“Eleven years ago, I wasn’t as old as I am now—which is a funny thing!” Virginia Mitchell tells me.
She’s dressed as if she picked her clothes using yellow Benjamin Moore paint samples: bright canary shirt, mustard pants, daffodil leather shoes. Last week’s theme was purple, topped off with a violet scarf; another time it was green, accented with a chartreuse ascot.
Marianna Crane ~
As I sit in the exam room waiting for my first patient of the afternoon, the phone rings. It rings four more times before I realize that Amanda Ringwald, our eighty-year-old receptionist, hasn’t come back from taking a rare lunch break.
I pick up the phone and say, “VA Hospital. Marianna Crane.” Oops, I’m not back at the VA anymore. “Senior Clinic,” I quickly add.
“Hello, my friend.”
The familiar voice makes my throat tighten and my eyes water. How in God’s name did he track me down at work?
“Mr. Foley. How are you?”
Lou arrived alone when she’d come for her blood pressure and itchy skin. Sharp, funny, she told me of her daughters, grown up and far away, and her life in the neighborhood as it changed around her. She had lived there for decades, long after her husband left, long after raising two on her own, long after the cottages around her were torn down for industrial sites. Neighbors were scarce and stray dogs plenty.
When her daughter arrived with her, I knew something had changed. Having driven sixty miles to bring her, Lou’s daughter was here to report on the increasing forgetfulness, the neglect of her garden. She was worried her mother was developing dementia and wanted her to move closer, where she could keep
Ruth Harimoto
I have lived in Japan for more than half of my life. I first came here as a nine-year-old child, the daughter of a missionary. Later, after several years of study and work in the US, I returned as an adult with my Japanese husband. You’d think that after more than thirty years here, I could almost call myself Japanese! But no. In this homogeneous country, I’m still a foreigner.
The role of a foreigner in Japan is, for the most part, a comfortable one. Japanese people are polite. They don’t expect foreigners to know Japanese, so when I do speak it (with my learned-as-a-child accent), I’m applauded and praised. This role can also be lonely, though.
As I go about
Just a shadow over two years ago, my parents’ lives shattered when old age carried deep illness into their home and broke everything into shards. Those shards will be with us forever. They will, I fear, be visited upon seven upon seven generations of sons and daughters and nurses and doctors and therapists and priests and aides and friends, seven generations to come.
The miracle is that we are still here, two years plus a shadow on from that nightmare time.
Alexandra Godfrey
My dad was once a physician for the coal mines in Yorkshire, England, where I grew up. It’s been decades since I accompanied him on his rounds, and fifteen years since I moved to the States and began to practice as a physician assistant in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. But I still vividly recall my childhood days and the Yorkshire dialect we spoke.
Somehow, the seventy-three-year-old woman sitting in my exam room takes me back to that time.
She’s coughing violently–hacking thick yellow mucous into her tissue, spraying the floor with spittle–just as my father’s patients did.
Hanan Rimawi
Ms. Connie was known, to her delight, as the Jackie Kennedy of Our Sanctuary nursing home. A tall, eighty-something woman who tucked splashy flowers into her voluminous curls, she’d strike up a conversation with anyone she encountered.
These chats were never a half-hearted “How are you?” tossed off before zipping away in her wheelchair. She’d ask an aide if her ailing daughter was feeling better, or check whether the receptionist’s son had heard from his dream college–“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for him!”
Ms. Connie shared a suite with Ms. Alice, a woman who was in her nineties. Ms. Alice was more reserved, but equally good-natured. Morning and evening, you’d find her sitting in her room, absorbed in a book.
A woman I volunteered with and hold most dear had a twin sister. Recently, during one of our sessions, I found out that her sister was headed for hospice; the next day, she began the active stages of dying.
Lisa Walker
My brother-in-law, Ron, was a curmudgeon; grumpy, sullen, even downright mean at times.
By blood, he and my husband Bill were cousins. In the 1950s, when Bill was just a child, his mother died unexpectedly, and Ron’s mother took Bill in to live with her and her four children. They were an African-American family living in the midst of a middle-class, predominantly white Connecticut township. Their home, located on a wealthy family’s farmland, had one bedroom, wood heat and no running water. Each day, Ron’s mother walked five miles to and from town, where she did laundry and cleaned houses to support the family.
Bill and Ron were close in age; they considered each other brothers. I met Bill when
I quickly skimmed through the rest of his chart. Mr. Lopes was an elderly Haitian man, a recent immigrant, who had visited the local emergency room for a bad headache, only to discover that his blood pressure was astronomical. Apparently, Mr. Lopes and his family considered him too sturdy a man to be retained at the hospital overnight, labeled as sick. So he fled.
And here he was, weeks later, to meet his new doctor. “BP: 190/100” read the nurse’s note in red.
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