Words of Wisdom from the Golden Years

I'll miss my patients at the nursing home so much in 3 weeks when my time there goes from full-time to on-call.  I didn't know my grandparents very well so I guess I have a special admiration for this generation.  They have lived it all, seen it all.  Many times I'll ask the ones who have been married 40,50,60 years, "what is the secret to a good marriage."  Often times: Women answer, "good communication." Men answer, "shut up and listen to your wife."  This always give me the giggles. Many other answers include: spend time together, respect, love, appreciate your spouse, the little things in life that seem so simple and take little time to do, yet we don't take the time to do it. 

One of my favorite, outspoken patients, who still wears fancy large sunglasses and painted red lipstick on her beautiful toothless smile advises me, "if you want to make your man happy, you give him two things: good food and all the sex he wants."  Here my co-workers and I are trying to hold back from losing it. "If you give him that, he'll never want for anything," she tells me with her pink-painted pointer finger in my face.  I remind her that's how she also got her 6 kids.

Another woman I was working with was there with her husband before he passed away last year.  Now at the nursing home everyone has twin-sized beds, even the married couples.  If they want something different, they can bunk together or push them together, but I have only seen this once.  She tells me one night her husband calls her over from across the room and asks her to snuggle in with him for a little while.  She waves her hand in the air and tells me, "I told him, no way, we'd never fit. But I held his hand. That next night, he died."  She wipes away a tear of regret.  "That night he died, I crawled in next to him and held his body.  I never knew I could hold a dead body, but he was my husband for 64 years. We had seven children together. He was there with me when no one else was, and he left."  She pats my hand. "Hug your husband when he asks you to. Respond to his touch.  That's my advice to you because it goes by so fast."

So hard to say good bye to that.