Interior decoration: reality show in a retirement home

 

 I confess a slight obsession with property shows. (Question to myself: can any “obsession” be slight?) The Property Brothers, Love It or List It, International House Hunting, or anything to do with tiny houses—these fascinate me. Especially tiny houses. I dream of decorating one and then living in it. But reality tells me that if I find it challenging to manage our own two-room apartment of almost 600 square feet, a 300 square foot tiny house would do me in.

Anyway, one can dream.

If I had another life, I think I might have been an architect or an interior designer. I arrange rooms and decorate walls in my notebook. In my real apartment, I love picking things up and then putting them down in more pleasing places. I search to find just the right picture for that wall over the couch. I look forward to the day we can change out our old carpeting for some newer lovely flooring.

Right now, the retirement home is undergoing major changes to its interior design. It’s more about upgrading, easy maintenance, and safety than it is about beauty. The décor of the downstairs lobby has proved controversial. The carpet has been replaced with vinyl flooring, synthetic stuff made to look like wood. It’s water- and scratch proof, plus easy to clean. That’s practical. The walls that once served as a gallery for local artists now have permanent decorative art, with only one real picture by a real artist. The furniture is tastefully arranged to invite conversations. The administration tells us that all this is more attractive to potential residents. The Marketing Department had a large say in the design.

But when I sit in one of those tasteful chairs, why do I expect a nurse to enter and tell me the doctor will see me now?

Practicality and safety have replaced the old cozy hominess. I feel sad about it.

This week they’re redoing the floor on the 5^th floor hall. That’s where we live. As I sit here writing this, I can hear a machine just outside the bedroom wall. Today they’re tearing up the old carpeting, not only in the hall but also in our community lounge. We can come and go only when they aren’t working outside our door.

Hal thinks the old carpet has been here since the establishment’s foundation in 1962. Can that be? That would make it over 70 years old. That hardly seems possible, but there’s no doubt it’s old. So, scrape, scrape, scrape. Then the next two days will feature washing, glueing, and laying, you guessed it, vinyl flooring. It will probably look nice.

We residents of the 5^th floor family are especially concerned about how the lounge, our community living-room, will look. The old carpet was maroon with old-fashioned rose bouquets scattered over it, something from another century that I would never buy for my own living room. Even so, I’d grown used to it. It gave the whole room a warm cozy feel. Most of the furniture we found downstairs in the resale store. It was eclectic and comfortable, like a real living room that a real family would enjoy. Grandma could pleasantly fit in the corner chair.

Since so many of us are grandmas or grandpas, it worked for us. We used our lounge for community meetings, private conversations, a place to entertain guests, or somewhere to sit quietly and read a book. The puzzle table by the sliding glass doors was always occupied. We’re hoping the redecorated room will invite the same kinds of activities. But we’re all a bit nervous it won’t turn out like that.

(I’ll give a report in a couple of weeks. I hope I can eat my words. Yum yum.)

Of course our retirement home needs to be maintained and updated. The interior decoration needs to comply with government codes for safety. This is all for our benefit. So then why is it so hard to accept these kinds of changes? I don’t believe the myth that all old people resist change. That’s not so, as some of my more adventurous friends have convinced me. Maybe it’s that some changes are hard for some people, no matter their age.

Can the new (safe and practical) and the old (cozy and homelike) merge? Wait and see in a future episode of this somewhat exciting reality show. Property Brothers, move over!

 

[PS: The new book is out!]

The kaleidoscope of change

It’s a cliché to say that change is the one constant in life. Of course it is. We all know that. And we know that it’s our attitude to change that makes the difference. That’s common conventional wisdom.

But it’s easier said than done.

I sometimes think that the changes brought about by aging are the toughest to adapt to. Some days I don’t have a good attitude at all about those changes. I wonder who I am now.

This reminds me of a passage in Alice in Wonderland. I’m currently reading this book aloud with my friend Harriet who lives down in the Health Center. Harriet is 104 years-old and has been through more life changes than most of us. The time she’s in now is especially difficult. But she loves Alice and laughs in all the right places.

The passage describes some strange changes and their resultant identity crisis. Alice was a little girl, not an old woman and her dilemma had to do with magically changing sizes as she swallowed potions and ate cookies. She wrestles with change like most of us and wonders who she is now. In this scene she has just come in contact with a caterpillar.

The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence; at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.

“Who are you? said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, “I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.”

“What do you mean by that” said the Caterpillar sternly. “Explain yourself!”

“I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,” said Alice, “because I’m not myself, you see.”

“I don’t see,” said the Caterpillar.

“I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,” Alice replied very politely, “for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.”

Being so many different sizes in a lifetime is confusing. Sizes, shapes, roles, tasks, relationships, responsibilities, circumstances—it’s a kaleidoscope and its constant spinning makes me so dizzy somedays that I can’t stand up straight. (Is that why so many of us use walkers and wheelchairs?) Which of all these selves and sizes is the real me? Is there such a creature? Is it even important to know?

The tiredness aside, most days I feel almost young and vital on the inside, much the same person I’ve always been. But then I look in the mirror.

I was startled this morning
to see a strange old woman
staring at me from the bathroom mirror.
Who is she? How did she get here?
Should I pull the emergency cord
by the toilet? Am I safe?
Such white hair!
Those lines around the eyes!
Those spots! Poor thing.
Even as I pitied her,
something about the pathetic look
she gave me made me laugh.
She laughed back.
In that very instant, I recognized
her, accepted her, and loved her.
Just as she is.

I realize that all the changes of my life come together to help make me who I am today. The changes are real and I’m at a different phase of life with its own challenges, but I’m still me. I’ll keep changing, but my core self, the essence of the person created by God, stays. It’s like the woman in Lisa Genova’s novel, Still Alice, who suffers the drastic changes of Alzheimer’s, but her family recognizes that she’s still the person they’ve always known and loved. She’s still Alice. And I’m still Nancy. And you are still your own unique self.

Joan Chittister in her book The Gift of Years writes that “We don’t change as we get older—we just get to be more of what we’ve always been.”

I love that passage in the book of Revelation that says that the person who remains victorious in all the challenges of life will receive from God “a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it” (Rev. 2:17). I’ve wondered if that personal name is God finally telling us the essence of our identity.

The search for identity, extending through the later years, is ongoing, perhaps until God tells us who we are. In the meantime, there’s a better way. We are to love our neighbor as ourself. Maybe these retirement years give us the leisure to appreciatively explore and affirm the essence of our neighbor—whether spouse, adult child, grandchild, or friend. Although we will never know the secret word written on their stone, we might come closer to genuinely knowing another person. What a good way to spend our time.

That’s a challenge for any age. 

Shifting family circles

Hal and I picked up our grandson at 2:00 yesterday morning and drove him to the airport. We hugged him and sent him off to Morocco where he will spend the next two years. We were all a little sad, but I could see both sorrow and excitement dancing in his eyes.

This comes at the end of a two-year exploratory period that’s seemed like a roller coaster ride. Having graduated from the university several years ago with an engineering degree and a desire to serve God and people in some needy place overseas, questions presented themselves. Where? Doing what? With which organization? For how long? The search took him down some interesting trails, all while he was holding jobs in the engineering field that put his salary at a level beyond what we’d ever earned. But he’s not in it for the money.

So now he’s off. I’m happy for him, but I’ll not deny the sense of loss I feel.

And this is not the first time I’ve felt this way.

Twenty-seven years ago, I discovered how important grandchildren were. It was like a new world opening up with these little critters playing an extremely important role. Of course, we were thrilled back when our own kids were born. But we were also terrified, not at all certain how we were supposed to carry out this parenthood thing. So much responsibility. As the years passed, we grew up alongside our kids. We learned by going where we had to go.

But with grandkids, it’s different. We’re already grown-ups (supposedly). And we’re not the ones responsible to bring up these marvelous creatures. We get to love them, play with them, spoil them, and on it goes.

Except when it doesn’t. Life, of course, is more complicated than that and all families are unique.  As Tolstoy famously said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Even relatively happy families have their rough spots (or years). Not everyone gets along with their grown kids and grandkids.

But I’m reflecting on me, my grandkids, and loss.

Hal and I lived abroad when our seven grandkids were small. Four of them lived in Africa! We made a commitment to spend time with the African grandkids at least once every two years, and as often as we could with the three in Oregon. When we were together it often felt that we grandparents were the center of their world. They fought over who got to sit by us, pestered us to read the same books over and over, and gobbled up our attention as if they had been starving. It was exhilarating. And exhausting. We were the exhausted ones. Not them.

All that changed, of course, with the onset of adolescence. We probably never really were the center of the world for them, and we definitely were not when they hit the teen years. Peer relationships took over, as is normal and right. But I’ll admit, I missed all the focused devotion. It actually hurt my feelings when I’d visit and hear, “Hi, Grandma! Bye, Grandma! I’m going to spend the night at my friend’s.” I felt loss, the loss of my “special grandma” role.

Families keep changing. Kids grow up, get married, and allegiances re-form. Nuclear families spit like the atom and some particles get lost in space. At extended family gatherings Hal and I sometimes feel like relatives rather than family.

This for me is one of the scariest paths in this old growth forest called aging. I’ve struggled off and on all my life with the sense of being on the periphery. Now it sometimes feels like I’m losing the connections that tell me who I am and to whom I belong.

Just another opportunity to grow up, I guess. Maturity is a weird goal. When it seems like I’m getting close, something happens (or some grandkid hurts my feelings) and the goal posts stretch off into the distance again. But the Spirit keeps reeling me in, reminding me that Christ is the center, and that I belong to him.

(I realize that I’m switching my metaphor from football to fishing. But—oh, well. At my age, I get to do that.)

About those grown-up grandkids, I’ve noticed something weird and wonderful. The relationships keep changing, but now that we’ve begun to relate as adult to adult, it’s a new level of friendship, a greater sweetness, and a whole lot more fun. I can’t wait until they have babies and I get to do it all over again. Maybe by that time I will finally know what I’m doing.

So—Aren’s off to Morocco. I’m going with him in my prayers. I can’t wait to see what God will do in and through his life. I’m so glad I get to be one of his grandparents.