The Essence of Nell

The old people in my family were not hidden away in nursing homes. My great grandmother who lived with her daughter Lucille, was a calm quiet figure, sitting in the shade of a pecan tree, shelling beans or darning socks, never too busy to hold one of us on her lap. As my family members aged it seemed to me that they just became more vivid, more themselves. 

            My own mother, Nell, who had learned early in life how to be a charming and diplomatic southern belle, became more plainspoken as she aged. Even in her nineties, as she faded into long periods of silence, you felt the strong presence of her being, as if the essence of Nell was even more present in her long silences. Her warmth and curiosity shone out of her. And occasionally she would surprise us. The women who came to her home to help us care for her often shared the most intimate details of their personal lives with Nell, knowing their secrets would be safe with her. Once one of them, who had perpetual boyfriend problems, was telling me about going to a Halloween costume party. Her boyfriend was going as a dirty old man. My mother, who had appeared to be napping and who hadn’t spoken a word in weeks, opened her eyes and said, “Then he won’t need a costume.”  

            Last week I went to at a party and met Carolyn, an eighty nine year old woman who lives in an apartment above the general store in Charlotte, Vermont. Climbing all those stairs keeps her strong. She says she tells people she’s in her ninetieth year because it sounds better than eighty-nine. When she left the gathering to drive herself home she turned to all of us and said, “I love you. At my age now, I can say that to you.” 

- Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Burlington, VT  

Role Models

I count myself very lucky to have grown up with positive models of what growing old looks like. My grandmother, Lucille, lovingly tended her TB afflicted husband for years at home in their small north Louisiana town. But when her husband died, she became an intrepid solo traveler. One day she surprised everyone, just packed her bag and flew off to Paris. My great aunt Helen, an accomplished and eccentric painter and author was married to John, who dropped out of high school at sixteen to take a job. John’s first job was cleaning cages at the Bronx zoo, but eventually he became the zoo’s director. Helen and John flew around the world collecting animals, and fascinating stories, which they recounted over martinis to their wide-eyed grand nieces. I always think of Helen, who was large in every way, dressed in her favorite outfit. She had persuaded my mother to sew it for her, my mother who favored beige cardigans and trim little navy blue A-line skirts. Helen’s voluminously full skirt was made from fabric she brought home from China, printed with giant pandas munching bamboo. She always wore it with a purple vest, red leather sandals and bright green ankle socks. 

 - Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Burlington, VT  

A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

We are people living in a culture which anesthetizes birth and death. We birth our babies just as we die, numbed and hidden away behind closed doors, in places most of us fear to go. We hate hospitals and nursing homes because when we open the door we smell the scent of our own fear. We fear death and we pretend it doesn’t exist. Maybe for other people, not for me. Not yet. And anything which reminds us that we are aging, that’s the stuff we make jokes about. For example, check out the birthday card aisle in your local Hallmark store. We fear becoming the stereotype we ourselves have perpetuated: irrelevant, ineffectual, nodding off at meetings. Not invited to the meeting. A self-fulfilling prophesy, we will feel irrelevant if we have helped to create a belief system which marginalizes old people.

           
It has not always been so. If we lived in a more traditional culture, birth and death would happen in our midst, and would give meaning to the rest of the life which happens in between. Old people, who had grown into their roles of midwives, shamans and healers, would be our guides and companions as we make our journey from one life to the next. Aging and death would simply be part of living.

- Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Burlington, VT 

OLD

I like the word. Old. I like it far better than “senior citizen”, which sounds polite but reeks of condescension. I could embrace “geezer” or “codger”, except that those words (along with “old fart”) seem a better fit for men.  Crone is too archetypal for every day use. Elder sounds a little stiff and sometimes it implies a comparison, unless we were to drop the “er” and revive the lovely archaic word “eld.” Meanwhile I’m just going with old, a plain word which states the truth.

It’s official now. I’m sixty five, collecting social security, and last year I ended my job working with families in the home-health field, a job which I had mostly loved for twenty three years. I left six months after the agency switched to electronic records. I simply couldn’t endure another computer training.

I suppose it’s natural that since joining the ranks of the eld, I’ve become more sensitive to  ageism. But I’m a little embarrassed to say it wasn’t until last month that I was moved to write my first letter to an editor on the subject. I was prompted by a cartoon in a local paper which normally takes pains to be politically sensitive. They would never publish anything which could be construed as homophobic, sexist, or racist. But there it was: a cartoon depicting the Vermont Citizen Legislature, a panel of six people seated at a table, three of whom were identified by little plaques that read “Retiree.” All three were nodding off or with their heads down on the table, little zzzz’s floating above their white or balding heads.

           

Recently I happened to watch an old video of Jerry Seinfeld on Broadway, filmed when he was forty-four. “I had to go to Florida,” he begins. “I didn’t like it,” he says with a bit of a sneer. “Everybody is old.” The joke is that Jerry is driving his car along the Florida highways and when he looks at the other cars there’s no one behind the wheel. All those invisible, shriveled up little geezers and crones. Creepy.

            
I realize we baby boomers can’t expect a lot of sympathy on this one. We, who once said “Don’t trust anyone over fifty” will forever have to chew on those words while we eat crow. But the pervasiveness of ageism in our culture is worth looking at. So Jerry Seinfeld, now that you’re nearly sixty, would you still tell that joke? And can you tell us what you’re scared of? I suspect if you are someone who makes your living by keeping your finger on the cultural pulse of America you would find a lot to make you nervous. 

-  Anne Damrosch is a published poet and writer living in Vermont.