I've been working at a mid-sized assisted living/memory care facility for four months now. Our residents never get better; all of them are suffering from some form of Alzheimer's or dementia.
My best friends and my daughters are now verbalizing their feelings.
"You're doing good work; I couldn't do it," one 20-year compadre said the other day.
"I always thought you were fun and loyal and interesting but kinda mean. And now you're like a poor man's Mother Teresa," another long-term bud added.
"I liked it a lot better earlier in the year when you were somehow dating that really pretty, much-younger girl, and talked about that when we had dinner," a third friend chipped in at the weekly Boys Night Out food-and-gab session I've been arranging since I got back from Hawaii in the spring of 2002. I learned in Hawaii that real friends were even more important than good weather.
My best gal pal, a former date who has become a very close friend, said she sees two changes in me: "You're a lot more tired, but you're also a lot more compassionate," she said.
I think everybody I know well is hoping I get another job soon so they no longer have to hear about the end of the road for all of us who don't get hit in a crosswalk by a cellphoning SUV driver, don't get shot in a drive-by by some wannabe gangbanger or don't work ourselves into an early fatal heart attack.
You cannot work in these places without taking a slight turn toward a darkened worldview, unless you are super stupid, super callous or super religious.
I am a lot of things, but I am not stupid or callous. I am also not overly religious, although I have taken to throwing a few prayers and thank yous up at the late-night ceiling since I began rubbing my own nose in mortality 16 weeks ago.
The sticking point for me in the praying game is I feel like I'm asking for help from the Being who is torturing all the poor old souls I daily try to comfort. I know I wouldn't treat my children the way God seems to be treating His or Hers.
But God, Jesus and Allah are the only game in town, so I keep tossing up my little hope bombs. You never know.
All this reality has forced me to rethink what I really believe in. I can't just gloss over things lately. I am more like I was at 25, trying to figure out a philosophy of life to help me deal with life.
One thing I've re-realized lately is that hedonism, if it hurts nobody, is a lot better option for me than excessive self-sacrifice. I wish my aging frame could cabernet nightly. I also wish the recent 28-year-old love casualty, and her 43-year-old predecessor from 2006, were sleeping with me on alternate nights. It might take my mind off the fact that I have had three residents die on me in four months. People I got to know, who, however diminished by disease, still touched me on a human level.
The elderly, of course, are not modern, shallow America's favorite age group. We seem to have reversed the old maxim: Children should be seen and not heard. As a culture that's what we want oldsters, even healthier ones than those I work with, to do. Shut up and disappear. The current cultural and political climate is geared more and more toward the young, verbally belligerent, and the shabbily money-mad.
My greatest distraction right now is golf, and golf is not a comfort sport unless you're Tiger Woods. Even the world's second-best linkster, Phil the Mick, is often seen on the tube suffering for his game.
In addition to now firmly believing in my heart that if it feels good and hurts no one, do it, I also truly know that we must try to enjoy and like each other. This journey we are on is going to end sooner than we wish, and sometimes it will in ways you can't, and wouldn't want to, imagine.
Dennis Wilken's column appears periodically in the Capitol Hill Times. Reach him at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.[[In-content Ad]]
