We live in a mixed community. I think we are the oldest couple in the area. We did not want to go to an older adult-type of setting. This community is bad enough with its HOA. On one side we have a young couple with a baby. They come to our house with their baby to enjoy dinner. Relaxing in our family room allows the baby to move around and her coming to me to sit in my lap . . . “up, up in her limited English.” So up she comes to my lap. She does such because her real grandfather held her for periods at a time. So she sees myself as similar. On the other side are two young women living together in their home. They laugh when they see me in my PJs with my messed up hair, taking the garbage out to the front to be picked up later in the
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We live in a mixed community. I think we are the oldest couple in the area. We did not want to go to an older adult-type of setting. This community is bad enough with its HOA.
On one side we have a young couple with a baby. They come to our house with their baby to enjoy dinner. Relaxing in our family room allows the baby to move around and her coming to me to sit in my lap . . . “up, up in her limited English.” So up she comes to my lap. She does such because her real grandfather held her for periods at a time. So she sees myself as similar.
On the other side are two young women living together in their home. They laugh when they see me in my PJs with my messed up hair, taking the garbage out to the front to be picked up later in the morning. I looked at them and ask “What?” They joined us along with the young couple and my Mexican neighbors from across the street Halloween evening outside for a beer and left over candy.
We were adopted by the Mexican family who live across the street from us. We became the pseudo grandparents. Their five children look to us and I discuss school and how to prepare for the future as adults. Adolpho (father) sprays for weeds and trims the bushes for us. He refuses to be paid. The mom is losing her eyesight due to cataracts. I talked to our Eye doctors looking for a solution. I believe we can help pay for the surgery. How is $12,000 sound to you if you have no insurance? We won’t pay such either. There are other ways we are exploring.
We did find a solution and hopefully it pans out. For now, we are quiet until we know for sure. She will have to go to Sonora for the surgery. The US surgeon does surgery there for free. I will donate money to the effort.
When Adolpho became a citizen, I was invited to it. I went to the ceremony as a proud neighbor and XMilitary. He is a friend. I tolerate the help even though I can still do it. It is boring for me not to be active. Even so, I hope we can help.
Someone Has to Be Around to Put Out the Lights,
by Joel Yager
Jama Network,
At 90 years of age, my father had a strong sense of purpose. He was living independently in a large retirement condominium community in Southern Florida with his wife of almost 10 years, Tess, whom he married a year after my mother died.
Over the previous few years, throughout his late 80s, each time we spoke, which was usually at least once or twice a week, my father would tell us about 1 or 2 friends or neighbors who had become so cognitively impaired that they had to be moved from their condominiums to nursing homes, who were dying, or who had died. Over the years, most of their good friends and acquaintances disappeared, predeceasing them or declining from dementia. My father and Tess found their friendship circle to be constantly shrinking, leaving them with fewer and fewer companions with whom to socialize.
It was around this time that my father revamped his purpose in life. Instead of being immersed in the typical diversions of southern Florida retirement, he began to focus on helping those remaining individuals and their families “tie things up,” usually in some small fashion. He guided them to local resources, helped them clean out their rooms and closets, visited the sick and dying, and dropped in on them in their new facilities, at least until these individuals could not recognize him. He also assisted families, most of whom did not live nearby, with funeral arrangements and planning remembrances.
In his words, “Someone has to be around to put out the lights.”
Now in our 80s, my wife Eileen and I, a retired pediatrician and retired psychiatrist, respectively, are starting to experience the same types of occurrences among our own relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Each month, we learn about someone close to us who has died or who is grappling with significant physical decline in the grips of a fatal illness. They are struggling with progressive Parkinson disease, heart failure, chronic lung disease, debilitating arthritis, metastatic cancers, dementia, and a slew of other maladies.
In fact, we are constantly interacting with an assortment of individuals who are “losing it”—becoming progressively forgetful, less capable of driving, and gradually unable to manage their daily affairs. Their children, if they are lucky enough to have children who are involved, are becoming increasingly worried about their parents living alone and are arranging for them to move to safer environments, usually assisted living facilities or in some instances directly to memory care units, with or without their parents’ consent.
Consequently, Eileen and I increasingly find ourselves in situations like the ones my father faced a generation ago. This life cycle stage seems inevitable, but it’s certainly not one we thought about much in advance. Although we empathized with my father and Tess when they encountered and confronted these situations in their time, we never envisioned that we would have to contend with them ourselves. Not that we were immune, but we simply avoided or ignored these psychosocially significant inevitabilities, as we tend to do with other issues concerning end-of-life matters.1
Inevitable, that is, if you live long enough. The only way to avoid these situations, it seems, is by dying first or by developing dementia first so that you really don’t know what’s going on around you. The (usually) more desirable path of outliving and “outhealthing” your compadres requires that you witness and accompany others who are close to you as they decline, suffer, fade, and die. You are destined to experience loss, some degrees of grief, and the contraction of your previous social circle. In the past few years, we have attended numerous funerals, more so thanks to YouTube and Zoom.
What else can you do? Eileen and I, thankfully still cognitively intact, have elected to follow my father’s example. Each morning, as we invoke the mantra of;
“May I be allowed to be of service?”
We are amazed at how often we are called upon by our contemporaries—relatives, friends, and acquaintances—to assist, in both big and small ways. Often, we find ourselves sought out by those in distress for advice, guidance, and referrals. Sometimes they simply need us to witness their agonized suffering, to hear them out, when we both know that we can do little to meaningfully alter their difficult situations. Not infrequently, we are contacted by their children, siblings, or other involved persons for our opinions and assistance.
We do what we can, and usually then initiate follow-ups, contacting those experiencing downturns and their families to let them know that we are thinking about them, to see if we can continue to help in any practical way. Phone contacts are increasingly supplemented by texts, Zoom, and FaceTime sessions.
Although we finish some days emotionally drained, we are always grateful for the opportunities to be of assistance. We also hope that if and when we ourselves decline to the point of becoming unable to function independently, and/or when we die, that others will be around to help us and our families with both the emotional and practical aspects of fading lives, dying, and death.
After all, someone has to be around to put out the lights.