Venture
Happy Days (and Nights) at Ye Olde
By Nancy Weber
A month until my Medicare birthday, and along with others of my vintage I’m looking for alternatives to mere dissolution and death. The favorite topic is the late-life commune, never mind that most of us flunked utopia the first time around.
My tenure in a commune lasted exactly one night in the summer of ’66, where a dozen of us fans of The Harrad Experiment — rented a house as the first step toward a New and Better Way. At our very first meeting, our bags not yet unpacked, a sister philosopher announced that she was writing her name on her spiced-apple yogurt, and she expected the rest of us to keep our hands off. “Let me get this right,” I said. “We’re going to share each other’s bodies, and one of our stated ambitions is to bust the mind-brain barrier and develop a group consciousness — but we have yogurt boundaries?”
The Dannon factor propelled me out of there the next morning. I ended up on a more conventional path — marriage, child, divorce; marriage, child, divorce — but I never renounced the dream of communal living. The computer rekindled my passion for dabbling in mind-merge. Although my kids are quite grown-up, and there’s now a bar in the playroom, I still want their friends and mine to hang out here. As for sleeping arrangements, I haven’t given up falling in love with men; I’ve given up falling out of love. Everyone’s too precious and perishable these days to be dismissed. We need our own private bedrooms and bathrooms and studies, not whole apartments or houses. Only the landlords and bankers benefit from the way most of us live. Why be jealous of anyone but Death, the ultimate monogamist?
One pal fancies congregate living on a lake or at the seaside, so we can sail into the sunset as we sail into the sunset. In a nod to the rock-’n’-roll years, he talks about the nostalgic up of taking our arthritis drugs together. Another friend sees a compatible bunch divvying up a Manhattan townhouse. When the Dakota opened, it had a communal dining room — couldn’t we do that too?
Variously we want fab guest quarters for children and grandchildren, restaurant-scope kitchens, gyms (but no stairs), a theater. In the positives, we differ; in the negatives, we are one. When we are no longer able to be more or less who we are now, when we go from merely old to actively dying, we don’t want to end as our parents have, or will: in assisted living or other commercial establishment among strangers, or at home with a healthy spouse who is then left in exhausted solitude. We want to be among friends, and we want a slew of professionals to ease the burden of our beloveds: doctors, nurses, lawyers, chefs, exercise gurus versed in decrepit anatomy.
Curious to my mind, no one mentions sex (or the lack thereof) in the game plan for the last innings. Darlings, better to talk about that now, don’t you think?
Given the givens, we late-life communards will need professional sex-mongers every bit as much as we will need diabetes-friendly pastry chefs. And let there be nothing but respect and gratitude for these geri-eroticists in black lace garter belts or bulging briefs. If they’re not doing the lord’s work, who is?
My parents had a beautiful marriage, 50 years long and strong. My father gallantly saw my mother to her end, breast cancer, and then retreated into arteriosclerosis and dementia. My brother and I could hardly bear the injustice of his sleeping his last sleep in a single, solitary bed. We got a life-size portrait of Rita Hayworth as Gilda, mounted it on poster board, and propped it against the wall he faced when facing a wall was about all he did. Even the starchiest nurses approved. Our mother would have thought it perfect, even though she gave Daddy a hard time for taking me to see Gilda instead of Tom and Jerry one afternoon when I was 4.
I can hardly wait. Sort of.
