A Way of Ending

A Many Voices Guest Post by Peggy Braun

Familiarity can be comforting and also imprisoning.  During the three years of Covid isolation I had become used to mostly staying in my familiar home, my familiar living room, my familiar porch.  Coming to a Continuing Care Community at age 88 upended all that.  Now I was in a new space, much less space, new people—all old and lots of them—new routines.  At first I felt quite lost.  Where now was my “home?”  I grieved my old life as thin as it had become in those three years and my beloved home with its view of an Audubon preserve.  Would there ever be a home again?  When I saw friends from the “outside,” I was so grateful for their familiarity.  We knew each other.  I knew what we loved to talk about, I knew what we found funny, I knew what activities we enjoyed together and most importantly, I knew they cared about me and I cared about them.

Here I walked down long halls, took elevators.  Many people smiled and said hello and introduced themselves but I didn’t know any of them.  The Staff were wonderful.  Your light is broken?  Someone comes and fixes it.  You’ve lost weight and your pants need to be taken in?  There’s a seamstress who comes every two weeks.  And I didn’t have to cook, except for breakfast.  I haven’t had that level of caretaking since my mother changed my diapers and put a bottle in my mouth when I cried.  I appreciated all this but a deeper level of acceptance and knowing were still absent.  It wasn’t “home.”  This was the beginning of a kind of transition I had never experienced before.  A few months passed.  I was observing and learning  about this new land and culture I had landed in.  In looking back, I realized that after the years of Covid let up, I had little energy to create a new life and the comforting familiarity had become turgid and stagnant.  But here, I simply have to walk down the hall and take an elevator to have a new life.  There is a choice of activities.  The poetry and writing class stir me to to think newer thoughts.  The art class starts me on a new skill.  Talking to so many new people is stimulating and exhausting.  The game of “getting to know you” is often repetitive and superficial.  Where did you come from?  What did you do?  Some political talk since the majority of residents are liberal and we sing in the same choir.  Bad days consist of talk about the quality of the food, the usual weather comments, how the place used to be and other subjects of little interest.  Good days -a lot of friendliness and feeling a part of a yet unknown community and beginning to feel sparks of connection. It begins to feel like a small town or village where spoken or unspoken there is the deeper knowledge that this is the final chapter.  Physical disabilities are talked about in an open and accepting way; everyone has something wrong with them. “What did you say?” is the mantra.  We are all in the anteroom of death and friendships literally die.  There is some acknowledgment of this; it’s not deeply engaged but it is a constant silent knowing.

I begin to have a sense of who I connect more easily with, offering the possibility of a deeper friendship.  And who I enjoy in limited but pleasurable ways and who I avoid.  I realize how deeply I have wanted community.  This might not be the utopia I would have wanted but I feel grateful that I have the means to be taken care of in a place that strives to make these last years safer, easier, stimulating.  Isolation is the new plague and I have been granted the embrace of a community with all its gifts and flaws to continue my life, pursue meaning and pleasure and be surprised by what can arise from one day to the next.   I am feeling that I have a place here; I am part of the community and that steadies me.  Life now offers possibility.  I had forgotten there was possibility.  It could be the end any day or any month or year but as long as it isn’t, there’s more life to be lived.

Peggy Braun is a psychotherapist, photographer, printmaker and writer who lives in the Berkshires (Western MA).  She is now  exploring the end phase of life from spiritual, emotional and physical points of view.  She hopes to stay alive long enough to do justice to her own experience and would gladly report on what happens afterwards, but, so far, that hasn’t worked very well.

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seventysomething will be taking two weeks off at the end of November/beginning of December. We look forward to seeing you all again on December 14th

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. Beginning in October, all subscribers will be able to read Many Voices posts. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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