Elsie

“Faithfully, every week, I visit Elsie, age ninety-two. We’ve been friends for thirteen years. For the first ten she was my neighbor on a street of homes built in the 1930s and 1940s and shaded by large sycamores. Then, three years ago, I left my husband behind in the gray duplex we shared, and ever since, I have driven twenty minutes from the neighboring town for our weekly evening of chatting and bad television. We have little in common: not our age or our history or our passions. So why do I go?

Not because Elsie is a lesson in how to live a long life… Elsie doesn’t eat much, but before her son hired her caretakers, she subsisted on cheap, preservative-stuffed danishes from Walmart. Before that, when she was still mobile, she’d carry a tray of home-baked cookies and cupcakes to my house in her bright-red polyester pants. In her late eighties she was hospitalized several times, and after each hospitalization a physical therapist would come to her house for three free sessions of exercises. Elsie was charmed by the earnest young therapists, but a few weeks after their last visit she’d return to her sedentary ways. She refuses my offers to drive her to the community center: most of her friends have died, and she claims not to know anyone there anymore. She can’t get up the stairs at her church, but she won’t let me take her to a stairless church just a block away. Her social circle has been reduced to her neighbors, a friend and a few relatives who occasionally call, and, most recently, the Ethiopian women who care for her four hours a day…

Not because Elsie is living history. I’m one of those rare specimens who actually enjoy other people’s home movies and slide shows of their vacations. At a party you might find me in the corner with someone’s grandparent, enraptured by their rambling stories of the olden days. But the past doesn’t much interest Elsie. When we watch television, I try to steer her toward the black-and-white movies on PBS that might remind her of her youth. She doesn’t have cable, but, of the five channels we have to choose from, she’d rather watch Dr. Phil or Entertainment Tonight or any sitcom with a laugh track. Only through years of listening carefully and catching the rare dropped detail can I begin to glimpse where Elsie sits in the flow of American cultural history. She was born on a farm in Missouri, the seventh of thirteen siblings. Her father was jovial and liked to play the piano, but, with so many offspring, he was benignly neglectful. She attended school in a one-room schoolhouse and adored her teacher…

Not because Elsie will give me her story. Elsie collects teacups, which she keeps in a glass cabinet in her dining room. Her neighbor Iris collects pink furniture and mouse, frog, and elephant figurines. I collect personal stories. My bookshelves are overflowing with memoirs and hundreds of my own journals. When I meet new people, I search for their central defining narrative: a life-transforming event; a driving passion; a trauma; a rope-tight tie to a person, place, or idea; a vocation; a hope or a terrible fear — whatever it is that pulses within them and forms their life into its particular shape… When Elsie’s husband, Ted, was sixty, he died of a heart attack. She had always baked him the pies he loved, so when she learned what contributes to heart disease, she blamed herself. Not long after his passing, her daughter, only forty, died of lung cancer. Three years ago her granddaughter, who had two children and was mentally ill, died from an overdose of prescription medications. Just this year Elsie’s sister — her favorite sibling and the last one living — died. We were watching Dr. Phil as he harangued some bad husbands. Suddenly Elsie turned to me and said, “Ted never told me he loved me.” I had never before heard her say anything disparaging about her husband. “That must have been painful, Elsie.”“And he slept with my sister. The alcoholic one.” There was a sharp, uncharacteristic hurt in her voice. I was stunned, this news having burst forth so unexpectedly. I sat in the sadness with her, not knowing what else to say. “That must have made you feel so sad.” “It did.”

Not because visiting Elsie is a habit. Over the years there is much I have done from habit or duty, but, since the death of my parents and my divorce, I’m apt to hold every object and activity to the light and examine it for its usefulness. I’ve donated dozens of overstuffed boxes to Goodwill, resigned from committees, and withdrawn from cluttering relationships. Nothing stays in my life unless it’s essential. So Elsie must be essential.

Not because Elsie is my ideal grandmother... Elsie resembles neither my fantasy nor my actual family. But perhaps Elsie and I are becoming family. (I’m reminded of the Oscar Wilde line: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” I know the deaths of my parents are not my fault, yet I can’t help but feel there is something flawed about me to have lost so much.) Before I leave Elsie’s house each week, she kisses me on the cheek and says, “I love you like you were my own daughter.” The statement is both true and not true. Elsie didn’t raise me, and she can’t hold in her mind the details of my personal history or even my daily life, but the affection that rises in her is real, as is my affection for her. We try to name it, and “family” is as close as we can come.

Not because Elsie is my community-service project. I send monthly donations to charitable organizations, participate in events for my friends’ causes, and assure myself that teaching, with all its unpaid hours, is community service. Still I feel guilty that I don’t do more. My friends are reliably impressed that I visit Elsie. “Your former neighbor? You visit her every week?” they ask, as if this were a charitable act. But I know it’s not… In college I read a line in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” This turned my sense of service on its head. This I know: if I visit Elsie only because I pity her or feel obligated to her, I will be of no service at all.

Not to earn karma points. In the years of Elsie’s mysterious and debilitating health issues, when I was still her neighbor, the hospital would often release her before she was well enough to fully function on her own. I’d spend the night on an air mattress in her hallway so I could help her to the bathroom. Neighbors did her shopping. My husband assisted with her bills. Watching Elsie, I began to fear disability in my own old age. I have no children. My retirement accounts are modest. Although I have a new love, I have no guarantee of a partner at the end of my life. Once, after a torrent of panic, I comforted myself by thinking that maybe by visiting Elsie I was depositing end-of-life-care points in a karmic account. But as quickly as the thought came, I dismissed it… The minute I serve Elsie for my own future good, I am no longer serving Elsie.

Not because Elsie is a guru. My friend and fellow English teacher Marc asked me why I visit Elsie. “She’s wise?” he guessed. “She gives you good advice?” I remembered Elsie’s most recent complaint: “There are too many black people on TV.” (She had originally called Barack Obama “that black guy,” and then, because she couldn’t remember his name, “Boo-Boo.” And then she voted for him.) “No,” I said. “Not really.” Marc asked me a few more questions, and I answered awkwardly and vaguely. Marc finally concluded, “It’s a rest for you, being with her.” In a sense he’s right. My schedule is full, and I compulsively try to improve myself by setting goals, eating right, exercising, and using every moment productively. My visits with Elsie, however, are a pause, existing in a slower time zone.

Elsie reminds me to be in the present moment. Like a Zen nun, she doesn’t mull over the past or plan for the future. She doesn’t define herself by her education, achievements, connections, or possessions. Her attention to the present doesn’t come by philosophical training. Her now-ness arises from a combination of her upbringing, her native personality, and the demands of her age. Due to her physical limitations and failing memory, she can’t impose her will on the future, fulfill new ambitions, or heal the past by ruminating on it. This isn’t mysticism; it’s being ninety-two.

But being with Elsie is not always restful. Some days she’s exhausted, and the contagious weariness soaks into my bones. On her more muddled days conversation is a struggle for us both. She’ll ask the same question over and over, and I’ll have to decide which details to repeat while trying to keep my tone fresh. I’ve learned the hard way that I must be careful about what I tell Elsie: disturbing stories can get stuck in loops in her mind. Several years ago she heard on the news that a student on her way home from my school had been kidnapped, raped, and beaten before escaping from the back of the car several towns away. I was still raw with my own grief when Elsie asked me about it, and I admitted the girl was a student of mine. Every week for the next six months Elsie asked me, “How’s that girl?” always remembering the attack but never my updates about the student’s steady recovery, the money the PTA had collected for her, or how she’d started taking classes at a community college.

I now monitor what I say to Elsie. I try not to infantilize her — I want our friendship to be based on honesty — yet I don’t want her thoughts to be constantly revisiting some instance of suffering that she has no power to ease. So, for the most part, I don’t ask her to carry my sorrows with me. We generally keep to small talk, and then we watch TV turned up to a mind-rattling volume. Sometimes we eat cookies or dessert breads. During the commercials we turn toward each other and smile or laugh about nothing, or Elsie tells me proudly, “When I was a girl, my family put me in charge of making the ice cream.” And it is a break, really, to sit next to each other yelling out the answers to Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and admiring the routines on So You Think You Can Dance.

Not because Elsie teaches me how to face death. Before I met Elsie, I knew little of what it meant to grow old. All my grandparents died far from me, before I saw significant signs of deterioration. My father, who lived in Canada, died seven years after his diagnosis and, in his stubborn solitude, hid his suffering, kept his end-of-life thoughts to himself, and allowed no one to care for him until the last possible moment. I hadn’t known my mother was ill until she asked my sister and me to visit, just a week before her death. Her bones showed through her skin, and all the expressions I’d ever known her to make flitted over that emaciated, hollow face. And then she was gone…

I want to know what it’s like at the end of a life, when you measure your future not in decades but in years or months. But what I’ve learned from Elsie is that, for the most part, her thoughts do exactly what mine do: buzz around in their orbit of habitual, day-to-day concerns. She worries about her neighbor’s chemotherapy. She complains that her Ethiopian in-home aides can’t cook American food well. She wants a new armchair with a hydraulic lift, because pulling herself up to her walker has become an ordeal. If she had the money, she’d replace the mint-colored carpet she’s had since the 1960s. Look at Iris out there, going for her daily walk even though her legs have been hurting. And have I seen how tall Sam down the street is getting? He’s going to high school next year.

We do not speak of death. In the hospital with a serious illness, Elsie, in that frail, small body of hers, will fight vigorously for her life. But later, when she gets a touch of the flu, she will wail, “Why won’t God take me?” Usually her fears settle not on her own death, but on being forced to leave her home. “They’ll have to take me out of here feet first,” she says.  Her mobility has decreased, but her health has steadied, with no more falls nor mysterious pains that warrant a trip to the hospital. She seems content. Another of my elderly friends, a therapist who knew she was dying, read books on dying well, met with her clients until her last months, and invited everyone she loved for quiet visits at her bedside, which she had surrounded with flowers. She designed her own memorial service with her favorite Christian, Buddhist, and Sufi prayers and music by Bach. Perhaps we all die just as we live: gracefully, awkwardly, in wisdom, and in ignorance. Perhaps Elsie holds no secrets about how to face my own end.

But I do feel differently now about the elderly. If you look hard enough, underneath the wrinkles you can see the faces of all their other ages, held in place by the shape of bone. I remember my grandmother once checking her lipstick in the rearview mirror and saying, “That face never ceases to surprise me. I’m always the same age inside.” Elsie laughs so easily, she makes the aging of her body seem like a joke. She seems astounded sometimes as she says, “I’m an old lady.” Then she cackles as if she were only wearing a costume. I used to say, watching two elderly women crossing the street in flowered hats, holding each other’s arms, “Look at those cute old ladies.” I didn’t mind the stereotypes that pepper movies and television shows. Now old people are no longer cute or mean or silly or wise to me. They are people, in all their broken fullness. Despite the glitches in faculties and functioning, anyone who’s lived that long has learned something the rest of us don’t know.

When Elsie was in the hospital with her joints aching, her nose bleeding, and bile in her mouth, the physicians took an MRI and looped a miniature camera through her body. A young doctor with a clipboard finally diagnosed her, in a flat, dismissive voice, as “just old.” She was sent to a convalescent home, where she was expected to die. I wanted to scream at her doctors, “What if she were your grandmother?” and, “Someday you’ll be her age!” Eventually, through the care of wiser doctors and the enigmatic process of healing, she became well enough to leave her hospital bed and return home for another five years.

Maybe simply because she is there. I heard an interview on the radio once with a professor who had a proximity theory of romantic love. According to his studies, the most common cause of romantic love is proximity. You fall in love with those nearby: At your workplace, your gym, your antique-car club, or your monthly trip to the opera. In your neighborhood.

Maybe because, in each other’s presence, we can feel. About four months ago Elsie told me she’s been crying often. This is new — she has never been a crier — and it worries her. She cried when her neighbor’s old black cat died. He was a curmudgeonly creature, slinking through her backyard, hiding behind the tomatoes, pouncing on the songbirds, marking his territory on fences and flowerpots. He’d never even let her pet him. But he’d been a regular visitor for fifteen years. I figure she’s grieving not only for that reliable life now gone but also for the cat’s human, who is struggling through cancer. Elsie told me she also cried when she watched a news report about a firefighter who’d died in a massive blaze. She wept during images of the memorial service, when the father was handed his son’s helmet. Baffled by her response, she told me, “I don’t even know them.” Only later did I remember that she, too, is a parent who has lost an adult child. To me it seems fitting, not a medical problem, for a woman of ninety-two to look back on what has been beautiful, exquisite, or unfulfilled and cry for all her accumulated triumphs and losses; to look forward and see that the rest of her life will be, at most, a few years, and cry, because preparing to die is a fear and a relief and a great sadness and maybe the hardest thing she’ll ever have to do.

Maybe because we don’t judge each other. For many months I didn’t tell Elsie that my husband and I had separated. I parked on the street and pretended I was trotting over from my former home. It was hard enough to carry my own suffering, and I wanted to spare her: Elsie loves my ex-husband. Before he stopped visiting her, he was the man in her life. He helped her with finances, fixed her porch light, settled her fears when they arose. She loved us as a couple, and I didn’t want to take that from her nor add the burden of her distress to my own. But Elsie already knew. My husband had told her, sobbing on her front porch. She respected my silence for several weeks before finally asking where I was living. “You’re going to get back together?” she asked. I shook my head. “I just can’t stand to see a grown man cry.” I was silent. I didn’t know what was going through her head: the forces of her Christian upbringing and its view of divorce; her own faithfulness to her complicated marriage; her need for a substitute family; the puzzle of our separation, as our marriage had seemed pleasant enough? She asked, “You’re happy?” I nodded. “Good. Life is short. You should be happy.” She would repeat the question to me in the months and years to come. When I answered yes, she would smile widely, flashing those small teeth of hers…

Because I want to know what it means to be faithful over a few things. Sometimes, when I am getting ready to visit Elsie and my night is busy and my house is dirty and I’m low on sleep, I hear in my head a passage from the Bible: “Thou hast been faithful over a few things.” This settles any complaints I may have and urges me, against all argument, to go to Elsie. The passage continues: “I will make you ruler over many.” My visits to Elsie are marked by devotion, but I’m uncertain how this might make me a ruler over something bigger. I do understand this: if I visit Elsie primarily for my own gain, our relationship will suffer, just as it will if I visit her only for her sake and sacrifice too much of myself. Faithfulness, in my new, slow beginning, must begin with faithfulness to myself.

Because she lets me do right by her. The first time Elsie was hospitalized, she fretted over how long her fingernails and toenails were growing. She wouldn’t let my husband or the nurses touch her but allowed me to hold her narrow feet. While I clipped and filed her nails, I felt a thread of connection to women all over the world, throughout time, who had cared for other women. In the past few months Elsie has needed my help getting into bed. She scoots her walker to her bedside and eases herself onto her too-tall, too-squishy mattress. I gently lift her legs and put them under the covers. Then I adjust her nightgown. With her head nestled on her pillow, her hair a light cloud, she laughs like a little girl. Each time we do this could be the last. I am going to lose Elsie, and I sit with her anyway. Only recently has Elsie begun to give off the smell of a live body decaying, and when I lean over her, I feel a physical urge to turn away. But I don’t. I reach down and press my lips to her cheek, and she kisses me back.”

~ Tarn Wilson’s commentaries have aired on public radio, and her writing has appeared in Gulf Stream and Inertia. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and can often be found on the trails of the Santa Cruz Mountains, diligently identifying flora and fauna with the help of a guidebook and then promptly forgetting them.

~ Elsie, who voluntarily gave up driving several years ago, stays busy doing needlework and working jigsaw puzzles.