A flurry of activity as first the outer then inner doors to the dentist’s office slammed open—bursting into the room was a passenger carried by a wheelchair maneuvered by a woman with a determined look on her face—and then slammed shut of their own accord.
It took me a minute to remember what I had been doing when the flurry jostled my eyes away from the phone. As I was waiting for my routine teeth cleaning, I had been reading my paid subscription to Oldster, a blog written by folks older than fifty. Today, the writer was sixty-seven and confessed that sometimes she felt like a car that had been in a terrible accident. As I contemplated her age, I was surprised to remember that I was eighty.
The wheelchair parked a few feet away from me and I met the eyes of the woman in the wheelchair. Her feet were covered with handmade slippers that looked comfy. After settling for a minute, she and her escort chatted. It appeared they were waiting for her sister and her husband to arrive. I could see genuine care in the way the escort interacted with her and asked her questions.
At one point, the woman in the wheelchair grumbled, with a hint of humor, that sometimes when she sat in the doorway of her room and watched everyone stroll by, she felt she was in prison. The escort, trying to help, pointed out that she had free rein over the entire building where she lived, but that only served to reinforce the older woman’s point.
Someone from the dentist’s office appeared then, and they spoke briefly before the question came up of how old this comfy-slipper-wearing woman was. Ninety-one, she said.
Whisked off to a treatment room, before she passed out of my line of sight, she gave me a good once over with her eyes. It felt like a kind investigation without words questioning who I was and why was I there. I felt seen in those few seconds. There was not time to respond to her scrutiny except with a smile. I wished there had been time to sit down with her, to tell her that I’m eighty, to quiz her and ask what advice she might have to guide me through the next decade.
Absent an opportunity to chat one on one, her non-verbal communication conveyed a spark of life. Even though confined to a wheelchair, at times feeling imprisoned, her spirit was alive. I imagined her telling me to keep breathing deeply, to keep interacting with people I cared about, to accept love and of course, to keep my dental appointments.
IMAGE: The slippers in this picture are a bit different from those I noted on my wise elder friend at the dentist office. These were my grandmother’s slippers gifted to my youngest son by my sister during his recent recent visit to her in CO.
