Lou Sanders was eighty-eight years old when he and his daughter, Shelley, were confronted with a difficult decision about the future. Up to that point he had managed well. He’d never demanded much from life beyond a few modest pleasures and the company of family and friends. The son of Russian-speaking Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, he’d grown up in Dorchester, a working-class neighborhood in Boston. In World War II, he served in the air force in the South Pacific, and after returning he married and settled in Lawrence, an industrial town outside Boston. He and his wife, Ruth, had a son and a daughter, and he went into the appliance business with a brother-in-law. Lou was able to buy the family a three-bedroom house in a nice neighborhood and give his children college educations. He and Ruth encountered their share of life’s troubles. Their son, for instance, had serious problems with drugs, alcohol, and money and proved to have bipolar disorder. In his forties, he committed suicide. And the appliance business, which had done well for years, went belly-up when the chain stores came along. At fifty years old, Lou found himself having to start over. Nonetheless, despite his age, lack of experience, and lack of a college education, he was given a new chance as an electronic technician at Raytheon and ended up spending the remainder of his career there. He retired at sixty-seven, having worked the additional two years to get 3 percent extra on his Raytheon pension.
Meanwhile, Ruth developed health issues. A lifelong smoker, she was diagnosed with lung cancer, survived it, and kept smoking (which Lou couldn’t understand). Three years after Lou retired, she had a stroke that she never wholly recovered from. She became increasingly dependent on him—for transportation, for shopping, for managing the house, for everything. Then she developed a lump under her arm, and a biopsy revealed metastatic cancer. She died in October 1994, at the age of seventy-three. Lou, at seventy-six, became a widower.
Shelley worried for him. She didn’t know how he would get along without Ruth. Caring for Ruth through her decline, however, had forced him to learn to fend for himself, and, although he mourned, he gradually found that he didn’t mind being on his own. For the next decade, he led a happy, satisfying life. He had a simple routine. He rose early in the morning, fixed himself breakfast, and read the newspaper. He’d take a walk, buy his groceries for the day at the supermarket, and come home to make his lunch. Later in the afternoon, he would go to the town library. It was pretty, light-filled, and quiet, and he’d spend a couple hours reading his favorite magazines and newspapers or burrowing into a thriller. Returning home, he’d read a book he’d checked out or watch a movie or listen to music. A couple of nights a week, he’d play cribbage with one of his neighbors in the building.
“My father developed really interesting friendships,” Shelley said. “He could make friends with anyone.”
One of Lou’s new companions was an Iranian clerk at a video store in town where Lou often stopped in. The clerk, named Bob, was in his twenties. Lou would perch on a bar stool that Bob set up by the counter for him, and the two of them—the young Iranian and the old Jew—could hang out for hours. They became such good pals that they even traveled to Las Vegas together once. Lou loved going to casinos and made trips with an assortment of friends.
Then, in 2003, at the age of eighty-five, he had a heart attack. He proved lucky. An ambulance sped him to the hospital, and the doctors were able to stent open his blocked coronary artery in time. After a couple weeks in a cardiac rehabilitation center, it was as if nothing had happened at all. Three years later, however, he had his first fall—that harbinger of unstoppable trouble. Shelley noticed that he had developed a tremor, and a neurologist diagnosed him with Parkinson’s disease. Medications controlled the symptoms, but he also began having trouble with his memory. Shelley observed that when he told a long story he sometimes lost the thread of what he was saying. Other times, he seemed confused about something they’d just spoken about. Most of the time he seemed fine, even exceptional for a man of eighty-eight years. He still drove. He still beat everyone at cribbage. He still looked after his home and managed his finances by himself. But then he had another bad fall, and it scared him. He suddenly felt the weight of all the changes that had been accumulating. He told Shelley he was afraid he might fall one day, hit his head, and die. It wasn’t dying that scared him, he said, but the possibility of dying alone.
She asked him what he would think about looking at retirement homes. He wanted no part of it. He’d seen friends in those sorts of places.
“They’re full of old people,” he said. It was not the way he wanted to live. He made Shelley promise to never put him in such a place.
Still, he could no longer manage on his own. The only choice left for him was to move in with her and her family. So that’s what Shelley arranged for him to do.
I asked her and her husband, Tom, how they had felt about this. Good, they both said. “I didn’t feel comfortable with him living independently anymore,” Shelley said, and Tom agreed. Lou’d had a heart attack. He was going on ninety. This was the least they could do for him. And, they admitted thinking, how long were they really going to have with him, anyway?
*
TOM AND SHELLEY lived comfortably in a modest colonial in North Reading, a Boston suburb, but never completely so. Shelley worked as a personal assistant. Tom had just spent a year and half unemployed after a layoff. Now he worked for a travel company for less than he used to earn. With two teenage children in the house, there was no obvious space for Lou. But Shelley and Tom converted their living room into a bedroom, moving in a bed, an easy chair, Lou’s armoire, and a flat-screen television. The rest of his furniture was sold off or put in storage.