Nursing Home Tales September 2009

I visited my old ladies this morning and they were in rare form. Some days they are all sleeping, but today everyone wanted to chat. Food is a favorite topic, as are family structure, the heat, and how demented the other patients are. I try not to laugh, but sometimes it's hard to keep a straight face when Cecilia tells me her daughter is still a little girl (at 63?) and then Bertha asks where her husband went this morning (he's been dead for 2 years) and Cecilia comments, "She's crazy!". Ceci is an enigma to me. She is a beautiful 80-ish woman; still agile and ambulatory, but swaddled in the ubiquitous Pampers they all wear. She is always quite eager for my attention until she tires, when she abruptly tells me to "go with God" (like a friendly way of saying "go to hell"?). I always start with and end with Ceci because she retains enough of the social graces to enjoy the hello and good-bye rituals. She never seems unhappy, or particularly happy, but she is remarkably uncomplaining. Ever since they moved the home to this new location three months ago she says that her daughter, Nelli, the retired professor, hasn't been heard from and doesn't know where her mother is... I tell her that I would be glad to pick Nelli up and bring her over, but this never goes anywhere. I ask if her other daughter, Isolde, knows where Nelli is. This always triggers a story about a recent (10 days ago? 10 years ago?) trip with Isolde where they saw huge skyscrapers and gardens... She enjoyed the outing, which I hope was real. I often wonder if I could take her out away from the hogar for an afternoon, but I don't know what problems might arise that my limited Spanish would make difficult to resolve.

Bertha is the only resident whom I find repulsive. Conversational, ambulatory, and sociable, she is somehow more off-putting than poor Melinda, a skeleton of a woman who cannot control her spastic limbs, cannot speak, and must be fed, diapered, and lifted from chair to bed and back again. I sit down with Melinda each time I visit, hold her hand, and say (in English, her native language), "My name is Anne. I come to visit because I love to hear the stories of older people. I wish you could tell me your stories. You are a professor, no? And so you must have many stories about your students and your work." Sometimes she barely responds, but more often than not she sways her head wildly, staring at me and making guttural noises in her throat. The nurse tells me she can hear and understand me, but I don't know how she knows. Melinda has no muscle tissue left at all in her arms and legs, not having used them for over five years, and I could put my two hands around her ribcage. In the U.S. she would receive physical therapy, but here there is none in this private domiciliary care institution. She is very tall for a Panamanian and has a beautiful face, if not for the haunted eyes. The aides tell me she has a good appetite, so perhaps one could assume she wants to continue living, although it's hard to know what is instinct and what is volition. I cannot imagine persisting in her state for such a long time. I try not to project onto her what I imagine I would feel.

Bertha is a formerly plump woman of about 80 who is the proverbial busybody. She appears at one's elbow within minutes of arriving, looking for her husband, demanding conversation or sweets, and complaining that her tongue hurts. She leers at people and says critical things, making the other old ladies alternately laugh or yell at her. She stands by Melinda's bed and says, "Close your mouth! Don't leave your mouth open!" I explain to her quietly that Melinda can't close her mouth and she interrupts me to comment on my gringa blond hair and blue-green eyes. I laugh and agree that I am a gringa, and she says her daughter married a gringo and lives in the U.S. I ask her if she has visited her daughter there and she says she wants sweets. I ask if she is hungry and she says she can't find Alfredo. I don't know if people ever remind her that her husband, Alfredo, died two years ago, but it seems unnecessarily cruel, so I ask if she wants to take a walk with me. We do circles around the downstairs for awhile, steering her gently away from people when she is about to accost them with a nasty remark. I wonder whether this personality is consistent with her youthful self. If so, no wonder Alfredo gave it up and died!

Victoria is a luminous personality, always laughing and kissing my hands when I sit down on her bed. She is extremely bright and alert, but unable to walk and seems content to be utterly sedentary. Whenever I start a conversation, she is right there with me, on topic, asking how my mother is, my children, my house. She loves to talk about food and cooking, and about the jungles of Puerto Pina in the Darien where she grew up. She laughs delightedly at things I say, and compliments my Spanish. I have had to work hard to understand her speech, which is either an eastern Panama dialect or rendered blurry by her malformed palate and teeth. She speaks in a singsong tone which reminds me of the way another man spoke whom we had met from the Darien. Vicky has a daughter and son in Panama, and a daughter in the U.S. who teaches kindergarten in Virginia. Today, when I asked about her teacher-daughter, she exclaimed delightedly that she had talked with her on the telephone over the weekend! Vicky is the only one of my ladies who is consistently oriented in space and time, so I am pretty sure this happened. I asked her about her husband, but she says she was not married, but _____ (some other word). Common law?

Lucia reminds me of my mom. She is proud and dignified, kind when approached kindly, and quick to bristle when treated demeaningly (as the nurses' aides sometimes do). Her cap of beautiful white hair frames a face so wrinkled one can see the toll of years of sun exposure. She cannot walk, and sleeps much of the time, but when I get her started telling stories, she will go on until we are interrupted by lunch or by Bertha or Cecilia. She has told me about her childhood in Chiriqui, the mountains of western Panama, where she lived too far away to go to school. Her mother was fair-skinned (Italian?) and her father an "indio"; but her father died when Lucia was 2 months old, so she and her brothers were raised by her hard-working mother, who worked on a coffee plantation. Lucia, in turn, had three children, none of whom are still living. At least I think that's what she said... It's the kind of thing one doesn't want to make someone repeat. She has told me about bouts of malaria, and dengue fever, and the hardships of her working life as a school custodian and then a maid for a North American family in the Canal Zone. She shakes her head and says, "It was hard. So hard." I tell her she has earned a rest. She smiles and says she is content to rest now. I wonder if she has a single living relative...

More about my Lucia

Lucia grabs my hands as I kiss her in greeting and sit down on the edge of her bed. "Hello, my love", she says, "how are you?" We chat about the pros and cons of midday naps (it is 10:15 in the morning and everyone is lying on their beds); about Panamanian coffee and how it is grown, harvested, and dried; about planting seeds for fruit trees. I get up suddenly to assist Ana, who is about to take an unauthorized walk (Ceci always sounds the alert when one of the precarious ones makes a move) and Lucia, awake now and interested in the goings-on, swings her legs to the floor and sits up. When I return to her, she is brushing her hair. She asks how my mother is and asks me to remind her again where my mother lives? She acknowledges me with such warmth when I come, in contrast to the way she snaps at some of the aides, tht I feel sure she knows me. Still, for the umpteenth time, she asks "Do you have children?" I smile proudly - proud of my children, of course, but even more in this instance of my now-fluent oft-repeated response to this question. "Yes, I have three children; two boys and a girl. The oldest is a young man who is 28, lives in New York City, and works with computers. My daughter is 25, also lives in New York, and is a violist. My younger son is 23 and lives in Moscow, Russia, where he is a journalist." Lucia quickly rejoins, "Moscow! How far away!" An aide walks through the room, calling to a woman on a far bed to wake her for lunch. Lucia watches the brief, familiar scene of an aide cajoling one of her compadres to get up. She turns back to look at me, her eyes widening as she formulates her question.

"Do you have children?" she asks.

Sometimes when I tell people about my "teachers" at the old folks home, I laugh as I point out what ideal Spanish teachers they make because they forget what I tell them and, in asking me the same questions again, provide ideal conversation drills. Today, though, my eyes well up as I look at this beautiful old woman, her wrinkled face drawn in pain (her knees are hurting today) and wonder if she can feel any of the connection to me that I feel to her. I don't think she has any family left in the world who are still connected to her and, if I understood her correctly in a previous conversation, none of her three children is living. She says she was never married, but the father of her children was "an indio" (an Indian). Her father died when she was 2 months old. She worked hard as a school custodian for 13 years out in the province where she was born for an unkind principal before coming to Panama City to work as a housekeeper and cook for an American woman in the Canal Zone. That relationship sounds like it had its positive points (Lucia says of her mistress, "She never called me her "employee", but always "her girl") but the condescension even in that affectionate statement makes me wince.

What has Lucia known of love?