Growing Old and a Defense of the Midwest

There are loads of things to write about, so why haven’t I written about any of them? The only thing I’ve felt like blogging about lately has been my search for loafers. LOAFERS.*



A giant lilac bush.



What I should be writing about is my recent visit to the Midwest. My father and I went for a week and a half to see my grandmother and to visit a bunch of my college buddies. I love the Midwest. I get angry at people who badmouth it or refer to the center of the country as “the fly-over states.”  I come from the most beautiful place on earth (Juneau, Alaska) and I find tons of gorgeous landscapes in the Midwest: lush, green rolling farm lands dotted with big old barns and silos; the red and orange limestone cuts you drive down through to cross over the Mississippi, the river wide and ranging; the broad expanse of the Great Lakes, inland seas; the small ponds and forests full of giant, sweet-smelling lilac bushes and silvery birch, echoing with the sound of frog trills; the small run-down towns with old store fronts, faded art-deco facades and peeling 50s billboards.

But of course, we didn’t visit to sight-see, we were there to visit people, most importantly, my grandmother.

Next month she’ll be 94. She lives in the Northfield Retirement Center in Northfield, Minnesota, a facility in which she’s lived for the last eight years or so. It’s the kind of place where you can start out independent in a little apartment, and then as your health fails they have increasingly intense assisted living sections. The people there are extremely friendly and many of the workers have been there since the day my grandparents moved in.

Grandma is currently in the nursing home section and has been there for a year and a half. A year ago my grandfather died, leaving her the last living member of her generation in her family. She told me then that she was ready to go. And yet she’s lived another year. This visit was a hard visit. She’s no longer able to move without assistance and spends her days napping or sitting in her wheelchair in front of the large television with the other residents.

Her Alzheimer’s has progressed significantly in that she seems to get lost in her sentences and can no longer draw up memories from the past when questioned. I still want to know her, know about her life, but discovered that, unlike in past visits, when I question her now her only answers are “I don’t know” and “I can’t remember”. It was frustrating for both of us. I didn’t want to make her feel bad because she couldn’t answer my questions and I didn’t know how to talk with her without asking questions. It took several days for us to figure out how to communicate in a way that felt like it worked for everyone. My father and I would sit with her, discussing whatever topic came to mind, and here and there she might chime in. Mostly we would pause to check in with her, make sure she was still happy listening or find out if she was tired and wanted a nap.

A year ago, after my grandfather’s funeral, I spent some alone time with my grandmother. Her mind was slipping, but she was still there. We had a very personal discussion and I came away upset, a total wreck even. But on this year’s visit, I wasn’t sad, I wasn’t upset, I was accepting. I think part of the reason I got so upset a year ago was because I could tell then that she was leaving us.

I love her dearly, but I don’t want to grow old like my grandmother. Her departure is long, slow, and drawn-out. She’s had, from what I can tell, a long loving life, but the way it is ending makes me afraid to grow old.



*Why has the world switched over to ballet flats? Loafers are the greatest shoe of all time: they slip on, you can wear them with or without socks, and they’re both casual and work appropriate. I’ve been searching for a new pair of cute, inexpensive loafers for about six months now and am starting to get pissed.

Little Bodies

We lived in a one story squared off 60s style house with orange and brown scroll-patterned linoleum in the kitchen and orange and yellow shag carpeting in the rest of the house. By the time I have any memory of the house the shag carpeting was only left in one small closet, the rest replaced by a short blue sea. The linoleum, however, stayed for as long as we did.

Both the dining area and the TV room had large, floor to ceiling picture windows, walls that no bird ever saw. Every time a bird hit, we’d rush outside to see if it had survived. It was a clear sign that spring had arrived whenever we started finding a larger number of robins, rather than chickadees, lying stunned and prone in the flower beds. If the birds were alive we would pick them up carefully, tucking their scratchy little feet between our hands and then holding them up, like we were cupping water to drink. The birds’ quick hearts fluttered, their small dark eyes darting back and forth, the birds were so soft and fragile, like precious babies. We were big and clumsy and could hurt them, so we had to be extra careful to be nice, to hold them for only a few moments, to pet them softly, and ultimately to set them carefully in the hedge so that when the bird was ready, it would fly away on its own.

Rufous feeding

If the bird was dead, then it belonged to my father. We held no birdie burials at my house. Instead, dad would go back in and get a sandwich bag, wrap the bird up in its clear shroud, and deliver it to our birdie morgue: the freezer. There was nothing strange to us about the fact that there was a little pile of bird corpses in between the Eggos box and the ice trays. After my first year of college I was speaking to a friend about our college entrance essays, she had written hers about how her father stored birds in their freezer. Her father was also a biologist. Clearly though, she had been much more aware of herself than I had, because it wasn’t until she told me about her essay that I realized that maybe people would view that as strange behavior.

Not too long ago I dropped by my parents house after work.

“If you’re getting a glass of wine will you get me one? It’s in the freezer,” my mom asked.  Next to the bottle of chardonnay, was a little body bag.

“Did you guys have a bird hit the window?”

“It’s one of the humming birds!” my dad said, “do you want to see it?”

“Sure.”

In their new house they also have picture windows, but these are on a second story, so the only birds that come close are those drawn in by my father’s hummingbird feeders.

“I feel a little guilty,” he said.

It was beautiful, but strange to see a hummingbird so still. My father was particularly excited that its tongue was extended out of its bill, like a stamen left after the flower petals had been stripped away. He explained to me about the coloring of the males versus the females, that this was a male.

As they feed from his feeder, they flash in the sun like gaudy living gems. Now on the dining room table it was like seeing the gimmick behind a magic trick.