Page 67 - Demo

“Let the ladies do it,” Douglas said. “Todd, let’s try not to be insensitive to the needs of others.”
hemorrhage, the mandatory autopsy said.
“I am sensitive,” I said.
~
The fact was I had been to nursing homes too often. Both my parents died in them—my mother who had begun in assisted living then spiraled downward until she lingered months largely ignored like a piece of rusting wrought-iron furniture by the hideous staff. When my father fell too ill to be left alone, I placed him in a far more lavish facility. But it was not much different. They gave him his daily medications and got him to the group singalongs, but he died in the middle of the night before emergency help arrived. When they called me, they said it had been a stroke. Two people on the phone made excuses. When I lost my temper, one of them had the audacity to tell me to calm down.
I sat on the edge of our bed with Claire’s multi-course meal that had included cheeses before a Dacquoise layered with whipped cream and berries waging war in my stomach. Douglas had broken out a bottle of Dom Perignon. “To our new addition,” he had said as if toasting the acquisition of a new imported Turk- ish rug. Now I could barely move to take my shoes off, rubbing my aging knees. Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m all for social experiments. Title 9. Afford- able housing. When they started giving out free methadone, I was all for it. Fiscal conservative, social liberal, let’s get it straight. But who are you helping by taking in so many old people as pets?
“Are you going to get undressed?” Ruth said when she came out of the bathroom.
A colleague of mine was one of the first to do it a few years ago. Henry Heckerson, the last sort of guy I’d have expected, a real gunslinger in the courtroom. The theory put forth then by our progressive gov- ernor was that an elder-care adoption program would curtail spiraling senior health care costs. They backed the ballot measure with reams of charts and graphs they produced, and campaigned hard with endless endorsements from geriatric actors who made their best movies eons ago. But Henry said to hell with all that. “You ever been to a nursing home? What’s the worst that can happen?” he said. “That I fail at trying to give the old codger CPR and he dies on my rug?” We should have called Henry prescient. One morning his adoptee, an 87-year-old man, had fallen while Henry was out. He died from a cerebral
“The Yaegers?” I moaned. “This elderly adoption thing is absurd.”
“How are nursing homes better? You’ve always said your father’s place let him choke to death in his sleep. You were going to sue and get the place shut down.”
“Because he might be alive today if they didn’t let him eat Philadelphia cream cheese before he went to
bed that night. When I die, I only want you and our daughter nearby if she’s still talking to me then. Or let me die in obscurity. Anything but being taken in by someone like the Yaegers as their faux kid. It’s bad enough being there is like a reminder we all have one foot in the grave.”
As always, Ruth sent a handwritten note thanking them for a lovely dinner, this time with a box of hand-dipped Swiss chocolates, worried I had been rude. But the next few days I would get into the elevator bracing for a possible encounter with the Yaegers toting the new member of their house- hold. On the street, I grew warier of the number
of elder-adoptions everywhere I went. At least all the bothersome baby strollers had been pushed by young people starting families. Now you couldn’t walk a straight line without slowing for an old per- son, bent over a cane or a walker, their caretakers coaxing them onward, 9 times out of 10 no spring chickens themselves.
In the morning, I would go into the corner coffee shop I often stopped at for a quick sit-down breakfast be- fore going to work. It was getting hard to get a table,
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