Our parents were called The Greatest Generation—and if by great you mean prolific, then yeah. Our generation, Baby Boomers, is the result of that greatness. There’re more seniors living in America than ever before, an immense population over sixty-five that’s been anticipated since the birthing spree of the nineteen fifties.
Occasionally I hear grumbling about how much we’re costing society. And it’s true. This multitude of non-working people on Social Security and Medicare is costing the taxpayers dollars that could be better spent on infrastructure, education, and oh, so many other things. The generations following us are having to pay higher taxes because we live. It’s a warped system.
The reason I can hear the grumbling I mentioned is because I wear hearing aids. Ten years ago you could only get them through a doctor of audiology. Just think, students went to medical school to learn to turn noise up and down with a knob and watch sound waves on a screen so they could end up make a living by being a hearing aids salesperson. Then along came the Baby Boomers; and entrepreneurs, recognizing the need, rushed to make hearing aids better and cheaper. In a short amount of time, the price dropped to a couple of hundred bucks and they’re available online.
This is only one of the many innovations created because The Greatest Generation’s progeny has grown old. How about those chairs that’ll carry you right up the stairs? Or Siri on your phone asking if you’ve fallen and do you want her/him to call 911? Hip replacements, knee replacements, shoulder replacements—doctors and their ilk, knowing they’d be hit by a wave of gray humanity with worn out joints in the twenty-first century, have been perfecting replacements since the sixties.
Away from the musing and on to the personal: David has recently had a shoulder replacement. He tried to prepare me for him not being able to use his right arm. He’s left-handed, so I figured he’d do fine. Though, like I said, he warned me.
I’m compassionate. I am. Well, in the abstract. I can get teary-eyed over a homeless dog or a hungry orphan, but when it came to the helplessness of a man who had a good arm and a brain, generosity abandoned me. The sling that kept his arm immobile was composed of many straps connected by Velcro, hooks, and buckles—most confounding. Working as a team, we mastered getting it off and on and, as I saw the necessity of it, I didn’t mind. But the other things he needed me to do for him were maddening, as were all the interruptions: Would you—dry my back? cut this lemon? pour this for me? Invariably I was in the middle of doing something else and I became impatient when I had to stop and help him.
Getting him dressed was beyond irksome—buttoning his shirt, putting on his socks and shoes, pulling up his pants. And my attitude was awful. The most shameful thing was when I didn’t offer to cut his meat, but simply watched him tear it with his teeth like a caveman, telling myself that I’d just done this thing for him or that thing for him, and he can by golly manage to do this one thing for himself.
Remember the scene in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane where the mean sister, Bette Davis, brings a covered dish to the sweet sister, Joan Crawford, who’s in a wheelchair; and how, when Bette Davis lifts the lid, she sadistically displays her invalid sister’s roasted parakeet? I can still hear my mother’s gasp. The whole time David was fretting about his shoulder, I identified with Bette Davis. I didn’t channel her, but I understood where she was coming from.
When we were running errands and ran into someone we knew, they’d first ask David how he was doing, then they’d turn to me and ask how I was doing, showing unexpected sympathy for a reluctant caregiver.
“I’ve discovered that I’m a horrible person,” I answered truthfully. “I resent driving him to his medical appointments, which are an hour away, and I’m mad that ivy’s crawling up our house and trees and he’s unable to cut it back, and apparently having shoulder surgery means you’re unable to put things away or clean up after yourself.”
Appalled by my candor, they retract their sympathy from me and return it to David.
“I knew how she was when I married her,” he explained with a shrug.
We got through it and the whole process took less than six weeks, though it felt like months. David feels great and achieves a higher range of motion daily, but if he starts talking about pain in the other shoulder, I think I’m going to leave the country for a while.
David doing his physical therapy using a pulley system. Before the surgery he couldn’t lift his arm higher than his chest.
A complicated sling.
And for no reason other than she’s beautiful, here’s my granddaughter, Clementine.
