The Big Move

Life Between the Turning Points

Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, Ruth Ray Karpen, Helen Q. Kivnick

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780253020734
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Gérontologie

"A fascinating attempt to marry personal experience with academic analysis to help us all reconceive of one option for later-life living." — The Huffington Post When her husband's ill health forces them to move into an assisted living facility, Anne M. Wyatt-Brown suddenly finds herself surrounded by elderly residents. In this lively and provocative collection, other distinguished gerontologists reflect on Anne's moving account of her transition to becoming a member of a vibrant and sociable community that offers care-giving support, while encouraging her to pursue her own interests, including exercising, reviewing articles for scholarly journals, serving on committees, and singing. By redefining notions of care and community, undoing the stigmas of aging, and valuing the psychological factors involved in accepting assistance, this volume provides a bold new framework for thinking about aging, continuing care, making the big move to a retirement community, and living with vitality in the new environment. "We have very few accounts of gerontologists who have grown old, and never before a memoir by a gerontologist who moved into a long-term care facility. This book is not only a first, but is a remarkable and riveting account of challenges all of us must contemplate... memorable and compelling." —Rick Moody, retired Vice President for Academic Affairs, AARP "Readers will be drawn to this book for its clarity and candidness. It will appeal to people of all ages, but especially to the large cohort of readers aging into later life and facing important choices about their own care and that of their partners." —Barbara Frey Waxman, author of To Live in the Center of the Moment

Annotated Bibliography of Further Reading

We offer the following additional readings related to residential options in later life, including retirement communities, nursing homes, continuing-care retirement communities, staying “in place” in one’s own home, and living with adult offspring.

I. FICTION

(a chronological list compiled by Margaret Morganroth Gullette)

Who would have suspected there are already so many novels with late-life characters living, by choice or otherwise, in new domestic settings? Many writers use the living conditions of this age-based minority as a way of dramatically including material about desire, comradeship, and romance; serious social issues (power of attorney, elder fraud, assisted suicide, bureaucratic domination, ageist microaggressions, overmedication, the ageism of young children); philosophical themes (respect, autonomy, privacy, and personal/sexual freedom, personal authority, dignity); social class and poverty; and psychological issues (loneliness, boredom, mourning, conflicts with adult offspring over money, neglect, or the infliction of care). In many novels, disability becomes a nondefining attribute; “frailty” and cognitive impairment become less fearful. Dying—known in administrative offices as “turnover”—seems not to provoke fear, but rarely occurs.

These novels are chronologically ordered because social and literary history influence writers. (The age at which they choose to write about old age may also be of interest.) More big-move novels have been published in recent decades, as the Age of Longevity bumps into Medicaid and the for-profit “care home,” representing “untroublesome, steady investment in what’s bound to be a growth industry,” as a Joan Barfoot character observes. Overtly or subtly, many novels are protest literature. Yet there is little about caregivers’ wages or state regulation of quality of care.

The books chosen here vary widely in style: some are highly praised literary fiction, others beach reading. Eccentricity or profundity abound, sometimes together between the same covers. Like World War II movies with one soldier of each ethnicity, the care community is a melting pot. More instances than one might expect are popular genre fiction—including the romance, featuring old people instead of young adults—another age-niche market. Although the subjectivity of older-adult protagonists agents would seem to be guaranteed (through dialogue, diaries, letters, or reported thoughts), this list excludes novels with a heavy ratio of backstory, because it implies that old adults have only memories rather than current interests, activities, and opinions. And some of these characters are just “real characters”: cutesy cardboard.

Do the protagonists consider themselves “inmates,” “residents,” “tenants,” or on the lam from the system? The “homes” tend to be one of two kinds. One, in which authorities survey, demean, and control the inmates, is the grim total institution. In the words of Ulla Kriebernegg, who is writing the first critical book about this literature, they are “detention centers for rebellious older characters to escape from” if they can. The other kind, where administrators are courteous and the food is good, is the conjoint living option with sociability, adventure, marriage, and psychological/moral development on offer. Many fantasies and actualities crisscross across the list.

There is no easy answer if your question is “What should I do?” except perhaps Robert Frost’s “Provide, provide.”

Austin, Jane. 1815. Emma. London: John Murray.

Not usually thought of as concerned with aging-in-place, this canonical novel of ethical development gives its young heroine not just singleness, nosiness, and a taste for matchmaking, but also a gentle valetudinarian father to care for—a parent easily bored, with fixed ideas, refusing anything unfamiliar, in a society where the word senility is never used and daughters and upright people carefully protect wealthy old men. Just as Emma is at her wit’s end thinking she must live alone with her father for the rest of his life, their good and wealthy neighbor, Knightley, proves just how knightly he is by proposing and proposing to move himself into their house (not them into his): a fantasy romantic ending for 1815 or any era.

Lawrence, Josephine. 1934. Years Are So Long. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company.

Written before Social Security was passed, when Lawrence’s newspaper advice column often received questions such as “Do I have to support my parents?,” this story of Ma and Pa Lear in Depression-era America finds Lucy and George Cooper (who lose their house when his factory closes) miserably divided in old age because their adult offspring refuse to take in both of them. The novel, which justifies a daughter-in-law’s statement that “living to be old is the most dreadful fate in the world,” was made into a 1937 movie Make Way for Tomorrow, directed by Leo McCarey. The bad old days that the two works highlighted helped make Social Security for a long time the third rail of American politics.

Updike, John. 1958. The Poorhouse Fair. New York: Fawcett Crest.

Updike set his carefully crafted debut novella, published when he was only twenty-six years old, on a single day in rural New Jersey’s “Diamond County Home for the Aged” in order to focus on power relations and concepts of virtue in action among three characters: the coldly punctilious prefect, Conner; an irascible knee-jerk rebel, Gregg (age seventy); and a former teacher, Hook (ninety-four), who has survived his children and knows “how to be old.” A true elder of illimitable calm, thoughtful speech, physical grace, and sensitivity to the pain of others, Hook’s fine character and good health reflect Updike’s admiration of his grandparents and his own interests in the atom bomb, President Buchanan, and ideas of heaven. Although nothing much happens at first—a cat is shot, the fair seems rained out—when the rain abates, a group of inmates gleefully flings small stones at Conner. He blames Hook, commits an act of petty tyranny against him, and is forgiven where the prefect had prided himself on forgiving. Since the 1950s, many writers far from old have also seen the rich possibilities in making an old-age “home” the setting for fiction.

Laurence, Margaret. (1964) 1993. The Stone Angel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hagar Shipley at ninety, with a tricky heart and a touchy pride, but a gift for first-person storytelling, has a current task: to stay in her own home after having mistakenly given it to her son and his wife, who, with the help of a doctor and a priest, are herding her toward an assisted-living placement from which people leave only “feet first.” The suspense of the narrative depends on her attempts to escape this fate: when speech fails, by running away to live rough in an abandoned cannery. Interspersed with this tense material, Margaret Laurence gives Hagar a long autobiography of tribulation—set in the fictional Canadian countryside she calls Manawaka—about her childhood, rash marriage, childbirth and child-rearing, escape in midlife from her uncouth husband, and return to his Depression-era farm when he is dying. In this novel, which is more about character and late-life development than ageism, Hagar, turned to stone by grief, regret, and inability to express joy with anyone—has an epiphany in the hospital that enables her to accomplish the only two “truly free” things she has ever done.

Sarton, May. 1973. As We Are Now. New York: W. W. Norton.

This is the most angry, helpless, and vengeful of all the nursing-homes-are-prisons novels. Caroline (Caro) Spencer, a seventy-six-year-old retired schoolteacher, intelligent, sensitive, and physically frail, who has been moved by relatives into a ghastly rural Maine “home” and subjected to humiliations and unrelenting cruelty by the woman owner, even for doing good to fellow inmates and trying to hold onto a little joy for herself. She winds up planning to burn down the institution and immolate herself, her captor, and everyone else in it. Without Caro Spencer’s meditations and her adroit struggles against servile meekness, forgetfulness, and madness, written in the perplexed first person of a diary, the novel might be unbearable reading. Publication resulted in shutting down the nursing home that motivated the writing and, Sarton once said, inspired younger readers to visit older relatives in such places.

Carrington, Leonora. 1996. The Hearing Trumpet. Boston: Exact Change. Original French published 1974.

Carrington, a British surrealist, produced this strange classic of fantasy fiction when she was in her middle years. It is the first-person narrative of Marian Leatherby, a nearly deaf, bearded, and bewigged 92-year-old woman with a healthy mother of 110 and one impractical bosom friend. The novel begins at the point when the family locks Marian up in an unconventional, castle-like nursing home, “Santa Brigida,” with a potential coven of witty, rebellious, and adventurous older women. A compendium of antiageist dialogues directed in part against the operators, Dr. and Mrs. Gambit, the novel segues into slapstick scenes of telepathy, a plot to outwit the Gambits’ poisoned food, an earthquake, goddesses, and other divertissements.

Somers, Jane [pseud. for Doris Lessing]. 1983. The Diary of a Good Neighbor. In The Diaries of Jane Somers. New York: Vintage.

Janna, a well-to-do and rather selfish romance novelist, writes a first-person story about taking care of, then learning how to care for, and not being afraid of, a desperately poor woman who develops cancer. Maudie Fowler, who at first impression is “an old witch,” “trembling with pride and dignity,” lives in a sordid rent-controlled basement flat in London. Despite the travails of her disease, she wills herself to die at home. Along the way, she teaches Janna enough social history to enable her to upgrade her writing skills.

Wilder, Effie Leland (and, uncredited, Laurie Ellen Klein). 1995. Out to Pasture (But Not Over the Hill): A Short Novel. Carmel, NY: Guideposts.

Having lived nine years in a rural Presbyterian continuing-care community in South Carolina, eighty-five-year-old Wilder wrote this sweet-natured debut novel as a first-person diary-cum-letters by a seventy-eight-year-old woman full of her own opinions. She writes about a group of mainly idealized coresidents who seem to have few care needs, but who have “tiny adventures.” They do good deeds for one another and the needy staff and keep it light about “becoming flaky,” needing to cry, or dying. Wilder then wrote others in the series, including Over What Hill? (Notes from the Pasture).

Munro, Alice. 2002. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories. New York: Vintage.

This is Nobel Prize–winner Munro’s subtle short story (first published in 1999, when she was sxity-eight) about jealousy, definitions of marital fidelity, and memory loss. An Ontario nursing home is represented as a sociable place to meet new people and form new relationships. Fiona Andersson moves into a care facility, the comfortable, light-filled “Meadowlake,” where she loses all memory of her formerly unfaithful husband, Grant. She becomes deeply attached to another man who is there only temporarily. Munro’s focus is on Grant’s behavior to make his wife’s life satisfying in her new state, which involves doing what it takes to ensure she can see the new object of her affections. The story was made into a movie, Away from Her (2006), with Julie Christie as Fiona.

Weldon, Fay. 2002. Rhode Island Blues. New York: Grove Press.

In this clever bagatelle, the much-admired English feminist, Fay Weldon (age sixty-nine when she wrote the book), locates her rich, oft-widowed, tart-tongued eighty-ish protagonist, Felicity Moore, in settings where she or her grand-daughter Sophia can observe and rebut a rash of unashamedly greedy, controlling ageists, starting with the profit-sharing doctor and the jeering Nurse Dawn, who run Felicity’s luxurious Rhode Island community, the “Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement.” By the end, both Sophia and Felicity have found true love. After wise pages about courtship and love in late adulthood, Felicity moves out of the broken Bowl to marry a seventy-two-year-old gambling addict she met at a funeral who enjoys sex as much as she does and is not after her Utrillo art work.

Edgerton, Clyde. 2004. Lunch at the Piccadilly: A Novel. New York: Ballantine Books.

This novel, by a prolific North Carolina comic writer, is almost farcical in its stereotyping of narrator Carl, a little man with a high voice who rarely dates, and his aunt Lil Olive, ensconced at the Rosehaven Convalescence Center and yearning to drive anywhere but Listre, North Carolina. Lil Olive provides not one but two scenes of preposterous driving behavior, one ending in a police pickup. Still, Carl is grateful to and genuinely cares for his only remaining relative and is fearful of the silence he will be left with when she dies. He spends a lot of time socializing with Lil and her friends. The many scenes of old women’s verbal silliness and wit end in the composition of songs by two men. Some readers think the novel has “memorable characters”; others complain that it’s just about “little old ladies and their zany adventures.”

Barfoot, Joan. 2009. Exit Lines. London: Phoenix.

A novel about planning suicide in later life, the story is located in a relatively well-run upscale assisted-living facility, the “Idyll Inn,” where former Children’s Aid social worker Ruth Friedman, seventy-four, widowed and childless, suffering only from osteoporosis with no worse diagnosis, has found three mutually supportive friends. In the twenty-first–century Age of Longevity, “rational suicide” in fiction needs to be plausible, but Ruth’s plan to die with her friends’ help on her seventy-fifth birthday is undermotivated until a few pages from the end. Conversation and indirect speech allow us to follow the thinking of the other three about euthanasia, suffocation, and God, before each improbably agrees to assist. The prize-winning Canadian novelist Joan Barfoot (sixty-three when she published Exit Lines) wrote this before Canada passed an assisted dying law in 2014. The novel seems committed to resolutions, but its suspense about the value of living to Ruth suggests that despite Canada’s cradle-to-grave health care system and the availability of hospice at the end of life, something in Western culture makes aging-into-the Fourth-Age seem more frightening than dying.

Casares, Oscar. 2009. Amigoland. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

“Amigoland” is the unfriendly Brownsville, Texas, nursing home whose non-Spanish-speaking director refuses dinner to Don Fidencio, ninety-one, when he declines to wear a bib. Fidencios’s seventy-year-old brother Celestino and his fortyish sweetheart, Socorro, soon arrive to spring him. They light out for the territory—their grandfather’s property in Mexico. This is a fifty-five-year-old writer’s debut novel about independent old men and succoring women that dares to stay mostly in the present, with Fidencio recounting the symptoms and bodily indignities that lead him on the short but difficult road trip to the truth that “he had escaped one prison only to discover that there was no way of escaping his own failing body.” It ends just as Fidencio wishes, with distant family (a blind kinswoman and her grand-daughter) inviting him to stay for good.

Johnson, Todd. 2010. The Sweet By and By. New York: Harper.

This is another debut novel set (like Edgerton’s Lunch at the Piccadilly and Jill McCorkle’s Life after Life) in and around a North Carolina nursing home, with the narration dispersed among four characters talking in first-person Southern dialect. The two main characters are an African American nurse, Lorraine Bullock, who has affectionate relationships with the white residents (“I’ve seen every kind of old there is”), and a cranky purblind white resident, Margaret Clayton, in her nineties, who has increasing memory loss but thinks clearly, speaks humorously, describes her l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• One
• Two
• Three
• Afterword
• Epilogue
• Annotated Bibliography of Further Reading