With an aging population and the 911 emergency assistance available 24/7, many elderly opt to live alone in America, knowing help is just a phone call away

“SO you think I lead a pretty miserable life?” Angie, my neighbour, asks me at the end of our long chat on aging.

We laugh, because both know that’s not the case. Angie, agile at 85, never ceases to surprise me. Retired at age 63 — after packing in 30 long back-breaking years as an industrial worker, the ever-active and merry widow whizzes around in her car, at all hours of the day, except nighttime: “I prefer not to drive when it gets dark — I can’t see too well.”

Recently, on a wet, dark morning, I woke up with flashing yellow lights as four police cars silently escorting an ambulance arrived at our front entrance. There were no warning sirens as people around were still sleeping. Within moments, I saw the white curly head of Angie popping out from the stretcher. She was smiling and talking as the paramedics whisked her away to an emergency ward at our local hospital. The police followed with her hand carry bag containing her belongings that she must have hastily packed while waiting for the ambulance to arrive.

This is America — alone and dying, you still need to keep your wits about to pack for the hospital! As for Angie, she was back and bouncing within hours. It was just a false alarm.

Flashing First Aid squads with police cars in toe is a common sight to behold. With an aging population and the 911 emergency assistance available 24/7, many elderly opt to live alone, knowing help is just a phone call away.

“I cannot imagine living with my daughters or son,” says Angie, who lost her husband to stomach cancer seven years ago. “First Carmen (her husband of over 60 years) got Alzheimers and would be roaming around the neighbourhood...I would have to go looking for him all the time,” she says with a hint of irritation in her tone. “Then one day, I decided I could not handle him anymore, so I put him in a nursing home which cost me $450 a month despite financial assistance from the State (New Jersey).”

For six years, until Carmen passed away, Angie dipped into her savings and was almost “broke.” As a seamstress all of her working life, the pension she earned was $96 a month while her husband, a foreman, got a monthly pension of $30.

Today, Angie’s children lead affluent lives. Her son Tony built a furniture empire and lives in a big home with fancy cars with all the latest gizmos (the gold standard for prosperity) while her daughters have it good too. “I don’t expect them to spend their spare time with me — they have their own lives to lead and are very busy. I don’t want to be in their way. I have no complaints.”

But loneliness is writ all over her face. “Now when I have all the time, I have nothing to do. She was two when her mother died in childbirth at the age of 37, leaving six little children behind. “We were all adopted by family and friends. My father remarried and had four more kids.” Her adoptive parents, childless and in their 60s, kept Angie with them for a full 50 years! “I got married, had my three children in their home and lived with them until they died at a very ripe old age.”

Angie remembers all the milestones in her 85 years of life and is determined to fend off senility.

The Memory Bible, authored by a neuro-scientist lists what he calls the ‘10 Commandments’ for keeping the brain young. They include training memory, building skills, minimizing stress, mental aerobics, brain food and a healthy lifestyle.

The person who comes closest to following the 10 Commandments is Maryjane Snyder. At age 87, the tough-talking, smartly dressed senior keeps her brain cells revved up, refusing to let senility stalk her. Her Irish heritage, “my joie de vivre — and the real belief that, as Charles Dickens puts it, ‘when life slams you in the face’, and Clark, my husband’s death did just that, I either had to scrunch or be scrunched! It’s like sitting in a corner and sucking your thumb, or getting up and dancing!”

Born and raised in Chicago during the Depression, Maryjane was an ardent Girl Scout. She earned BS in Journalism from the University of Illinois in 1938 and her first job out of college was trying to persuade newspaper editors to “go offset.” As a freelancer, her column Maryjane Snyder Writing for You was well-read and liked. She married, had two children and took in a widowed friend and his two-year-olds. “The result? two more children, two husbands, 5 children (all girls). The neighbours were intrigued!”

This is the kind of wry wit that first drew me to Maryjane, whom I have now known for almost 20 years. So different, so irreverent and so very charming. A woman with her own mind — refusing to go with the flow.

How does she keep aging on hold?

“Every onslaught is different and hits each person differently. There’s no answer, of course.... You have to take the bitter with the better! There is always someone in one’s surroundings that can make you feel important and needed. There is a lot of difference in the coping mechanism of those who go alone or with a partner,” says Maryjane, who after Clark died — some 30 years ago — has always had female friends to bond with. Currently, she lives with Jane, her old friend of many moons. Both share common interests. Loneliness is not one of them. “Don’t fall! I’m serious. The 4-letter word around here is FALL. Beyond that, avoid the ‘poor pitiful’ syndrome. Don’t read the obituaries — and make a point of making younger friends,” Maryjane advises.

There is no painless transition to senility either for the individual, and more permanently, those left behind, she says. “Where I live, there is a gradual passage of care (kind of assisted living).... I have chosen a retirement complex, where there’s no gardening, window washing or what have you. The important thing is the presence of people; maintaining personal and professional interests and feeling strongly about issues and events that provoke you into arguments.”

Sounds perfect.

“Because every day is a new beginning,” Maryjane has a quote on her bathroom scale that she reads each morning: “This is the Day the Lord has made; Rejoice and be glad in it.”

Kathy, 75, a widow who recently moved back to her old neighbourhood because she missed her friends, shares her moments of loneliness and concerns: “I was happy to take care of my grandchildren while my son Glenn and daughter-in-law Dianne worked — but now Dianne’s mom has ovarian cancer and my son and she are moving in with her parents. I am delighted to go back to my own town and my own doctors.”

With hair done up and nails painted a bright pink, Kathy shows me her stuff that she is selling before her move, “She got the cancer diagnosis the day her pap test came all clear — this has made me so nervous, that I want a full check up done.... I suffer from osteoporosis and polyps,” Kathy tells me in one breath about her life and the impending death of Dianne’s mom.

She never got her driver’s license: “I was 17 when my father gave me lessons and I got so mad that I swore never to learn driving — my advice to all, never get your parents to teach you how to drive!”

“I am now determined to drive — until Bill (her husband) was alive, I never felt the need, he took me everywhere. We married when I was 19, and he was such a good man. He died too young. He’s up there and I talk to him daily.”

What have the three widows in common?

Their zest for life!