“My Lonely Room” by Jerry Cordeiro

My mother’s family has produced an uncanny number of recluses.  For example, my Aunt Virginia spent three-quarters of her youth holed up in her room in a rocking chair listening to the same Barbara Streisand albums over and over and over again.  Eventually, she transitioned into a halfway house for mentally ill, which required her to coexist with others, but she later was liberated to a subsidized apartment where she resumed her Emily Dickinson like existence. Three people besides her immediate family attended her funeral. [1]

Virginia at a New Years Eve party in 1964

Her father, whom we called Kiki, also retreated almost full-time to his bedroom.  There he listened to the radio (Paul Harvey, baseball games) or played the ukulele while crooning Hawaiian songs and/or yodeling. In his later years, he took his meals in that room where he stacked dirty plates on the floor next to the door for my grandmother to retrieve and wash after he had consumed the country meals she prepared and delivered.

In his sixties, Kiki began acting oddly, putting his alarm clock upside down on his bedside table, mowing the lawn at five a.m.  Eventually he was placed in a home in Columbia called Crafts-Farrow.  I was in college in Columbia at the time, so I borrowed my girlfriend’s car to visit him.  I met him in a large room where other patients and family members milled around.

He immediately recognized me and started relating hard-to-believe tales of the abuse he was suffering.  He said, “Rusty, help me escape. Ask them if we can go for a walk; then we can ride away.  Just let me out on the side of the road.  You’ll never have to see me again.”

I explained that he’d get better if he stayed there. As I was leaving, I asked a fat lady at a desk near the door to keep an eye on him, explained that he was planning to escape, and she let out a maniacal, unhinged laugh.  Ends up she was a patient herself.

The good news is that he did get better and returned to Summerville and the house and [mocking cough] enjoyed a much better attended memorial service.

His son, my Uncle Jerry, worked on a spy ship tracking Soviet missile launches and had purchased the house where they lived.  When he retired, he also spent the majority of his time alone in his room, which was more like a suite, on the opposite end of the house from his father.  My grandmother had her own room, so essentially, you had this nuclear family who had little to do with each another living together in their separate cells.

My grandmother was the exception.  She spent her days in the living area watching television from dawn until the Indian test pattern shut things down after The Tonight Show starring Jack Paar and later Johnny Carson. One spring when I was in grad school, I visited and was almost blown out of the door by the hotness blasting from a gas heater even though the temperature outside was in the seventies.  Obviously, though not ensconced in her room, she didn’t get outdoors very often.

My mother, on the other hand, was extroverted and vivacious. She was the only sibling to have children. In the summers, she took us to the Curve In Pool or the beach and loved yard work.

Although I’m not geared for extended periods of solitude, I can appreciate its appeal. In my case, I’d opt for a darkened room with no radio and no Streisand, just a grandfather clock and a never-ending supply of camphor-soaked handkerchiefs in honor of Faulkner’s Mrs. Caroline Compson. I’d lay the handkerchiefs upon my furrowed forehead as the clock audibly ticked away seconds and marked with chimes the quarter hours and knelled away the hours — one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve — while the planet rotated and revolved its way into my oblivion.

“Hey, Wes, have any plans for retirement?”

“Yeah, I plan to take it easy.  Hey, know where I might be able to cop some camphor?”

[1]You can read about how he disposed of her ashes here.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is

WB Yeats

Gustave Klimt: Old Man on His Deathbed 

One of the coolest speeches concerning the decrepitude of old age is the Duke’s contempto mundi screed in Measure for Measure, delivered to poor Claudio who has (to use guidance counsellors’ dearest cliché´) made a bad choice.

He’s impregnated his fiancée.

Not a capital crime, you muse.  Well, fornication hadn’t been until the Duke’s successor Angelo took over the government and started enforcing every law on the books, no matter how ancient or unjust.  Addressing Claudio on the eve of his supposed execution, the Duke offers some words of recompense for a life cut short (and a rather lurid peek into a future none of us wants to consider):

If thou [old person] art rich, thou’rt poor;

For, like an ass whose back with ingots bows,

Thou bear’st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee. Friend hast thou none;

For thine own bowels,[1] which do call thee sire,

The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum,

For ending thee no sooner. Thou hast nor youth nor age;

But, as it were, an after-dinner’s sleep,

Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms

Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich,

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,

To make thy riches pleasant [. . .]

Yeah, but!  There’re still crossword puzzles, unread novels, Fletcher Henderson recordings, sunsets, that majestic roof fretted with golden fire, Shakespeare himself . . .

***

Nevertheless, I, too, admit I’d rather die than get shipped off to a nursing home.  Luckily, my late wife Judy’s parents avoided that fate as did my daddy and my mama (and both sets of grandparents). My wife Caroline’s father is still going strong alone at eighty.

Unfortunately, Judy’s grandmothers ended up in a “home,” and each trip down to St. Simons when Birdie and Gramma were among the quick included the resiquite visit to the motel-like care facilities where they languished.

Although the two women had been nothing alike before their relocation – Birdie a gardener and world traveler, Gramma sedentary, a knitter –  afterwards, their conversation consisted of the same broken record, a litany of complaints: stolen jewelry, bad food, bodily decay, a life not worth living.

Still, they appeared to be in much better shape that the wheel-chair bound specimens parked on the front terrace as you walked in. It was like something out of Brueghel or Bosch: skeletons, twisted into fetal position, oblivious, with open maws, or others, non-comatose, but wild-eyed and confabulating, living a hallucination.

Breughel: The Beggars

Terrible to witness, but a brave soul must stare down horror if he or she wants to go wide-eyed and laughing to the grave.

* * *

No one –  no matter how successful or accomplished – can be assured that he or she won’t end up warehoused in some facility.

Among the famous names to have been shunted [at Motion Picture Country House] are Johnny Weissmuller, best known for playing Tarzan, and Oscar-winning actress Mary Astor who was remembered for sitting aloofly at her own dinner table.

The actor DeForest Kelley – Dr McCoy from Star Trek – spent his last days enjoying the picturesque palm trees and topiary. Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American to win an Oscar, for her portrayal of “Mammy” in Gone with The Wind, and director Stanley Kramer, who was nominated for nine Oscars, were also residents.

To think that Tarzan spent his last days cooped up in a Hollywood nursing home!  Gazing at picturesque palm trees and topiary ain’t gonna cut it for someone who swung through the jungle on vines.

Then there’s Samuel Beckett, who ended up in a Paris maison de repos.

About a year ago, after falling in his apartment, he moved to a nearby nursing home, where he continued to receive visitors. He lived his last year in a small, barely furnished room. He had a television set on which he continued to watch major tennis and soccer events, and several books, including his boyhood copy of Dante’s ”Divine Comedy” in Italian.

On July 17 this year, his wife died and he left the nursing home to attend the funeral. Late this year, after he became ill, he was moved to a hospital. There are no immediate survivors.

Damn, Beckett dies in a Beckett play.

***

Who better to have the last word than Philip Larkin?

Perhaps being old is having lighted rooms

Inside you head, and people in them, acting

People you know, yet can’t quite name; each looms

Like a deep loss restored, from known doors turning,

Setting down a lamp, smiling from a stair, extracting

A known book from the shelves; or sometimes only

The rooms themselves, chairs and a fire burning,

The blown bush at the window, or the sun’s

Faint friendliness on the wall some lonely

Rain-ceased midsummer evening. That is where they live:

Not here and now, but where all happened once.

 

[1]In my case, Harrison and Ned

Breughel The Beggars

It’s just a matter of time before officially mandated euphemisms, words like handicapped, for instance, acquire the connotative stench of the word they were chosen to replace, in this case crippled.  The linguist Steven Pinker calls the phenomenon “Euphemism Treadmill.”

Back to ambulatory disabilities. In the Seventies, well-meaning advocates declared the word crippled cruel and decided the word handicapped was more humane. They insisted that handicapped replace crippled, airbrushing, as it were, an unpleasant sound associated with a sad state – withered limbs, club feet, braced legs, thick-souled shoes.1

When you picture a cripple, what do you see?

I see a ratty Victorian coat draped across the shoulders of a stooped Dickensian character with a cane.

Now close your eyes and picture a handicapped person.

For me, he or she is wheelchair bound.  However, unlike crippled, the word handicapped covers a much wider range of maladies; it’s not limited to problematic arms legs or or spines.  Elmer Fudd and Sylvester the Cat have speech handicaps, for example.

The word crippled is crisp, a trochee, the double p-sounds limping. It comes to us from two words of German origin, crypel and crēopel related to the word creep.

Handicapped is less specific, more metamorphic, having originated, not in the distant mists of Anglo-Saxon barbarity but in the 17th Century describing strange pastime called “hand in cap.”

Here’s the OED’s account:

Mid 17th century: from the phrase hand in cap; originally a pastime in which one person claimed an article belonging to another and offered something in exchange, any difference in value being decided by an umpire. All three deposited forfeit money in a cap; the two opponents showed their agreement or disagreement with the valuation by bringing out their hands either full or empty. If both were the same, the umpire took the forfeit money; if not it went to the person who accepted the valuation. The term handicap race was applied (late 18th century) to a horse race in which an umpire decided the weight to be carried by each horse, the owners showing acceptance or dissent in a similar way: hence in the late 19th century handicap came to mean the extra weight given to the superior horse.

Handicapped spread from racetracks to golf courses and enjoys in the arena of sport non-pejorative connotations. It suggests the possibility of success despite a disadvantage, yet it, too, has fallen out of favor. Disabled person is now preferred over handicapped.

Would you rather be crippled or handicapped or disabled? No doubt one day disabled too will fall out of favor for some new attempt to soften the sense of the situation.

This phenomenon of euphemisms falling out of favor has a long history.

Take these deposed onetime legitimate descriptors of levels mental incapability.

Idiot, imbecile, moron.

For example, the blog Medium provides this succinct explanation of what these no longer clinical terms once meant.

1910, the Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and Feeble-Minded Persons adopted three classifications of people we know today as intellectually disabled, as defined by a newly invented way to measure intelligence we now call the IQ test. “Morons” were the most intelligent — they had IQs between 50 and 70. “Imbeciles” with IQs between 25 and 50 were the second level. Those below 25 would remain “idiots.”

Of course, the problem with these terms is that people started insultingly applying them to non-imbeciles, non-idiots, non-morons, so I can see why changing them made some sense. For example, HR McMaster, Trump’s former national security advisor, called his boss “an idiot,” as had White House chief of staff John Kelly, according to the Washington Post. Ousted Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “moron.” Although others have called Trump an imbecile – actress Sonam Kapoor, e.g., – I can’t find an example of one of his staff members employing the term. In addition, no one, to my knowledge, has called Trump “retarded,” (though Trump himself used that term to describe his former attorney general Jeff Sessions).

Maybe “mentally incapacitated” will survive. What an ineffective insult that term would make, a nerf insult, not suitable for a staccato attack during a road rage incident. “What the fuck you think you were doing, you fucking mentally incapacitated person, you?”
Although I would rather be handicapped than disabled, I’d prefer to be mentally incapacitated rather than imbecilic. I told my mother once after she chided me for using the word piss, that I’d bring in a jar of urine and a jar of piss, and if she could correctly label which was which, I’d never use the word piss ever again until the day I passed away or croaked.

[1]Yes, “air-brushing sounds” is indeed a mixed-metaphor. Cluck your tongues, you stepchildren of Freud!