Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me

I was reading this interview with Chris Rock, and paused towards the end in thought: 

Who do you hang with these days? Who’s your peer group?

I hang with Dave [Chappelle]. I hang with my kids. I hang with Nelson George. There’s not a lot of hanging in the Covid world. The better question is, who do you FaceTime with?

So who do you FaceTime with?

The other day I realized I’ve never met an elderly person that was cared for by their friends. Every elderly person I know that’s got any trouble is cared for by a spouse or a child. Sometimes they have like five kids but only one helps. Where are your friends? Your friends are probably not going to be there when it really counts. [Laughs.] When my dad was dying in the hospital, where were his friends? My grandmother, where were her friends? Don’t get me wrong, you get sick in your 20s, your friends will come to the hospital. It’s an adventure. [Laughs.] You get sick in your 60s, they farm it out. “You go Wednesday and I’ll go Sunday.”

Enjoy them while you have them. But if you think your friends are your long-term solution to loneliness, you’re an idiot.

On one side of my family, there are a group of cousins who are fiercely devoted to each other. No one else in the world matters except for their siblings and their families. They doted on their mother in her final days, never leaving her alone, even when she was in the nursing home for a year. 

These cousins are no longer youngsters. During this horrific year, a number of them have passed. One has sat shiva three times this year. 

They are of the age when friends (if they had them) would no longer be showing up to assist. For them, from the beginning, it was only family; at the end, there is only family. 

"Your flesh and blood," Ma would chastise when us kids would fight. "How can you hurt your own flesh and blood?" 

Friendships are nice, as Rock says. They have their place. But when I see others cast off their family because of "friends," that these friends are now their everything, I wonder how tight that bond is, how long it can last. 

Rock is 55, old enough to contemplate his mortality and wonder what is truly important in life. Obviously if a family member is toxic it is best to keep one's distance, but one cannot deny the connection family has, whereas friendships rarely last into the caregiving stage. 

Han and I joke to Ben that he should please not shove us into a cut-rate nursing home when the time comes. Because it'll be his problem when we are old and creaky (but with excellent skin, because of the creams we use now), and no one else, no matter how "close," will want to take it on. 

TGIF

• Short-term memory and age.

Age Like Iris?

I learned, a long long time ago, to never say, "Well, I would never—!" 

A number of women have that about-face when skin starts to sag. In one's bouncy youth, the idea of surgical intervention for shallow reasons is repulsive; yet, perhaps, when actually confronting the signs in the mirror, the concept becomes less abhorrent.

Who knows what I will be tempted by if my neck goes all turkey despite my nightly creams? 

Debora Spar mulls over the issue in "Aging, and My Beauty Dilemma." 

Then my friend Elise pushed me toward the exit, where our husbands were waiting. Elise is about a decade younger than me; she is also Nordic, smooth-skinned and built like a ballerina. “Did you see that room?” she asked, smiling and rolling her eyes. “Every other woman there was over 60 and yet there wasn’t a wrinkle to be found. They all looked great,” she acknowledged, “but so similar!”

We ducked into the car and started heading back to the West Side. In the darkness, she grabbed my arm. “Promise me that we’ll never do that,” she said.

“Do what?” I asked, pulling my own black dress more tightly around me.

“That plastic surgery thing,” she said. “Fillers, Botox, all that stuff.”

I demurred, mumbling quietly, “Come back and see me when you’re 50.”

That's why we can't judge. If we haven't been in those identical shoes, who knows what we would do?

As for dressing, Julia Baird proclaims, "Don't Dress Your Age." I find it awesome when I see older women in bright, colorful, patterned attire. If anything, I think such garb is probably more age-appropriate than it is on the young. There is a fabulous octogenarian that I know who is my inspiration for my golden years, God willing. Now, I rarely wear patterns, and have difficulty finding festive hues that also suit my frame. But when I've aged out, what's figure-flattering will no longer be a concern.  

All this nonsense is why I adore the funky grandmothers you can find on Instagram who dance about in baubles and proudly sport turbans. They refuse to fade, hide or match their attire to the wallpaper.

But my greatest mutton-fantasy is just to wear and do what I want. To not have such preoccupations even cross my mind. Isn’t there a point when one can simply be a dowager, a grand old dame, or just a merry old boiler? When we can refuse to kowtow to prescriptions and permissions, but just march on in the shoes we fancy wearing?

Faces of Bravery

"You'll feel better if you talk about it." Then they lean in eagerly, proffering an inquisitive ear. 

But we are not all the same. Not everyone desires to upchuck their emotional guts. Some find such withholding to be unnatural, unhealthy. If only they knew what the other side thought of them . . .  

In Betsy Lerner's memoir, she recalls her misunderstanding of her mother's staid, dignified bridge group, chafing and clashing against their expectations while yearning for their approval.

But in 2013, as her mother, Roz, was recovering from an operation, the author resolved to make peace. She began her campaign by infiltrating the bridge circle, intending to break through the ladies’ polished surfaces and gain a deeper understanding of their inner lives, and, she hoped, her mother’s.

Sitting with Roz, Bette, Bea, Jackie and Rhoda (the club had five members, in case one had a conflict), she eavesdropped as they bid, passed and took tricks. For years, she had imagined that during card play, the women let down their guards, spilled secrets, groused about their spouses and worried about their children.

Instead, she found, to her disappointment, they did not ever “trash anyone” or “share a deep feeling.” Their commandments were: “Thou shalt not pry. Thou shalt not reveal. Thou shalt not share.”

To her surprise, this was no wine-fueled contemporary "book club." 

Week after week, these women met, played bridge, and kept conversation way above the depths.

With Bette, she brought up a tragedy that her mother had always refused to discuss: the death of Ms. Lerner’s baby sister, Barbara, in 1964, from pneumonia.

Had the ladies known about it? the author asked. “Everyone knew,” Bette replies. Had her mother spoken of it, during all those bridge Mondays? “Not once,” Bette says.

Ms. Lerner found such reticence callous. Yet, gradually, grudgingly, she came to accept that TLC did in fact exist in the pre-TMI world. Just because a bridge luncheon didn’t operate like a therapy session didn’t mean it wasn’t therapeutic, she saw. For the ladies, it was a safe, neutral zone where they went to recharge as they weathered life’s blows, keeping up appearances and their spirits as they trumped, finessed and ate kugel from china plates.

She writes, “I never thought I would say this, but I think the Bridge Ladies are brave.”

"Talking it out," I have found, is not always magically cathartic. For a number of issues, hashing them to death will not help. These women craved stability and structure; when life threatened their balance, they were able to re-attain their equilibrium with a weekly ritual amongst their comrades.

Yes, in an ideal world, we could be vulnerable with one another without fear. Brené Brown has started the revolution; perhaps a wholehearted future awaits us. But we should respect the previous generations' means of perseverance, when presence was needed more than words.    

Paradise?

"Kiddo, what is this?" 

"My report on the family!" 

"I gathered that. But who's family?" 

I managed to squelch my feelings of violence towards my (beloved) niece. I had carefully, thoroughly dictated to her our history. She had chosen to ignore it. Her paper was pure fiction. 

Like her insertion that my grandparents were longing for the opportunity to migrate to the "goldene medina." 

 

"Dearest, that was a popular term at the turn of the century, when the Jews of Poland and Russia were fleeing pogroms and starvation, not when Zeidy and Babi came much much later. They certainly never used that phrase . . . stop texting and listen to me!" 

After the war, my mother's parents had returned to their hometown. She was born there, and recalls a happy childhood (in vivid detail). After Zeidy and Babi had rebuilt and established a pleasant life, a more intense crop of communists arose. 

They didn't leave because they dreamed for years about going to America. They had a lovely home, plenty of food, and nice neighbors. They didn't fantasize about a magical country with streets paved with gold that would make all their problems disappear. (I rewrote her report just to protect the family name. I don't intend for that to become a trend. Oh, Jane Austen? Okay, maybe one more.) 

Tara Zhara's "America, the Not So Promised Land" attempts to scrape away that gleaming veneer from nostalgic history. 

Contrary to popular imagination, 30 to 40 percent of immigrants from Europe before the First World War ultimately returned home. For many this was always the plan. But others returned disappointed and disillusioned. They found little reward for their hard work, lack of support in times of illness and old age and questionable moral values in an ego-driven society. . .

As European migrants were recruited to replace the plantation labor of freed slaves, some feared that they would be no better treated. Emigration, they insisted, was more likely to deliver migrants to a new form of slavery than greater freedom.

Not all Jews thought it was grand, either: 

In 1912, a letter signed “the unlucky one” reached the editors of Forverts, a Yiddish daily newspaper in New York. The writer was contemplating a return to Warsaw after 22 miserable years in America: “All these years I’ve struggled because I never made a living. I know English, I am not lazy, I’ve tried everything and never succeeded.” Now that his children were grown, he just wanted to go home.

“It seems strange to me that I must go away from the free America in order to better my condition. But the chances for me are still better there,” he insisted.

None of my grandmother's aides had any intention of staying indefinitely in America. The financial condition in Hungary has been so bad in the last few years that with whatever they save up, they can go back and live like queens. Marika gleefully shopped for clothing and pots, sending it all home to her new apartment in a charming seaside town. 

Yes, America is awesome. (The shopping! It's just so delicious!) Yet we can get a little narcissistic. Not everyone wants to be here, not everyone thinks it outshines their home countries, nor do they want to be here indefinitely.    

I Don't Mean to Be Grim

From my miserable historical-fiction reading, I am exceedingly grateful to be living in this century. This is how stories used to go, by the way: 

Once upon a time, everybody died. 

And I mean everybody. No one was spared. From the moment babies drew breath, they were ticking time bombs. To quote Epictetus, "As you kiss your son good night, whisper to yourself, 'He may be dead in the morning.'" (Got that one from Resilience.) 

Meaning, the idea that infants are matter-of-factly thriving well into adulthood is a gift we should be merrily celebrating. 

Let it be known that I do not wish to be flippant regarding death. Yet we seem to have an unhealthy approach to the matter when those who have lived long, full, spectacular lives are still clung to frantically by their loved ones, their inevitable ends gruesomely extended. 

 

I once heard from a woman the beautiful tale of her father's passing. He refused to go to the hospital or a home; she cared for him under her own roof. He died holding her hand, smiling. 

Deborah Lutz's article says it all: "See Death as a Triumph, Not a Failure." 

The Victorians looked at death differently than we do now. 

The Victorians recognized that death’s presence was woven into the texture of life, giving that life one of its essential meanings.Religion, of course, played a role in this attitude. Evangelical revivals early in the 19th century reinvigorated the tradition of the good death, in which God called believers to him. 

There is even a Talmudic example, perhaps, of "death's presence giving life meaning":

At the wedding feast of Mar the son of Ravina, the sages present turned to Rav Hamnuna Zuti and requested: "Let master sing for us." Most probably to the surprise of those present, who expected a cheery song or jovial ditty, Rav Hamnuna Zuti complied with a mournfully lament: "Woe to us that we are destined to die! Woe to us that we are destined to die!" 

As for "the good death," consider Beth's demise in Little Women. A triumph indeed. 

By the beginning of the 20th century, however, these views of the dead body began to change. Doctors and scientists acquired a deeper understanding of bacteria and disease; death became medicalized. God hadn’t called the individual to him; rather, a malady had overtaken the body. Rather than dying at home, the sick were carted off to hospitals.

In addition, fewer people believed in the afterlife. No longer a triumph, death became a failure — of the physician’s skill, of the patient’s will. It was to be avoided at all costs. The mass death of the Great War, which left so many bodies missing, exploded or rotting on the ground, further undermined the view of the corpse as a meaningful stage of life. Cremation grew in popularity as a way to “cleanse” with fire the last shameful disintegration.

What we have lost is not only a savoring of ephemerality, but also an appreciation of the way that time marks the body. We try too hard to keep the terminally ill alive because we can’t admit to finality. . .

. . . the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s lament in the 1930s about death still rings true. By avoiding the sight of the dying, he felt, one misses the moment when the meaning of a life is completed and illuminated in its ending. The denial of death then leads to the demise of the art of storytelling. He called his contemporaries “dry dwellers of eternity” because they “live in rooms that have never been touched by death.”

We are not immune, us now liberated Jews. We think now the same way—stay alive, no matter the cost. Even though Rebbe's maidservant was praised for ending his suffering.     

Hear Your Elders

Not only am I the youngest in my family, I'm amongst the youngest of my cousins as well. To me, everyone was always older. 

Via bazanphotos

I don't know if it is just my nature, or because I was always around those who were older, but I like older people. We seem to have more similar interests than I do with my contemporaries. 

Silas House notes "The Growing Generational Divide," and the cost to the next generation:

This is the main thing we lose when we don’t talk to our elders: the histories. How many teenagers, for example, know the intimate details of the Kardashians’ lives but don’t know the love stories of their own parents? The joys and sorrows of the older generations serve as examples for us to learn from, to emulate or, perhaps even more useful, to avoid. As age segregation becomes more ingrained in our culture, what cycles will be repeated, what misconceptions will flourish? 

Quite a lot. I try to tell over the family tales to the best of my ability, but with every re-teller they get contaminated. I just took my niece's head off because she completely butchered/fabricated her report on Ma's coming to America ("They never referred to it as the 'Goldeneh Medinah!'")

The younger generation may roll their eyes at how the relatively elderly struggle with technology, but as Ma heard a personality proclaiming on a talk show, there is more to knowledge that smartphone savvy. Yes, she may not know the iPhone—but that means she has nothing to teach? There is plenty the young people don't know that she does.