Oz for Seniors

Here begins an exposé of an unknown world in which few have any but a queasy, unquiet interest – the world of Independent Senior Living. Of course you’ve seen the glossy ads featuring well-dressed, attractive old people happily singing, gardening and enjoying formal dinners. The image is a sort-of endless, ground-based cruise devoted to contented merriment. And the image is accurate, if you want to live in an image. ISL isn’t Assisted Living, a term given to facilities that provide varying levels of help to people of any age who cannot perform routine tasks of daily living alone. So what is ISL?

I had no idea when I moved into one, and it’s taken me six months to figure it out.. At first it was totally bizarre, a strange world populated by white-haired puppets in heavily decorated tops, on walkers. The puppets were programmed to say the same things over and over. “Have a nice afternoon.” “Have a wonderful evening.” As far as I could see, every afternoon and evening were the same. Meals and activities are announced, twice, over a loud speaker, every day. There’s a weekly printed program and meals and activities are always at the same times anyway, so why the maddening announcements? By 6:30 every night the place is empty and silent, an abandoned city. I spent my time trying not to run people down in the halls and assuming I’d wandered into a genuine alternate universe or eerie dreamscape meant to teach me some Big Thing I’d failed to learn in a lifetime. Then I’d die enlightened and become a bodhisattva even though that fate holds little appeal.

No worries; I’m not dying or even Buddhist. But I have learned that ISL places, and there are thousands of them in the U.S., are to greater or lesser extents a curious distillation of the identities that made and were made by an era now vanished. WWII to now, although “now” is aware of these identities only as wraiths, and they barely comprehend, much less influence “now.” These are the walking old, more than half in a sort of slow-acting dementia that can go on for years. They function adequately in rote expressions of their most acceptable selves, molded in post-war childhoods. They are dear. They are sweet. They learned to be dear and sweet in the 40’s and 50’s and now rely on that programming. Many construct small shrines outside their apartment doors – teddy bears, silk flowers, religious stuff – meant, I suppose, as symbols of who lives inside. (A nice person, circa 1953.) Others who eschew shrines display elaborate seasonal decorations on their doors, I guess signaling conformity to cultural observances, if not niceness. I recognize them; they are eerily familiar because I, too, made elaborate seasonal decorations as I was trained to be dear and sweet, courteous and kind, thrifty and quietly brave. They are my mother and her friends morphed into myself and my friends at 25, nice ladies in pastel shirtwaists, wives, mothers. Lana Lobell actors endlessly reviving a play that closed forever fifty years ago.

I picked this particular ISL facility because it’s a fantastic deal – attractive apartment with gas fireplace, cable and all utilities included, maids to clean and change linen every week, laundry rooms on every floor and three meals a day in the dining room – for far less than the rent alone for my apartment in San Diego! Plus the presence of other people meant I wouldn’t waste away in the isolation that’s epidemic among seniors, in case that was a possibility. Friends have opted for (much) pricier ISL places and report better-educated, more sophisticated residents, but as one keeps telling me, “Abbie, these places are all alike!” I get it. Prisons, convents, boarding schools, all places of communal residence create a communal identity to which all conform. Lana Lobell is the common denominator here, while in more upscale places it may be anything from Bella Hess to Balenciaga. The role, not the clothes. And it’s the same everywhere, a reliable identity that remains even as other cognition wearies and stumbles.

Is this sad? Maybe. I gesture at a roomful of residents and ask my sort-of friend and constant meal companion, Toni, “What do you see?” “Sad,” she says. “It’s just sad.” I find it horrifying and flee to the more comfortable perspective of sociological analysis.

Frequently, fire trucks and EMT vans arrive in the parking lot, and somebody goes out on a gurney, providing concerned dining room conservation. A couple of weeks ago somebody died in her apartment. The event was obvious from the EMTs and a police chaplain standing around in a semicircle outside her door as local relatives made phone calls inside with the body. I was, of course, curious to see the sheet-draped form wheeled.through the reception area. The pivotal moment! What writer could resist a glimpse? But everybody courteously vanishes from death scenes “out of respect,” and I could only drag out opening my mailbox for so long.  To avoid seeming goulish, I had to vanish as well, missing the quintessential dramatic moment. No announcement is made of deaths here, but a day or so later a framed photo of the deceased is placed on a table in the reception area. Nobody mentions it, and then it’s gone. After lunch, everyone says, “Have a nice afternoon,” and I once again look around for the wizard who must be running this show! But there is no wizard. And any grad school cultural anthropologist eager to write a dissertation on the post-war era need go no further than the closest Senior Independent Living facility.

Stay tuned for my next Substack tale – “Tops for Surviving Senior Independent Living!”