Reinventing Care: Assisted Living in New York City

Epilogue

187 Epilogue Now sixty-one, I face with my twin brother and sister the problem of how to care for our parents. Most of our experiences are not much different from those of other adult children our age. Yet because it has influenced this book in so many subtle ways, it seems important to at least acknowledge the influence of our experience. Parents give us our first lenses for seeing the world. My parents’ experiences as frail elderly persons have also given me lenses for seeing long-term care. Yet those experiences can’t be understood, just as the facilities I have described in this book cannot be understood, outside of the context of their history. Nancy and Henry were born during World War I, a few blocks’ distance from each other in Catonsville, Maryland, but worlds apart. (My parents always insisted that we call them by their first names even as small children, a product of some utopian democratic vision fostered in the Depression that never quite caught on.) Nancy was born into Baltimore society, the product of the union of the rebellious daughter of a successful entrepreneur (or robber baron in the language of the time) and the son of a nineteenth-century utopian socialist community. The entrepreneur’s only mark on the twenty-first century is a toxic waste site, and the utopian community is now marked by only by a few piles of stone rubble in an upper-income housing development in Red Bank, New Jersey. Nancy’s uncle on her father’s side, Alexander Woollcott, terrorized New York City as a theater critic, radio personality, and participant in the vicious circle that met at the Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s. Other than the periodic revival of The Man Who Came to Dinner, a play parodying him, he also has left no mark. Henry was born into a working-class family in Catonsville; his father was a day laborer, and his mother died when he was eight. Two maiden aunts raised him and his four brothers. A diligent student, he was able to attend St. John’s College on a full scholarship and eventually receive a Ph.D. in psychology from Johns Hopkins. 188 Reinventing Care My emotional connection to my parents was formed at childhood bedtimes. Henry was a storyteller who would tell stories about his own childhood and his experience as a young man sailing to Galveston on an oil tanker. Sometimes he would make up stories that were elaborations of the pulp fiction he read as a child about heroic individuals who survived and flourished in the wilderness with nothing but “a pair of BVDs and a pen knife.” Nancy was a reader who loved the sound of language. She would read us poems and had a wonderful soothing way with the words even though as children we couldn’t begin to understand them. This was especially useful when I couldn’t fall asleep or was awakened by a nightmare. Henry got a permanent faculty position at Michigan State College in 1949, and we settled in East Lansing. Nancy started writing and eventually published four children’s books, mystery stories developed from some of our experiences as children. With other faculty who lacked housing in a rapidly expanding academic community, they formed a cooperative , purchased some farmland, hired an architect, and built, with the help of the sweat equity of the families involved, their own housing development. There was a closeness sparked by this cooperative effort. Neighbors, drawn from all parts of the United States and the world, felt nothing about dropping in unannounced on each other and organizing intergenerational pickup volleyball or touch football games and barbecues . Henry built his dream retirement house on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1970s, while land was still cheap and before it had become the visible destination of the rich and famous. Nancy’s grandfather had originated the island connection with the purchase of a summerhouse on Martha’s Vineyard in the 1920s. That house became known as “The House of Shattered Dreams.” His dream was that his expanding extended family would join him there in the summers. The dream shattered when they did. Two of Nancy’s three sisters ended up raising their families on the island, and it became a regular summer destination for us. Henry’s retirement house became an extension of Nancy’s grandfather ’s dream, a place for extended gatherings of family and friends. There were volleyball games, animated play with...