Old and Alone

...Instead of wallowing in them, Robey began to take notes on old age and to read books on aging...

...Depression and numbness alternated with anger and confusion...

...Yet a reader of any age can draw insight and even inspiration from her autobiographical account of her way of coping with widowhood, physical ailments, and new living arrangements...

...In this quiet place she sometimes "felt as if I were sitting under my own mental bodhi tree, learning the truth of egolessness...

...Growth it would be, not helplessness and despair and the injured sense of 'being done to' by fate...

...most are much less so...

...to live alone in their houses or apartments until they are no longer able to function independently, or to go into a nursing home...

...But the ancient and admirable system of keeping the elderly usefully employed for as long as they are able, and integrated into caring, interdependent, intergenerational communities (my own model would resemble a kibbutz), has yet to be developed in this country...

...Unless older people are able to stay under their own roofs and maintain a certain amount of independence (often at the cost of loneliness), they fear becoming a burden to the family of a relative or must adapt to segregation in a ghetto of idle old people...

...eventually the pain forced her to give up her work...

...Harriet Robey's ability to meet the challenges of old age is unique to her...

...She took this as a challenge: "Well then, all right...

...While courageous, individual ways of coping with age are worth knowing about and I'm grateful to Robey for her will and persistence in writing this book (though not to her publisher for changing the original title, A Late Lark), the general problem remains: the integration of the elderly into a more creative and caring social system...

...Aproblem that increasing numbers of us face, if we survive the vicissitudes of this nuclear era, is old age...

...A few people of Robey's age have been even more fortunate than she...

...There are a number of pleasant and busy retirement homes and villages, and many "senior citizens" seem to enjoy them...

...Actively undertaking to overcome her back pains rather than give in to invalidism and stereotypical old age, she went into the Boston Pain Unit for physical and mental therapy, then to a meditation retreat...

...Growth, at her age...

...She assessed her life, her marriage, and her parental relationships...

...Beyond the financial costs are the psychological ones...

...As her eyesight failed, she simplified her life, ridding it of all but the bare essentials...

...She disposed of her beloved car, a symbol of freedom, and gave most of her possessions to her children and grandchildren...

...She tried meditation, and the mantra that popped into her head was "growth...

...Her son installed a CB radio in her car, and she enjoyed this extension of her world...

...My bondage to the wheel of life and death is light...

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a free-lance writer and peace activist...

...Her grief softened, she began to appreciate her freedom and new things to be learned to sustain independence (even as a professional worker she had depended on her husband to deal with finances...

...At the suggestion of a psychiatrist friend, she eased her pain with marijuana...

...These options, except perhaps the first, require money that many older people do not have...

...The new balance she began to achieve was rocked, however, by a renewal of old back troubles...

...Concluding that none of the books on old age conveyed the feelings of the old, she decided to write her own book, "a first-person exploration of the dark continent of age by a traveler who knew the language...

...She does not attempt to speak for all old people, but from her own condition, "only of that which I knew firsthand, I who have adequate financial resources, who live alone enjoying solitude, with many descendants who come to me because they want to come...

...She moved from her country home to a more accessible and manageable condominium...

...Thus the choices open to most elderly people are to leave their own homes and live with relatives, usually a son or daughter...

...She found that women sixty-five or more, most of them widows like herself, are the fastest growing part of the population...

...It was then that she faced all the "horrors" of old age: idleness, feelings of use-lessness and purposelessness, physical incapacities, worries about cancer and total dependency...

...If their savings, pensions, or Social Security are insufficient, relatives, charitable institutions, or the state must provide the rest...

...When her husband died, Robey was seventy-five and still working as a psychiatric social worker...

...One is tempted to quote many passages from this book applicable to young and old, rich and poor...

...She had the good fortune to be able to resume her work and to share her grief with family, clients, and friends...

...Harriet Robey is an octogenarian who has the financial and psychological wherewithal to opt for maintaining her lonely independence, so the experiences she relates in There's a Dance in the Old Dame Yet are personal and of limited applicability...

...It is a problem mainly because the transient, profligate, individualistic, and youth-oriented nature of American society makes us ill-prepared to cope with it...

...Today the smell of my house is warm to me, the birds are fluttering around the feeder, and the refrigerator purrs...

...And in that little distance and in that repetition I know all the happiness I need to know, for I can now live immediacy without rattling the dice of the past or rolling out those of the future...

...But the loneliness persisted: "Though I remained quite whole at work, each day as I drove home I became half a person again, with a nasty empty riven feeling...

...to move to a retirement home...