Living with the Oldies
While I was visiting my mother at her retirement residence, I was able to engage in a fair bit of sociological study. I was surrounded by the elderly in varying stages of health, and since we ate our meals communally, it was a wonderful opportunity to watch them in their natural habitat.
Seriously, I did not mean the above to sound like "The Nature of Things", but to be honest, there was something of the voyeur to my visit. I'm obsessed with aging and death, not in any kind of negative way, I'm more reassured by it than anything. And while I realize that sounds somewhat negative in terms of the part that comes before death - i.e. mid-life - I don't think I mean that in a negative way, either - although, I am certainly at a crossroads in terms of work (see entry below).
Okay, maybe I am looking forward to death. But I've been working for the government in between doing interviews for jobs working for the government.
Anyway, there's definitely a hierarchy at play in this particular retirement residence, with a separate hierarchy reserved for couples (of the heterosexual variety). Couples have their own special status in the retirement residence, simply by virtue of both parties having stayed alive long enough to enjoy their remaining years in a retirement residence, the average age of my mom's retirement residence being somewhat closer to 90, than actual retirement age (I think by "retirement residence" the owner simply means "not a home for the aged" - as using words like "home" or "aged" to describe the "residences" of "retirees" is not good marketing). The couples who live together, sharing an apartment, are regarded almost like royalty. Or lottery winners. They live socially apart from the singles, who are mostly women, whether they want to or not, and only become part of the mainstream elderly society once their partner passes on to his great reward.
And it had best be him who goes first because leftover men really don't have the same quality of life as do the ladies who outlive them. In spite of what you may have heard, older ladies have no use for older men who are not their husbands. In fact, and I saw this with my own eyes, once their husbands pass on, older ladies make an almost seamless transition into the world of other older ladies - who have no use for older men who are not their husbands. It's just the way it is. Not great for the husbands who've lost their wives. Ladies d'une certaine age, no matter how solicitous they may have been of men in their younger years - are having none of it when there are precious few left to spend gambling with the girls.
As a middle-aged visiting daughter who grew up without a father and who was somewhat terrified of her friends' fathers (who all seemed cartoonishly brutish - but it was Sault Ste. Marie) I had a surprising amount of empathy for the poor old guys and went out of my way to engage them in conversation. I had no trouble putting myself in their shoes, but boy - I had to put up with some eye-rolling of the "don't encourage him" variety. Maybe it was because what the old guys ALL wanted to talk about was their late middle years when their wives were alive and they were the boss of something somewhere. Old ladies, on the other hand, want to talk about anything but. Gossip, politics, food, drink, children, grandchildren - whatever is going on now is what old ladies want to talk about.
Old men, not so much...
So the single ladies wave off the men and smile sweetly at the passing couples, who always pass by as couples (I can imagine the married men would prefer to go without dinner rather than head off alone to the dining room), being very solicitous to the ladies who are living in the retirement residence while their better halves live on the outside - or worse - a home where more care is required. But although the couples clearly have a special status, I would say it's more a courtesy, a nod to the days when 'til death do us part meant to "endure" for the sanctity of marriage, rather than anything covetous. Because what matters more than anything to the single ladies with their marbles and a certain degree of mobility is to be friends with another lady with her marbles and a certain degree of mobility - who still has her driver's licence.
Indeed, the friend with the driver's licence in a retirement residence is every bit as precious as was the friend with the driver's licence when you were a teenager too young or incompetent to have your own driver's licence. Talk about the circle of life - except that when you're the 80-year-old with the driver's licence, it's not about getting it, it's about hanging on to it. And there's not a former lady driver who won't tell you that the worst thing that happened to her by virtue of age was losing her driver's licence. Of course, most of them have long since lost their husbands, so they're not necessarily thinking of them when they say that, but I have a feeling that, even if they were, they really do mean that losing their driver's licence was the worst part of growing old. Because you can still be independent when your partner is gone, but when your driver's licence is gone, so is your independence. Oh sure, you can say to them as a middle-aged woman who doesn't even care to own a car, "take a taxi, ride the bus" but those are just meaningless words to ladies d'une certaine age. No, losing your driver's licence means you must sell your family home and move into a retirement residence where you must make friends with another older lady who still has her driver's licence.
Why not an older man, you ask? Because older men don't want to drive to Winners just to see what's come in since yesterday. They don't want to eat out at the newest restaurant when they've pre-paid to have perfectly good food served to them in a cafeteria by nice young women who smile a lot and ask them how they're feeling. And they don't want to put on a bathing suit and do aquafit classes for an hour.
They just want to talk about the good old days - before they got old.
