On Elder Care And “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”

Thoughts From the Retirement Community (pt. 3)

I always start my discussion sessions with a personal question that connects back to the story. In this session, I asked “What is something that has happened in your life that you consider to be a miracle?”

Patty, a bespectacled woman with a neat grey bob and a firm grip on her walker raised her hand. She proceeded to share that her children had put her in a retirement home that they claimed would “save on cost”. When she arrived, it was a house with 10 older folks, most of whom she described as “out of it.” The house was run by a retired Navy SEAL, who would wake them up at “awfully early” hours. There were no activities – the only entertainment provided was the television, which was tuned 24/7 to the Hallmark channel. “I watched so many Hallmark movies, I started to think to myself – hey, I’m a pretty good writer, I could write one of these!” she laughed.

The trouble started when she wanted to contact her children to let them know about the conditions. “They had taken my phone,” Patty said, “and whenever I asked to use the phone, they wouldn’t let me.” She said that of all the informational signs on the bulletin board in the house, the one about abuse was at the very top — “and I’m only 5’2″!” she said. “I couldn’t reach it! So I didn’t know it was abuse.”

She began plotting her escape, but it was the middle of winter, and with her cane, she said “I couldn’t get very far, although I did try a couple of times.” She wrote a letter about the conditions, but they wouldn’t let her mail it. She tried to give it to the postman, but the door was locked. “I signaled him with my cane, tapping at the window,” she said. “But he didn’t see me.”

Finally, the cleaning woman (who only spoke Spanish – “My Spanish wasn’t good enough to tell her about what was happening”, she explained) forgot to lock the door one afternoon, so our heroine made another daring escape. This time, there was an EMT truck waiting outside.

“How did you know to come and get me?” Patty asked. “Your hearing aids!” They replied. Apparently, her hearing aid batteries had died, which sent an alert to the EMTs. “That was my miracle,” she finished. 

In the United States, elder abuse affects as many as 1 in 6 older adults every year. In the majority of cases, it is perpetrated by family members, friends, and caregivers. However, only 1 out of every 24 cases of elder abuse is reported. 

“A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings” by Gabriel García Márquez can offer us some insight into this issue. The story follows Elisenda and Pelayo, who are tending to their sick child when a very old man with buzzard wings crash-lands in their garden. 

Throughout the story, the people of the town treat the old man like a “circus animal”, tossing him things to eat, throwing rocks at him “trying to get him to  rise so they could see him standing”. He receives the bare minimum of care – “eggplant mush” to eat, a chicken coop for shelter, and at one point, when he is very sick, “Pelayo threw a blanket over him  and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed”. 

I asked the retirement community: Why? Why do they treat the angel in this way? George – a blind man who sat with his eyes closed, listening intently, and responding insightfully to nearly every question I asked — commented that it is easy to mistreat those who are different from us because we can view them as less than. Patty agreed, pointing out that the angel, in their mind, may not even be human. Martha (dressed in pastel sweats) declared that it is just like very small children, who find something smaller than themselves to torment. 

I wonder at this inherent cruelty in human nature. When we see someone or something that is vulnerable, does an inner voice encourage us to exert our own power? Or are we simply curious, in a childish way, what will happen if we do (like Martha’s younger sister used to) “squeeze a grasshopper until it pops“? 

At the end of the story, Pelayo and Elisenda have built a “two-story mansion with balconies and gardens” from the profits they earned charging admission to see the angel. But they put “iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in”, and the angel (whose coop has collapsed by this point, nearly 7 years from the day he crash-landed in the garden) is dragging himself around the house, a constant and unignorable presence that seems to be “reproducing himself all throughout the house”, so that “Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels.”

“What a tragedy!” I said. Instead of feeling gratitude towards the angel for the positive changes in their lives, Elisenda can only focus on her annoyance at the burden of his presence. In their frustration with the angel, they have turned their new mansion into a prison by installing bars on the window. I wish that Elisenda had been able to shift her mindset and focus on her gratitude for what caring for the angel has brought them: Pelayo is able to retire from his job, Elisenda has new “satin pumps” and “many dresses of iridescent silk”, their child is healthy, and they have built a beautiful new home. Instead, they are so caught up that the angel is “an annoyance in her life” that Elisenda claims to be in “hell”. 

George sighed. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I’ve certainly recognized at times that I am contributing to my own suffering by being upset at circumstances that are outside of my control. But I still feel annoyed at the circumstances, and those emotions don’t go away.” The rest of the community agreed, expressing their empathy for Elisenda and Pelayo, who did not ask for the burden of caring for the angel.

I was surprised by this empathy, so I asked the question that had been on my mind throughout the session: The angel is a “very old” man, and Elisenda and Pelayo are tasked with being his caregivers. They do the bare minimum, but they don’t let him die. You empathize with Elisenda and Pelayo’s frustration at the burden of being caretakers, but you, as elders in our society, are also in need of caretaking. Would you accept this same poor standard of care with the patience and passivity of the angel?

“No!” Martha exclaimed. “And they’ll tell you, too,” she said, pointing to the two staff members present in our circle. “I know how to argue! But you do have to accept when you have no control. You can’t always fight to change things.” As she spoke, I reflected that it is undoubtedly the arrogance of my youth that gives me the energy to rage against the injustices of the world. 

Martha continued. “But I understand why my children put me in a home,” she said. “After all, they’re living their own lives, and they don’t deserve to be burdened with caring for me. They’re busy!” This candor surprised me, as I had expected more resentment about the situation.

George explained: “Our society has found a way to take care of elders without burdening families, through assisted living. It’s an institutional way of doing what Pelayo and Elisenda had to do.” 

At this point, Hannah, one of the staff members at the retirement home, raised a hand to interject. “But there are plenty of other cultures where this kind of care is not institutionalized,” she commented. “People live together, and they know that just like their parents took care of them as children, they will take care of them when they grow old as well.” 

Hannah’s point was particularly noteworthy to me because Gabriel García Márquez is a Colombian author, so it’s worth thinking about how Latinos approach caring for elderly family members differently than the people in this discussion, who were all white. A recent study by the Collage Group found that 67% of Hispanics in the U.S. perform tasks to help care for someone in their life who has a health/medical condition, which is about 10 percentage points higher than the total population. The study also found that 86% of Latinos say that family is one of the most important things in their life, compared to 82% of the general population. “As far as Latinos go, studies have looked at how parents intentionally teach children to focus on and prioritize family over themselves,” said Dr. Belinda Campos from the University of California. “So they are not only assisting their family members, but they are also finding it pleasurable and rewarding.”

This is not a simple binary, where institutions are bad and family care is good. I will confess – the idea of being a caretaker to my parents is not appealing, for exactly the reasons that Martha stated: I am living my own life, and while I would certainly take on the responsibility of caretaking if necessary, I am grateful that I don’t have to. I also recognize that if I grew up in a culture where being a caretaker for my parents at the end of their lives was the norm, I imagine that I would be more likely to find the work “pleasureable and rewarding” than “unfair and burdensome” (like Pelayo and Elisenda).  

Still, I think about a scene Patty described: She (herself an organist during her life) remembered sitting and playing piano with her grandmother, who lived with them and taught her to play. I thought about how powerful that memory must be, to have lived with Patty through the years. I thought about how that memory would not exist if her grandmother had been living in an assisted living facility.

Working in retirement communities, I continually find wisdom in conversations that is worth remembering and repeating to others. But the elderly can make people uncomfortable, whether because we do not want to engage with the burden of their care, or because witnessing another person’s aging reminds us of our own mortality. Still, not everyone has the angel’s power to drag himself about the house and continually remind Pelayo and Elisenda of his presence. When we lock our elders away and ignore them, we lose out on many unexpected experiences that, years later, we may find ourselves remembering with gratitude.

*names of participants have been changed to protect anonymity