. They represented the residents who had died between October 2005 and April 2006. As my mother passed away November 10th, she was thirteenth on the list. After each name was spoken aloud, a bell was rung. If a family member was present, you raised your hand. An usher passed you a white rose. For about a third of the name read, no one family member was present to receive the rose.
One of the residents (Jane K. Myers) wrote a poem, which she read. It said in part:
Do not grieve because you miss us.
Listen, and you’ll know we are near.
We still meet you in your dreams.
And make mischief in your rooms.
We will whisper in your heart
And tickle you inside your brain.
Love entwines us all your days
I found myself a bit choked up, although I tried not to be. My mother may be gone nearly seven months, but the grief was still nearer than I thought. In some respects, my attendance was an act of courage. I can understand why my sister and wife passed on attending this service.
After the service, we wended my way from the chapel to my father’s apartment. My father held the fragile white rose in his hand. “I was glad you could come and represent the family,” he said. “You have done your duty.”
“Dad,” I said gently, “I came to honor my mother, and her life, and to support you. I was my privilege to be with you tonight.”
“What should I do with the flower?” he asked somewhat pensively.
“You could take it and put it on Mom’s grave,” I suggested.
“Yes, but the wind might carry it away.”
“You have Mom’s picture on the dining room table. Why not put the flower in a small vase and place it next to her picture.”
I gave him a final supportive hug, and then exited down the fire escape toward my car. It had been a long day.
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June 3rd, 2006 at 12:37pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2006 |
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With my mother in serious decline, my family’s focus has been on her. My mother is now in a nursing home. She still has some expectations that she will eventually be released from the nursing home and will be sleeping in her regular bed again. The sad reality is that barring a miracle the nursing home is where she will remain, unhappily and crankily, until death takes her.
We still visit regularly with mother of course. But I am beginning to turn more of my attention to my father. The sad fact is that there is not much else I can do for my mother. I can provide occasional company, tell her I love her, and push her around in her wheelchair to meals and physical therapy. I bring her flowers on occasion and tell her stories of life around our house. But it is difficult to visit her more than once a week and the more her mind goes the more challenging the visits become.
Although my father now effectively lives alone, managing my mother’s care is still a full time job. Not surprisingly, the last couple of years have been very stressful. He no longer has to immediately fulfill my mother’s demands. There is staff in the nursing home to do most of this, just at a more sedate pace. Providing somewhat distant tender loving care is a challenge of itself. In addition, the finances of nursing home living are challenging.
Each day is a cycle with few variations. As my mother’s mind deteriorates, the woman he loves becomes less recognizable. We sense that our father is fraying around the edges. So I’ve decided it is as important to provide support for him as it is to support my mother. My mother may be unhappy, but she gets the physical care that she needs. My father needs distraction. He needs to get away from his situation. He needs respite.
The good news is that he now lives near Washington, D.C. He is a native Washingtonian. The bad news is that it that he is tethered to his retirement community and cannot usually get away for more than a few hours at a time. My father is a sociable creature, but he is still developing friends at their retirement community. It can be a bit chancy for him to get away by himself. While he can still drive, the Washington traffic is relentless and unforgiving. We are worried that the split second response times needed by drivers around here may be beyond him at this point. Too many day trips are probably chancy.
My goal is once or twice a month to get him out of the apartment and engage his mind in something unrelated to fretting over my mother. What could we do with a couple hours? It turned out that what my father really wanted to do was see old haunts.
He grew up in a row house in Northeast Washington. Of course, over the years he has revisited Washington many times. He has even been inside his old house, now passed on to new owners. He has seen graves of parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and distant relations. He has visited old schools and neighborhoods. Yet one thing he had not done was retrace some of his many youthful bike rides. With his ADC Atlas of the Washington area, me in the driver’s seat, and my Dad in the passenger seat we set forth in my car on a hot July afternoon.
It was a rambling little adventure on Maryland and DC roads, mostly inside the Beltway. It turned out that being in the passenger’s seat was ideal for him. He did not have to concentrate on driving. Instead, he had the pleasure of looking out the window. While it was hot and muggy outside, it was cool and comfortable inside my car.
We looked in vain for an entrance to the Mormon Temple in Kensington, which is easily seen from the Capital Beltway. We got lost a few times. He changed his mind frequently about where he wanted to end up next. Eventually we were in DC and heading down Beach Drive. Here, along Rock Creek Park, was an area he knew intimately from his boyhood days. There used to be a horse stable around this corner. Was it still there? Yes, it still was! There used to be a monastery here. We pass an old building. Could this have been a monastery? He was not sure but it was fun to speculate. We traveled at minimum speeds down Beach Drive under the canopy of tall trees. We made frequent stops so he could look out the window. “Seeing this brings tears to my eyes,” he told me. He said he was at a nostalgic age. While much has changed about Washington, much is still the same. Many of the houses that were new and opulent to his boyhood eyes are still there and kept in good shape. He knew the most surprising things. “John Rockefeller used to live in this house.”
We ended up at a Starbucks at Four Corners in Silver Spring. We laughed as I tried to explain the concept of Starbucks to this man from the World War Two generation: fancy overpriced coffees and sweets. My Dad is more the type to drive through the McDonald’s drive-thru and make sure his coffee came with a senior citizen discount. Neither of us are big coffee drinkers. So despite it being a hot day we ordered hot chocolate and noshed a brownie while watching the traffic on Colesville Road pass by.
Mission accomplished. For a few hours, my father was a happy creature again. The woman I know as my mother recedes from my present. Perhaps consequently I am increasingly grateful that my father is still around and in full possession of his faculties. I am indeed fortunate for the first time in nearly thirty years to have my father living near me again. I will try not to dwell too much on how many good years he has left, but to savor in the time we have together. It may be that our drives around DC will, in the end, be far more meaningful to me than to him. Someday perhaps I will make the drive down Beach Drive alone. I may stop at a place where my Dad and I stopped, and I will be the one with tears in my eyes.
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July 3rd, 2005 at 01:49pm
Posted by
Mark |
Life 2005 |
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