Okay. Go ahead. Imagine you’re gonna fix a nice meal. S’ppose, for example, you toss a lovely piece of steak on the grill. While you’re at it, toss on a handful of lovely fresh asparagus drenched in fine garlicky olive oil. Maybe place upon the plate half a gorgeous ripe avocado and a couple of sweet, scrumptious Campari tomatoes.
R-i-i-g-h-h-t…
Then consider the facts that your belly is still full from the munificent breakfast you turned out…that the bottle 0f red wine on the shelf is reserved for your son, for Christmas dinner…that any day you’d rather loaf with the dog and the birds on the side deck than bang around the kitchen…that it’s two o’clock in the afternoon: too late for lunch, too early for dinner…that there’s half a bottle of white wine, already open, in the fridge…that… Okay, that you’re too damned lazy to fix a whole meal.
…Right?
Luckily, we have the fixin’s for lunch, in the form of that refrigerated white wine. Heh heh heh… And some marvelous crunchy cheese cracker things that AJ’s serves up. They can’t be good for you. But surely they can’t be THAT bad for you, either.
Right?
Hanging out with my neighbor Marge, on the way home from a protracted doggy-walk. Her lovely husband Ward passed away, picked off by the covid virus while he was being treated for a recurrence of some old meningiomas. Just awful: they are (were) the BEST couple, mellow, kindly, friendly…the kind of people you would pay to have next door. How dare he die, dammit, and leave her here to fend for herself?
Having recovered from the extended trauma of Ward’s demise (she went back to the Midwest to be with lifelong friends, then spent some time at their cabin in the north country…now is down here updating and spiffifying the city manse), Marge has installed new cabinets in the kitchen. Very handsome! She thinks, as I do, on how to stay out of a Rabbit Warren for Old Folks.
We must plan. We must plan carefully, with foresight aplenty.
We think. We think, Marge and I do, on the circumstances of J&L’s decision (J’s, actually: L was having none of it) to move into the horrifying Beatitudes, a rabbit warren for old folks.
Marge has met Margie, the 90-something pistol who is fending off old-folks’ prison from her house up near Gangbanger’s way. She knows something about her, but nothing like as much as I do.
I relay to her the report (from the horse’s mouth) that Margie took out a home equity loan and is using it to pay underlings to come in and care for her. Basically, she’s spending as much as it would cost to move into the Prison for Old Folks, but she’s in charge. She’s in her own home, with her own stuff and her own space and her own funny little dog and her own neighbors and her own lawn dude and her own…everything else. She hires people to take care of the yard, to take care of the house, and to take care of her.
This, of course, is not cheap. Both her husband and her only offspring having predeceased her, though, she has a way to finance it: a home equity loan. She has borrowed a sh!tload of money against the vastly inflated value of her pleasant North Central-style home, and she is using it to pay for the services, in that home, that she’d get at the Beatitudes if she sold the house and forked over all the proceeds to that outfit.
I am convinced that this is possible, if you think it through NOW, before you need it and not later, as the icy fingers of Death reach out toward you.
I grow old…I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled…
Why?
Uhm…because T.S. Eliot told me so?
Ah: no. Who the hell did he think he was, anyway?
It only stands to reason:
You own assets worth something.
Some of us own assets worth a whole lot.
You know what you need.
You know what you want.
You know what you don’t want.
With those factoids in hand, it ought to be possible to anticipate a strategy for how to accommodate your future.
I hope.
Oh, Funny – I have been fascinated with your attention to aging – and I think you are darned smart to try and plan ahead. I have followed your blog for years and commented on it maybe 3 times. I have to identify myself a bit before I continue. Last year I was 86, my husband 88. We had been married almost 67 years. We were casually planning on moving in with one of our children, but, not in a hurry, enjoying going with them to explore 2 family houses. And life stepped in. I broke my arm. Covid arrived. He fell and broke his leg in several places. (You do not want to be hospitalized in the middle of a pandemic.) This year I am 87, a widow, and I live with a different family member. So, I want to tell you to speed it up. Decide what you want to do and DO it, before life moves out of your control. I know you are a good bit younger than I am, but I wish we had been decisive while we were your age and had options. I wish you well.
++
These are the precisely the things that spook me, Ellie! When you live alone…holy mackerel, what if you fall? What if you forgot to pocket your annoying cell phone that you can’t figure out how to use? And how can you cope with these eventualities BEFORE they happen?
My friend J (of the J&L couple) decided they must move into the Beatitudes after L fell for, I think, the third time. Though he’s fairly slender and not what you’d call real infirm, he’s a good 6-foot-2 (she’s tiny and slender), and when he fell on the garage floor, she couldn’t get him up! She finally managed to get a neighbor to come over and help him back on his feet! But she was unnerved.
Rightfully so, I’m afraid. What if it had been the middle of the night? What if he’d broken something? (Mercifully, he didn’t, but still…he couldn’t get to his feet on his own.) How long would it take the EMT folks to get there? These are reasonable fears, as are many similar concerns.
L did not want to leave their lovely little patio home — I mean REALLY did not want to leave. It was a traumatic move for him, psychologically. But she was genuinely afraid and — sensibly enough, I have to agree — felt they needed to be someplace where help is on call 24/7.
But heaven help us! Surely, SURELY somehow there must be SOME way to get help on call 24/7 without consigning oneself to a prison for old folks! And a prison, during the current plague, is exactly what it has proved to be. The management forbade the inmates to leave the grounds, as the epidemic spread across the land.
Yes, people are stupid. Yes, too many Americans are so undereducated they don’t understand the mechanics of contagion. Yes, most people think “it won’t happen to me.” But…but…do those facts REALLY justify incarceration? Of adult men and women? For no other reason than that they’re in their 70s, 80s, or 90s?
That’s what it is: incarceration. J had to make up a story — saying she was going to her doctor’s office — to get her hair done (she has one of those helmet-like Little Old Lady styles that have to be unwrapped, combed out, washed, dried, set, ratted up, and sprayed again once every week or ten days). J. is not a child. She understands the risk of going out in public. And she surely is old enough and responsible enough to decide for herself when to take that risk. And no, surprisingly enough she did not catch Covid at the hairdresser’s shop.
There’s gotta be a way. There simply HAS to be a way. I think Margie, who is in her 90s, is on to it, but I need to study what she does more carefully — or think it through more carefully — to figure out how to engage it here at the Funny Farm.