While I sat in my wheelchair, bemoaning the utterly unimaginable mental image of myself in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, I started to befriend my ever-so-faithful caregivers—one it seemed for every single body part except my toenails! (They appeared to have stopped growing anyway!)
I began to re-envision this retirement community as collaborative: WE. Together WE could collaborate to make this mission work well for both administrative decision-makers AND for aging residents, privileged to have the resources to pay our fees, and feeling various degrees of loneliness as we slowly aged in place. My new slogan for this cooperative effort became: Make WE, not pee.
* * * *
My strategy was to make small efforts to get to know my caregivers. Who are they as people? They are more than their function here. This is who I met:
-I asked a young therapist where she was originally from. She told me she was Polish but her grandfather was born in Prussia, which was a territory not yet subdivided into different countries. No one ever told her this story. My own maternal grandfather was also born in Prussia and was Jewish. My mother never told me this story. We laughed together about family secrets. Whoever knows? Maybe we’re both Prussian!
-A young woman told me she grew up in Gloucester, Massachusetts. She remembered feeling so happy as a child riding in her father’s fishing boat returning home with a mess of stinky fish cradled in a net in her lap—the catch of the day. She felt proud to be helping. I lived in Gloucester for thirteen years and remembered the pride and the joy and livelihood of the fisherfolk—including the wafts of sea air from the harbor and the fears of families who waited for their men to return home, as I too waited eagerly for my Daddy to get home from his big city job. He advertised soups we had to love.
-I reached out to a young woman whose face crumpled into tears, and to a hard-working man himself bending into the aging slump. He thought this just happened to women. We shared laughter as I showed him my newly acquired walker.
-An Occupational Therapist shared grins of pride about her sports-loving daughters, one of whom had been a coxswain for a rowing crew. I tried that once myself, because I was the smallest and lightest girl in my class. Pride in our children counts to connect us all.
-An entertaining wheelchair driver serenaded riders strapped tightly into his transport van. I felt for a bit like Juliet on a balcony.
-A lively conversation with a caregiver about cultural differences that sometimes separated us and often seemed silly in the face of a God who created ALL of us from the same Love.
There are many more stories, all worthy of remembrance. All of them helped me feel connected to others, to my own life’s experience, and to the whole created order. It is relationships that sustain us through life, especially as we age, not just meds and therapies.
2 comments:
TO CLARIFY AND APOLOGIZE: I am healing well so far from spinal fracture in lower back. All about degenerative osteoporosis and aging. I have doc and meds and very good therapeutic care plus my wonderful husband to help me. My post sounded as if I were already confined to wheelchair for life. It's my FEAR of that that drove me to write and share my ways of coping with healing, which is certainly my goal and my HOPE. I am sorry if anyone was confused. (Aging itself can make one a little loopy.) Thanks,
Lyn
Dear Lyn, your wisdom came through these messages, and I find myself on a new spiritual plateau, thanks to your catalytic post, amidst a few recent life experiences that have been surprising. We will talk soon! So glad you are back at home with Dick.
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