Geriatric Oz
My wife’s parents are 100 and 101 living in their home upstate with 24/7 care. Two members of what Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation”. Art landed in Normandy on D-6 and saw Eisenhower talking to General Marshall on the beach. Judy was a Red Cross volunteer. They met after Art got home from 4 years in Europe and got married on July 14, 1946–73 years ago.
This year Art’s medical problems went south and we woke up in a kind of geriatric Oz. Overnight we found ourselves pulled by the shirttails into running a living room medical facility held together with chewing gum and anxiety.
The next chunk of our lives is in the hands of caring overworked docs stretched beyond their bandwidths and a steady stream of home health care aides, nurses, and EMTS. An army of decent, caring, good humored folks with personal back stories that make you stop and take a deep breath.
His vision and hearing are gone. She has dementia. She whispers to him about things that aren’t happening and he can’t hear her. Then there are moments when she reaches out from her wheelchair, touches his outstretched hand at the bedside and they silently hold each other in a riveting portrait of a seven decade marriage.
One afternoon, Judy is at the side of Art’s hospital bed in the living room of their home. She won’t leave his side without his phone number so she will be able to reach him. His body is shot but his brain is sharp as a tack. Without missing a beat he repeats the phone number they have shared in that house for 54 years. Someone puts it on a slip of paper for her to hold. She calms down and grips her walker for the shuffle back to her bed. She sleeps in what used to be the den until their bedroom on the second floor became the inaccessible frontier of their ever shrinking universe.
There was the time Art needed to be hospitalized. EMTs were arriving and you could hear the diesel engine of the ambulance in the driveway. Judy needed to not be standing at his bedside but at that moment, for her it might as well have been a 1960 North Carolina luncheonette sit in and she would not be moved.
I shot a glance at the aide on the other side of the bed and said, “I guess I have to do this”. The aide nodded. I reached out and lifted her up from under her arms to place her in her wheelchair while taking a few punches in the chest.
The next day I stuck my head into her room and said, “ Good morning Judy”. She looked at me from the bed where she was waking up and silently made a cutting motion with her fingers. I wasn’t sure if that meant she was cutting me out of her life or threatening castration. The same aide was there. Her take was that it was definitely the latter and we shared a head shaking laugh. The kind of laugh I imagine triage nurses depend on to get through a Saturday night in the Emergency Department.
