Old People

I visited home last week for the first time in a while. It was nice to get out of Philly.

I was eating pizza with Mom that first night back. Between bites, she said, “By the way, Grandma fell yesterday. She broke some teeth. She’s in the hospital.”

“Yesterday,” I said. I was surprised she hadn’t told me when it happened. “Is she okay?” “Well. She’s in the hospital. But your grandmother, she’s a tough lady.”

“Okay,” I said. I sipped my root beer. Grandma never seemed particularly tough to me. She’s barely over five feet tall.

“Anyway. Was your drive back home okay?”

I was taught to never be taken aback by things like this. Grandma’s new kidney, Grandpa’s forgetfulness, et cetera, et cetera. These were Old People. My great grandma died when she was ninety-six. I was five, and I was sad, but my parents told me that these were the sort of things that happen to old people. They lose motor skills. They get confused. They get sick. This is how it is. She’s in Heaven now, they told me, everything is going to be okay.

This is how it is.

My mom works as a physical therapist, mostly with geriatric patients in their homes. She’s always telling stories about them. The one old lady with the six kittens, the 85-year-old guy that flirts with her while she tries to treat his debilitating back pain. Once she came home with tomatoes from a patient’s garden. I don’t think she ever ate them.

Those stories are often nice. My mom says things like, “This sweet old lady,” or “Can you believe they’ve been married for seventy years?” But many of them instead lean to the bleaker side: the sixty-year-old lady who walks like she’s ninety-seven, the morbidly obese fifty-year old with the heart of a man on his deathbed—et cetera, et cetera.

I gathered at a young age that these gloomy stories were not meant to scare us, but instead to make us proud that our grandparents were in good shape. They were meant to make us glad that the elders we loved were a-okay, at least comparatively so.

But a part of me didn’t buy it. My mom might’ve been desensitized to this sort of stuff, but these stories did scare me. I just imagined my grandparents’ condition would decline the same way everyone else’s did, only a few years down the line. I wondered if they thought about this the way I thought about this. Did they lay in bed late at night bracing themselves for their lives to slip away? Could they feel death creeping up on them? Does aging happen so gradually that none of this crossed their minds? Or is it so sudden that they feel it hit them like a truck?

I remember my younger sister saying one time, “Old people scare me so much.”

I couldn’t disagree.

Grandma ended up being okay. She got her teeth fixed and was discharged from the hospital quickly. A few days later it was Father’s Day. My grandpa is constantly worrying about my grandma. Mom told me that he felt guilty when she fell. “What’s he gonna do? Catch her?” she said. “They probably weren’t even in the same room.” As a gag-gift, Uncle Tom bought Grandpa a hockey helmet with a facemask, meant for my grandma to wear at all times. Uncle Tom texted a picture of her in the helmet to our family groupchat of 20 people. There were some laughing- crying face emojis and some Hahas. A wittier reply said, “I think this would make a good Christmas card photo!”

I didn’t respond. I was having trouble seeing the humor in any of this. Grandma fell so bad she had to go to the hospital. She’s smiling in the hockey helmet photo. She looks okay. But this just allows you to zoom in to look at the new teeth. They don’t look like her old ones, and her lip is

bruised purple. I was surprised to realize I knew what her old teeth looked like, but sometimes you perceive these kinds of things only after they’re gone.

I had to go back to Philly for a day to take a final exam. We were on break, then, and my girlfriend Harper’s moms picked us up and took us to Cape Cod for a week’s vacation. It was a nine-hour drive in traffic, and her mom Jen was on the phone a few times with her brother Ron, arguing about what they were going to do about their very sick 86-year-old mother. The conversation was heated, yet matter of fact, like the business that surrounded her dying was more vital to discuss than her death itself. I don’t mean to say there’s something wrong here—there’s not. Only there is a surprising contrast between Jen’s unflinching discussion of selling her parents’ house, having an estate sale, nursing homes, versus my family’s emojis and jokes after Grandma’s fall.

Jen left the trip early. Her mother was getting worse, her brother was beyond stressed out, and her father couldn’t understand a word the doctor said. I suppose he’s old too. Harper and I were playing cards while her parents were out. When they came back Jen sat down next to Harper and explained the situation. She said whatever growth in her mom’s back was this big now. She said that it was pushing against some of the nerves in her legs and she wasn’t walking well. She said something about how if they had to operate, her heart might give out in the process. She was going to fly home in two days.

Needless to say, we didn’t finish our game of cards. I put something funny on TV to try to cheer her up. The show wasn’t anything complicated, but still I lost track of what was going on. I felt angry. I was angry at how in-depth Jen explained everything. It seemed overly specific and almost harsh.

But maybe I only felt angry out of a strange sort of jealousy. I thought my own mom might sugarcoat everything if this happened to us, whereas Jen was no-bullshit about the whole thing. In this sort of situation, my mom would tell me that Grandma is a fighter, that she’s one tough cookie, and would leave it at that.

I can’t know this for sure. No one very close to me has ever died. I was twelve when Aunt Karen had a heart attack. My youngest cousin Andrew was around four, and he apparently yelled gleefully in a Panera Bread after it happened, “Aunt Karen’s dead!” I’m sure he wasn’t happy about it or anything, but he was too young to get it. Everyone laughed at this story at the funeral.

I worry about this. I’m far past the point of being too young to grieve. When something like this happens again, I will get it, and I don’t know how I’m going to deal with it—certainly not with humor. Humor fatigues me.

The night before Jen left, we played Cards Against Humanity. I was holding two inopportune cards: “Hospice care,” and “Dead parents.” I never played them.

Harper and I went to a bookstore after Jen boarded a ferry from Cape Cod to Boston. Her flight from Logan was late that night. Harper was looking at the horror section, or mystery, maybe. We go to a lot of bookstores together. I know where she usually likes to look: fiction, poetry, plays— never horror. She was looking at all the Dean Koontz books they had there and said her grandma loved Dean Koontz. The way she said this—it was like a part of her was already grieving.

Maybe that’s the trickiest part. Grief doesn’t wait until the end. It starts early, and even earlier if you’re an anticipatory person like me, always steeling myself for the worst. Early when you see something, like a book, that you know will remind you of someone after they’re gone. I don’t think my family is wrong. Humor works. Humor distracts. But lately it’s made me feel distant, like I’m watching something dreadful happening, and I’m the only one to see it.