Black and White Cookie

When I come in, Dad is in his wheelchair watching a news program. I sit with him a while in the orange plastic guest chair. Then I take him down to the cafeteria and buy him a coffee.

He’s been watching the staff. Watching the residents.

“All of the doctors are white. The nursing staff are Black — from Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic. A male nurse from Senegal. Orderlies from Ghana. A mother and daughter who work as outside aides. It’s two populations,” Dad says. “Living inside separate culture bubbles. It creates misunderstandings.”

He gives me an example. “When a resident becomes agitated, a nurse comes in from a different socialization — she might say something like, ‘What you going on about?’ Or joke around, trying to tease the resident out of their distress.” In Jewish culture, he explains, teasing is used differently. The resident doesn’t understand. It creates more agitation. “They don’t speak the same body language. The same cultural language.”

“The staff need advocates,” he says. “The residents need advocates. No one is facilitating dialogue between them. I could help with that.”

He tells me about a nurse he’s spoken with. She works a second shift here — midnight to seven — after doing four hours as a home care nurse elsewhere. When she finishes her shift at the Hebrew Home, she goes home, makes breakfast for her children, gets them to school, sleeps until they come back.

“When do you sleep?” I asked her. “’Ach, it’s good,’” she said. “’I make breakfast for my children. I get them to school. I sleep after that. When they come home, I get up. We have an hour together before I have to go. It’s good.’”

Dad is quiet for a moment.

“She is not being paid enough to support a family in this city,” he says. “And she is taking care of me.”

He’s in full social worker mode, observing how things work. The day to day. Feeling for how he fits in — how he might help. He sips his coffee through a straw. Asks for a bite of the black and white cookie I added to our tray.

“This is how we treat our elders,” he says. “This is not natural. Not natural to throw unrelated people together in little cells of suffering. Not natural to set people aside into colonies of irrelevance.”

He pauses.

“It’s a prison,” he says.

I reach for his hand. I know this mode. When Dad goes professorial, when the words get big and the concepts get large, he’s feeling something he can’t say directly. All his life, this is how he’s moved through the hard stuff.

“People in nursing homes are a little bit dead,” he continues. “Their bodies are winding down. Their minds may become sclerotic. They sit and watch TV. No one knows what to do with them. Busy work, crafts, activities — all this energy, all this wisdom, wasting away.” He shakes his head. “We are an unwise society, full of hubris and youthful ignorance.”

“It starts with the children,” he says. “A little kid tells his mother, ‘Grandpa scares me,’ or ‘I don’t like the way Grandma smells,’ and instead of helping the child get comfortable with old people, the parents keep the child separate. ‘We don’t want to upset him,’ they think. But it’s a mistake. Keeping him separate, his fears are affirmed, his grandparent is further isolated, his child never has the real-life experience of aging — and when he grows up, it is that much more threatening. The young ones need the old ones as models. The old ones find true joy in the young ones.”

His eyes go soft. True joy, he repeats.

This is a scene from The End of Men, a book about my Dad and me.
Previous: Dad, The Buddha
Next: First Thanksgiving
Scene Index: here.

Want to support the work? Leave a comment. Share a chapter with a friend.

To receive the scenes by email, subscribe here.