Midstokke: The precious metal of the golden years

I’m not sure who invented the idea of gathering up geriatrics and sequestering them to apartment complexes with hand rails, but I am sure it is one of the great travesties of generational diaspora. Each of us seemingly set root in our current age bracket, as if it was the only one that mattered, busying ourselves with the tasks of youth, career, family making, middle age.

I don’t really know what comes after that, as I’m preoccupied with middle age. As if my “now” was all that mattered. I suspect I am not the only one who suffers this solipsistic affliction.

I got a glimpse of life after now this week as I was picking up a friend from her new digs: an assisted living home down the road. My heart broke for her as I pulled into the parking lot. How does one leave the familiarity of their own kitchen? The subtle sound of their feet on the carpet they’ve trod a path into? The unquestioned rhythm of the traffic, the mailman, the seasons? Is assisted living some purgatory in the flesh? If they serve Jell-O, you know it is.

As I walked down the halls of this place, I saw something else: a kind of front-porch welcoming at every door. There were charming signs of homemaking, decorations, notes on doors that said, “Out of Office until January 1st” and “Don’t let the cat out.” It smelled like potpourri and sounded like maybe there were cocktail parties happening behind some of those doors.

While many of these bodies are now partially titanium, I believe they are called the Golden Years for a reason. The Greeks are responsible for this term in reference to an age of abundant resources, absence of strife, and contentment.

Are old people having fun without us? Do they secretly love their retirement communities and luxury track suits and 4 p.m. dinners? Are we missing out on one of the greatest gifts the human experience has to offer (wisdom, not velour athleisure wear)? I imagine them playing Cards Against Humanity and laughing at how quaint and naive today’s youth – those under 65 – are, perhaps using their medications as poker chips.

I fear the value of wisdom and history have diminished along with the multigenerational home and family. Our busy lives do not allow us to be full-time or part-time caregivers of our parents. Or maybe our parents are intolerable, our houses too small, our geographical gap too wide. Whatever it is, I have a nagging suspicion that we are all losing something precious and temporal by a cultural shift that separates us from our elderly.

At dinner, I catch my own impatience listening to my friend eke out the details of her story, as if I can only digest accelerated TikTok snippets of life. In my bustle to find serving spoons, I miss the sweet details of her childhood. I want to write it all down, preserve it in some way because I know it matters and I know that we so often fail to ask until it is too late. And with those we love, we lose the opportunity to understand our own selves better, the ancestral weavings of our own stories.

In our search for ourselves, we are blind to the brightest lights – those who forged the path before us. They have already done youth, career, family making and middle age. Something tells me, they are troves of experience and wonder if we could make space for them in our lives. For me, that means turning down the volume, slowing that pace, asking questions, and actively listening.

I watch as these irreplaceable human beings are slowly muted by the noise of our own stories in which we have failed to include them, ever-bothered by the ceaseless demands of doing more faster. We begin speaking to them as infants (I recently learned this is called “gray-speak,” a known simplifying of our language when addressing the elderly), making too many decisions for them, mistaking their confusion in our breakneck life pace as decline.

And what if it is decline: Can we accommodate that?

It is not always possible (or safe). One of my sweetest patients suffering from dementia would eat herself sick every day because she forgot she’d already eaten a slice of pie. She’d walk past it five minutes later and think, “Ooh! Pie!” until the whole cherry goodness of her was resting in her swollen belly. The family started buying single servings. Then they took the knobs of the stove. Then they put away sharp things. It wasn’t until she wandered off the property (several times, once with a saw) that they made the tough decision for assisted living. And still, visits produced gardening tips, pie recipes, and girlhood stories of a long-forgotten time.

Bearing witness to the beauty of the final stretch of this human journey is rich with rewards for us, for our children, for society. Age is the gift. Being able to be of service to and care for these valuable members of our community is a privilege.

In a culture in which relevance seems lost with age, where geriatric medicine is replaced by pathology specialists, where resources to support those supporting our aging demographic are sparse, the casualties go unnoticed.

It’s not just the people we lose. It’s all they had to offer when we weren’t listening.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.