The trouble with old people, part 47

A community, like Yarmouth, like Cape Cod in general, with a larger percentage of elderly residents than the statewide or nationwide average will suffer severe consequences. Especially if they live alone. The real tragedy isn’t that the elderly are terrible drivers famous for hitting the gas in front of hair salons or tattoo parlors and crashing through the front windows. It’s not the left hand turn signal that never goes out no matter which direction they are travelling. No, it is even more serious than that.

Old folks, and we have twice as many as the rest of the state as a percentage of our total population, eventually stop shopping and going out to eat. They get Meals on Wheels. The only workers they require are minimum wage home health aides and grass cutters. They require serious health care assistance and more drug stores per capita than casinos in Las Vegas. They stop making any contribution to the local economy. They start to drag it down.

And they vote, against everything. School funding can’t be improved, town infrastructure maintained, new projects, like sewers or mixed housing developments, can’t get started. After town meeting or voting they gather on the sidewalk bumping into each other’s walkers and wondering out loud where they are and commenting to each other about the high taxes keeping them from going to Foxwoods more than twice a month. They won’t sell their retirement homes and simply stop maintaining them instead. The grass grows up and the trim paint peels off. Property values in the neighborhood decline but they don’t care because they can’t see the messy pile they live in for what it really is.

That cheap wooden ramp up to the front door is always an attractive feature. The general thought today is that moving in with one of the children and perhaps the grandchildren would be a big negative for everybody.

And that may be true if you are as cranky, depressed and unpleasant to everyone as many of these folks are. That’s perhaps why no one comes to visit any more. It’s not just that “everyone is dead” as you like to say, it’s more that you have grown into an old asshole.

My grandmother Callery came to live with us when her husband died and we were little children. She cooked and cleaned, made pleasant conversation with the parents, watched the children and contributed to the family. Because she had worked before Social Security she had no income of her own. Now, I’m not suggesting making old people dependents of their families but I can’t help but think that many elderly would actually feel better and have a better outlook if they were part of an extended family on a regular basis.