Travels with My Aunt:
Through the Looking Glass of Nursing Homes

Published:
AboutTown, Summer 2013

What is sexier than an article about a nursing home? Maybe one about the joys of peas and musak? Chicken soup and walkers? The very subject gives Fifty Shade of Grey a whole new twist. But lately, the topic has a creepy, Alice-in-Wonderland, déjà vu quality to it. I can’t be the only one who finds herself increasingly engage in conversations about one’s aging relatives with the kind of interest and intensity previously reserved for disquisitions on toilet training, first grade teachers and teenage limit-setting.

“So, how is your father?” I say to my friend, knowing our talk Will lead towards that particular combination of wistfulness and schadenfreude reserved for those conversations about the very young and the very old. “He doesn’t recognize you at all?” I brighten inwardly, finding my own father’s shortcomings less dramatic by the comparison.

I suppose what lurks beneath these exchanges, as with those about one’s children, is the furtive weighing of nature vs. nurture. As relatives lose more of themselves to the wages of time I wonder both how much of the problem was always there (i.e. did I always endure) but more, is this what is in store for me and–even more than that, what can I do to protect myself, knowing the answer must be: more or less nothing.

In this cheerful spirit I turn to the subject of nursing homes. Actually, to one in particular–Ten Broeck Commons in Lake Katrine, just outside of Kingston. In my case, the relative who has forced my acquaintance with this extraordinary place is not my father or mother (both octogenarians and living at home, thank you very much) but my mother’s much younger half sister. Some months ago a perfect storm of terrible luck, bad judgement and medical accident left her, at the age of 62, a total invalid–confused, disoriented and completely unable to care for herself.

I will not goin into details about the initial part of her story. Suffice it to say that my aunt’s initial residency at a nursing home somewhere in the Bronx would reinforce anyone’s most nightmarish fears about ending up in a nursing home somewhere in the Bronx. After several months of visiting her in a room with peeling lime green paint and a fuzzy television blaring Jeopardy, my mother and I knew we had to do something to improve the situation, although I think I mostly believed then that the despair I felt while visiting her was endemic to the nature of the place, not to its particular brand of decrepitude.

Since my aunt had spent her entire adult life in Manhattan, moving her near Rhinebeck had not been on our minds. When it turned out that getting her into a good nursing home in Manhattan was roughly as competitive as getting one’s child into prep school, I reconsidered. It was then that I remembered Ten Broeck Commons and its lovely fresh-faced Director, Kathryn Romaguera, with whom I had felt several years earlier an unrelated professional matter. The place is a low-lying, nondescript, 1960s structure providing skilled nursing and rehabilitation services to up to 258 patients (“residents”).

Ten Broeck Commons was opened in 1993 by two businessmen who reportedly decided to put their business savvy to the challenge of opening a nursing home fit for the ones they loved. In my prior life as someone oblivious to nursing homes as a lace to which anyone I actually know would succumb, I had only vague memories of my daughter having sung there in a school concert, and having felt uncomfortable, frankly, at how old everyone was.

What is extraordinary about Ten Broeck Commons is not its grounds (though they are clean, well maintained and perfectly nice), but the people who work there. Meet Mary O’Haire, a nurse at Ten Broeck for just over three years and, most serendipitously, assigned to my aunt’s unit. If there is a truth to the law of karma and its position that happiness received can be measured by happiness bestowed, then my aunt engaged in both very bad and very good acts during her life. How else can one explain the tragic peculiarity of a young life in need of a nursing home along with the good fortune of ending up in this one?

About my earlier confession of discomfort at being around “old people”: Mary O’Haire might say (as she has said to others) “Shame on you, Rachel for seeing only the wheel chair, and not the person sitting in it.” I knew that Mary was special the first time I met her, when she recounted to me stories from my aunts childhood and I realized that she had managed to engage in more meaningful conversations with my mother’s half sister than I had been able to in have in months. The thing nobody wants is pity, she said. If you treat her like the person she always was, or like the best version of the person she is, she will respond in kind. I thought of the contrast displayed in my face when I visited, forehead furrowed and full of pain, and realized it wasn’t so surprising that my aunt stated back at me blankly in return.

When I told Ms. Romaguera about my plans to write this article, she told me that I should speak to their Reiki therapist Glenn, who also does hypnosis, guided imagery, chakra balancing and energy healing with the patients at Ten Broeck, including my aunt. Glen is part of Ten Broeck’s recently initiated complementary and alternative medicine program, which utilizes naturopathic practices not generally associated with western medicine and which also includes music, light, oil and aroma therapy, as well as myofascial release.

Glenn told me the same thing that Mary had–that people want to be treated as human beings without pity. My patients at Ten Broeck are on their own journey, he told me, and my role is to make this journey as comfortable as possible. Your aunt knows something about non-traditional medicine, he commented nonchalantly. I thought of my aunt in her former life as a non-invalid, incense wafting around her apartment decorated with stone Buddhas and meditation pillow. If you only knew, I thought, and then I realized that, somehow, he did.

When entering Mother Earth grocery store last week after a visit to Ten Broeck Commons, I saw a man leaving who was in his 60s, boyish looking and very familiar. As I walked up to the checkout clerk to verify my hunch with the young employee, the older customer in line affirmed it: “John Sebastian,” he said– “of the Lovin’ Spoonful,” he told the checkout clerk.

I turned back to the parking lot and watched John Sebastian–singer/songwriter of such amazing anthems of the 60s as “Summer in the City,” and “Do You Believe in Magic” and one of the rock and roll idols of my youth–rolling his grocery cart though the bleak February parking lot towards his car. In her wilder days, my aunt had had an affair with Jim Morrison, founder of the Doors. Invoking the lyrics from one of their sons, I thought to myself, “No one gets out of here alive.” While I never imagined considering the works “Jim Morrison” and “nursing home” in the same paragraph, let alone lifetime, I must say th that places like Ten Broeck exist to help us make that journey from here to there.