How to senior

No one ever tells you

I just joined the board of a non-profit dedicated to meeting the needs of seniors in my county. Just a few weeks into this work, I can see the gaps many fall through as we age.

We need some manual called “How to senior”, just like we needed in the 1950’s something wise, kind and informative telling us “how to puberty.

Here’s what I knew about menstruation
when I started to bleed: Nothing.

It was 1955. I was 10. I went into what was called the “powder room” in my family’s large home - a closet on the ground floor with a toilet and tiny sink - to pee. The wall paper was floral on a dark background. There was a can of Bon Ami under the sink that I’d read again and again to entertain my mind while my body did its thing. This day, there was rust colored blood in my panties.

I went to my mother and squeaked out this news as if I’d done something wrong. She silently led me up the winding staircase to her bathroom. I still see her wide derriere ahead of me. She said, “Today you’ve become a woman” as she strapped a sanitary belt around my hips, attached a big cotton wad onto toothed clips front and back. That’s it.

Peyton Place for sex education

For the rest of woman-ing, I depended on the romance magazines my friends and I would buy at the drug store and hide under our mattress, as well as Peyton Place which I hid in my sweater drawer.

Coming of Aging could be seen as a similar mysterious life change, announced, perhaps, by a stringy neck, a thickening waist, reading glasses or forgetting a word or two. We try to hide all that, just as I tried to hide that thick pad when I changed into my gym clothes. We don’t want others to notice. We don’t want to be seen as an old person, past her prime, banished slowly to irrelevance.

When I turned 60, and an acquaintance showed me a picture of a chair bound old woman, and asked me how I would manage “old age.” That, my friends, was a vision of hell, and my inner Peter Pan stamped her foot and sang, “I won’t grow old, I don’t wanna go to assisted living…”.

Maiden, Mother, Queen and Crone

At that moment, I thankfully found an alternative to maiden, mother and crone as I was NOT ready to crone. It was maiden, mother, queen and crone! Yes, queen. In the fullness of my power, a seer, an oracle, a leader, maybe with another relationship or two in the offing.

This way, I put off “old” for two decades, and queen-ed to my hearts content.

Yet, as I approach 80, this resistance to old is now there to greet me, and ask for my embrace. Through this blog, I’ve grappled with what that entails. It’s like a reverse puberty. Your body’s changes change you.

As with menstruation, my society has not prepared me well “to senior” other than fill me with horrors of losing control of my life, successive weakening no matter what I do, the possibility of a sickness that takes me out, the possibility of institutionalization.

Who in this wide world wants that?

That’s why I joined the board of a local senior support center, to put some practical meat on the bones of my personal inquiry.

Meals on Wheels

This organization manages Meals on Wheels, a three times a week meal delivery program for shut ins. I volunteered last year to meet and greet one sort of person I might become: alone and unable to drive. I met a tiny woman in her 90s, living alone in a large house, with a watering can on her rollator to water her plants. I met another woman in her 90s, living alone in a large house, tall, regal and perfectly coifed and dressed. I met a self sufficient man in his 90s in a cabin he may have built. I met others in chairs in front of the television, or out on their porch, riotous with pots of flowers, greeting me and chatting warmly. Okay, I learned, old people are unique, whether or not they can drive or see very well.

With just a few weeks on the board, I’m fascinated and excited to learn and help. Out beyond me, a financially set white woman, there are so many vulnerable older people.

In my county, 9% of householders over 65 live alone over twice my state. Households that may use food banks/SNAP: 36%. Eight percent live below the poverty level.

Our fears:

• affordable housing

• access to medical care

• living on a fixed income

Plus, living on an island, we depend on ferries to get “over town” to specialists, and the ferry system in all of Puget Sound is stretched beyond capacity.

These aren’t anticipatory fears. These are real and present fears.

Some needs are met by churches, some by this senior service agency, some by other groups, but too many are out of mind out of sight for those of us who are still bouncing around, having fun, doing things we love, kicking ass politically.

Community

I talk about community as my bastion of support as I grow older - and older - but until this moment I haven’t considered this web of services for all of us as “my community.” My mind boggles now thinking of the many thousands of us are trying to figure out how to get to doctors, to community events, to church, to shop, to meetings and such. My mind boggles as I see not just my own unreasonable embarrassments and unwillingness to ask for help, but the many thousands of us, like the woman with flower pots or the woman watering her plants with her rollator or the woman dressed impeccably in her impeccably kept house … or me.

Older people R US

Older people are not “other people.” Older people R Us, and there’s no fairy godmother welcoming us to this phase with a pamphlet about all the services and all the challenges and how to meet them, and her fairy godmother phone number to call any time, day or night.

I could go meta and critique ageism or predatory capitalism, but I won’t. Now, I simply want to signal that I want to learn to be that fairy godmother and not just walk someone upstairs to the bathroom - like my mother did when I was 10 - to get incontinence pull-ups with nary a word about how to be a senior.

Visions of inclusive aging

My creativity has started to churn out ideas, but it’s premature. I need to get the lay of the land, and how other brilliant, creative ideas have gone bust and why, and what the gaps are and who else spends their days trying to fill them. I see that this island of aging people really can assist one another to age from birth to death. An intergenerational, mutual aid community where all needs are met, with affordable rentals for everyone who needs them, with ways to connect with others to overcome loneliness, with belonging.

If people my age are to gracefully evolve from “older to elder”, we can’t do it all by our lonesome. We need to be part of the life here, with ways to lift one another up as we are able. And we need lots of fairy godmothers who will answer their phone, 24/7.

For now, I get to hold a vision of inclusive aging, where aging is actually a graduation into the deeper mysteries of life, and older people aren’t “problems to be solved” but simply part of us, good to the very last drop (as we said in the 50s about Maxwell House coffee.)