I was at the old-age home (sorry, "retirement community") last week -- a place that gives me the creeps even though many of my friends and former colleagues seem to live there happily. (I'm on the waiting list but I hope that I'll never be constrained to move in.) I was there to share lunch with a 90-year-old friend. At the next table over (in the rather luxurious dining room) was a woman whom I knew slightly fifty years ago -- as a neighbor and as the mother of a Flatirons Elementary School tudent. She's 89, a widow, and still healthy, still attractive.
She (let's call her Ms. GK) initiated the conversation with this question. "Is your wife still alive?"
It wasn't the inquiry itself that took me aback. It was the casual way in which it was asked, with no more emotional resonance than, say, "do you want raisins in your cereal?" or, "is it raining outside?"
Which made me realize that Ms. GK -- and all her fellow denizens of the facility -- live in a world of "sole-survivors" where the deaths of spouses "were as plentie as Blackberries." Therefore, there is nothing noteworthy or remarkable for her to inquire about the status of a long time companion, especially when more than half of husbands and wives have already kicked the old bucket.
Nevertheless, the lack of emotion, the cold bloodedness, the absence of euphemism, of Ms. GK's question produced in me a "take stock" moment. Whether we are in or out of the institution, we are in the same ninth-decade world.
But I do hope that I myself do not become quite so matter-of-fact about the death of friends and family.
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