Adult Foster Care

Some twenty years ago--though it seems more like an eternity--my second wife and I lived in an operated an adult foster care home. We did this for about ten years of our marriage, finally escaping in the year 2000.

It was a hard job, doable only by personal compassion and grace from above. It was not an 8 hour a day job, but a morning to night job, day in and day out. The needs of unwell elderly people do not adhere to the pattern of a 40 hour work week.

On Sundays we often had the help of one or another substitute caregiver--generally terrified, rattled, confused young women who would decide within a week or two that they would be better off either to travel around the world or work at McDonald's.

We did not go out dancing on Saturday night, we slept, and closed all the doors to our section of the house, and pulled all the shades, and pretended we were not home. On Sunday we did not drive to the beach or go to baseball games, we went to church, mouths open like hungry birds, craving the food that would fill and sustain.

If I learned one thing about old people during those years, it was that I did not want to become one.

We had in the house anywhere from three to five people, depending upon how many had suddenly died and how many the State had been able to resupply us with. Edith, Ethel, Virginia, Donald, Grace. I remember.

To that point in my life, I had never been around older people. Both sets of grandparents had died before I was born. My mother was adopted and did not know her biological family. My father's tree had withered early on. Being thrust, therefore, into the constant company of these decrepit and somewhat smelly creatures seemed akin to having been dropped off on Mars.

On the first night of our residence I was awakened by a tap-tap-tapping on our bedroom door. My wife would not wake up, and I figured that if I ignored this knocking, it might just go away on its own accord.

But no, of course it continued, and was accompanied moreover by a voice now.

Hello? You? You? Hello?

And my wife would not wake. For all appearances she had either taken sleeping pills or simply passed away quietly in her sleep.

Well, I can handle this.

Struggling into my robe and slippers, I made my way through the dark of our bedroom toward the tap-tap-tapping sound. I would simply tell the woman to go back to bed. I would explain that it was the middle of the night. If there was some kind of mess out there, I would either clean it up, or if at all possible push it aside for my wife to deal with in the morning.

I opened the door, and there she was--Ethel, in all the glory and innocence of her original creation--in short, butt naked except for a pair of clunky black shoes, and of course her cane, which had been responsible for the tap-tap-tapping.

What in Christ's name . . .

"Ethel, what do you want?"

"Well," she said, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing."

And so you wander around the house naked? What kind of sense does that make?

"You're supposed to be sleeping," I said. "Ethel, you got no clothes on."

Worried, fearful, then indignant, Ethel surveyed her own sagging flesh.

"There's no one here," she said. "They took my clothes."

I was just wondering whether there would be any point in explaining the mutually negating structure of her statement when, praise God, my wife showed up at my side.

"Ethel, what the hell!"

She took poor Ethel by the elbow and led her away, back to her room, to where she was supposed to be, to what she was supposed to be doing.

So ended my first day and night as an adult caregiver. The good news, though I did not know it at that moment, was that we had only ten years to go.