Wilting Flowers

                                                            Wilting Flowers

                                                           by Marco M. Pardi

           “As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.”

Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) In Ralph Waldo Emerson Journal. 1845

All comments welcome.

For much of the U.S. Spring has arrived.  Even the word evokes positive interpretations.  The trees and flowering plants are budding, blooming, and sending out new leaves.  The birds are calling “Cheer up! Cheer up!” They are busy feeding their chicks.  Other young wildlife are cautiously venturing out, eyes blinking, trying out those muscles and moves.  The sentinel crow calls to his buddies, “It’s just the old guy walking his dog.” Never let on you understand a language until you have to.

And soon we will look at our flowering plants and see flowers past their prime, drooping, wilting, and we will feel we must prune the dying flowers for the aesthetic appearance, even the health of the plant. Walking in my woods out back I will occasionally find a chick fallen from the nest, perhaps dead, perhaps not.  I’ve seen adult birds on the ground flop around as if injured to distract me from a nearby chick.  And I remind myself to “let Nature take its course.”

Flowers are interesting.  Like my knowledge of birds, I have very little knowledge of what’s what.  The biology department at a college where I taught decided to put taxonomic labels on trees, bushes and plants: Binomial nomenclature.  My first thought was, “Gee, and all this time I thought these were trees, bushes and plants. Will they be labeling people next?”

The ways people interpret flowers are also interesting.  For decades the social sciences, including history and anthropology, were permeated with behavioral interpretations based in theology.  So, the first Neanderthal burials found with flowers were heralded as belief in an afterlife, even reincarnation.  Always a build-from-the-basics kind of guy, and having worked in a funeral home, and having done my share of survivalist camping I saw it differently.  Without embalming, the body begins to break down rather quickly in very odiferous ways.  Scrubbing out a shallow pit with simple stone hand tools means the body will be near the surface.  To reduce the likelihood of it being dug up by a scavenger, and to reduce the stench emanating from the grave, flowers are generously included.  Even an embalmed body seeps a chemical odor to which some people are sensitive, especially if they approach and touch it.  Flowers around the casket. Anyone familiar with the history of the perfume industry well understand this.

I also thought putting cut flowers in a hospital patient’s room was a rather odd thing to do.  To me it was like saying, “I know you aren’t going to last long, so enjoy.”

Our language employs plant development in several ways. We talk about children blossoming into young adults, growing like a weed. We have anecdotes such as “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree”.  But these taper off sharply as age progresses.

I worked in a small town funeral home from summer 1959 to summer 1960.  Back then there were no independent ambulance services in our region; we provided that.  There were no hospices or home assistance programs; we provided that through such things as me driving oxygen equipment to a home and setting it up, lifting someone from bed to easy chair in the morning and returning them to their bed in the evening, transporting them by non-emergency ambulance to hospitals or clinics for treatment, or transporting them to nursing homes.  Of course, I was able to develop conversational friendships with those who were able. Even when they couldn’t respond I always talked to them. It was here that I saw the other end of the journey.

If the word Alzheimer’s had entered the lexicon I certainly never heard it.  Many people were clear and lucid; the others were simply lumped into the “senility” category, particularly if their impairment included resistance to nursing orders and/or dramatic shifts in their behavior toward family members.  This was before the relatively sudden advent – one might say blossoming development of psycho-pharmaceuticals that became the daily mainstay in nursing homes, leaving so many people wedged into wheelchairs – the tray holding them in, in a stupor in the dayroom while the television blared out the soap operas for the amusement of the staff.  Others simply lay in their beds day after endless day. It was also before the now much better understanding of the various causes for dementia and the development of cause specific approaches.

Years later I established working relationships with nursing homes in Central Florida so I could place my advanced Death & Dying students with their lucid residents.  The students ranged in age from late teens to early forties.  By then Florida had long been associated with aging retirees moving into the State, renewing their Drivers Licenses even though they had to feel their way into the DMV office, playing shuffleboard and bingo, patronizing the ubiquitous liquor stores, going to restaurants for the Senior Early Special, and sitting on sunlit park benches facing what some may have hoped was their last sunset. It became known as “Heaven’s Waiting Room.” South Georgia could have erected highway signs reading: Pearly Gates Ahead 500 Yards.

I don’t know where or when the title Senior Citizen entered the lexicon but it took off in Florida. But what, exactly, did it mean? An interesting development that may have been related was an uptick in petty crime – shoplifting, parking in restricted zones, etc., attributed to older people.  Some opined it resulted from a sense of entitlement conferred by the new Senior Citizen title.  Others suggested that, as one’s end draws in sight one loses the inhibitions that enabled comfortable socialization; one “cares less”.  As you honk and pass that old lady peering over her dashboard as she drives 20 mph under the speed limit she is as likely to give you the finger as any rebellious teenager.

Another development has been the “spreading like weeds” of Assisted Living facilities, offering a range of levels from room and board (with parking and pet friendly options) to full nursing lock-up for dementia residents (“memory care”).  While assessing one for my mother, my wife and I found a place that was so nice we would have lived there as grad students were we going to the nearby university.  Sadly, many of the places, especially when the level of care must be elevated, are simply out of financial reach for most people.  And, unless things have changed, a person is required to meet the criteria for “Indigent” at least two years ahead of qualifying for government assistance.  Clever estate maneuvering can manage that for many if they know of it far enough in advance, but was simply out of the question for us;  we just paid $3,700.00 per month for several years in the 1990’s.  And, I don’t know if that assistance even applies to Assisted Living as it does to nursing homes.

Early in my relationship with nursing homes I noticed that most of them had large clocks with an additional feature which said, “Today Is: _________”.  At first I thought that was a good idea.  But as I got to interact with the residents I found that for many of them the passage of days, the hour of the day, meant little or nothing.  Their days were meaningfully trisected by three significant markers: Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.  Yes, there were various scheduled activities.  But participation was at best half-hearted.  It made me wonder how we mark our days.  And, it made me more aware of the trepidation many older workers have as they face impending retirement. So often we hear, “How will I fill my days?”  For those hit by the reality that constant travel is beyond their reach daytime television is soul death, and becoming sedentary soon finishes the job.

One such worker, an administrative assistant at a large federal agency, was a divorced woman living alone.  She confided her fears to me and I told her she should look into her community to find organizations and social groups she found interesting.  Once having identified some, she should take some of those unused annual leave days and go to the meetings of these groups.  Instead of presenting herself as a supplicant hoping to be admitted she should adopt the attitude that she was the potential employer and conduct an interview with them to determine exactly how they could be of benefit to her.  She did as I suggested and, though it took a while, found groups she felt compatible and transitioned into her retirement happily.

Another retiree, a few years my senior, recently asked me what I thought of his getting a dog.  I said I was all for it, so long as he went to shelters and specifically got an older dog. Startled that I may have been hinting I thought he was near the end, he asked why.  I explained an older dog is less likely to get adopted, less likely to wander off from him, more likely to walk with him at an acceptable pace, and nowhere near as much trouble as a young dog.  And, he would have less worries about the dog should something happen to him.  I’ve had deep friendships with older dogs and older horses.  They convey their appreciation for every moment you spend with them.

I certainly do not mean to be morose.  But using wise forethought should not necessarily be depressing.  Of course there are many elderly people who live quite happily in their own homes, despite the image portrayed by ubiquitous television ads that hawk Life Alert and so many related products.

So many people chart and measure their career path by promotions, pay increases and other markers that will one day fade in importance.  I am who I am; I’m not what I work at.  My life is my path; careers are only temporary ways of expressing myself and, to an extent, developing the momentum which will carry me through the years I have yet to travel.