Book Review: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

Title: When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple

Author/anthologist: Sandra Haldeman Martz

Date: 1987, 1991

Publisher: Papier-Mache

ISBN: 0-918949-16-5

Length: 181 pages plus 12 pages endnotes

Illustrations: black-and-white photographs

Quote: “‘Then why you sticking Sitty in The Asylum for the Aged?’ ‘Victoria, I’m over eighty. I can’t care for her no more.’”

Nobody thought we needed to be told that growing old is a mixed blessing. Right. You don’t. But maybe some insights into specific ways it’s a mixed blessing might inspire you to enjoy any time with your grandmother, or mother, or aunt, that you still can...or to be more empathetic with your patients, if you work in the health care field...or to work for needed changes in the way we, the richest country in the history of the world, treat our currently-oldest generation.

(Miseducated reader: “I thought this web site was all about reducing the federal budget.”

PK: “This web site is a hodgepodge, not all about any one thing...but when this web site says “we” it does not mean “a lot of bureaucrats who claim that the solution to all problems is to feed more money into their departments of the government,” whether federal, state, or elsewhere. When this web site means “government” it says “government.” When this web site says “we” it means you and me.”)

For a start, why does the first full-length story after that much-quoted opening poem open with the decision to institutionalize Sitty (the narrator’s grandmother), whose age is unknown but known to be over 100, and who is still trying to teach Arabic to her U.S.-born granddaughter? (Trigger warning: college students have grandmothers who are over 100 years old because their fathers married younger women.) Young Victoria would rather stay home and be the geriatric nurse her grandmother needs, instead of going to college. Why doesn’t she? Why is funding available for expensive full-time institutionalization of the grandmother, and (if her family can plead sufficient poverty) for an expensive furnished room away from home and/or expensive commuting for the student—rather than for respite care while the student lives at home and walks and/or telecommutes to classes at the college in her home town? (Respite care, a few hours a day, would be cheaper.) Once long ago people who were impressed by big mechanized factories thought that educating the young and caring for the disabled-who-are-mostly-old would be more efficiently done in big tax-funded institutions rather than private homes. Real enthusiasts fantasized that cooking and laundry could be better done by big publicly funded cafeterias, too. Few people who’d eaten in a cafeteria ever got behind the public cafeteria fantasy, although it appealed to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but in the 1930s our federal government bought into the federally managed schools and nursing homes fantasy. And oh, how the young and the old have paid for that mistake.

Then, on a completely different note, why does the speaker’s Grandma, in the next piece (a one-page free-verse poem), have so much trouble sitting down, “knees locked, keeping contact with the chair...not looking at anything now, it hurts, she’s concentrating...she lets herself fall...She knows not to take for granted she can get back up”? Yes, it’s likely that everyone in the United States who’s lived long enough to know how to read has watched an old woman sit down that way. Yes, it’s likely that most of us also know someone in her late nineties who sits down and stands up as easily as a healthy teenager does. Yes, most of us who attended average-size schools and had a reasonable number of school friends have also seen a teenager sit down and stand up as awkwardly as Grandma in the poem. So why do we associate the idea of disabilities that people can have at any age with the words “old” and “Grandma”? Did you realize that this association has been so powerful that Medicare has allocated funding for treatments for paraplegics only through programs for the “old” and the mentally-impaired-through-permanent-brain-damage, leaving others to fund treatment for young active people who become paraplegic suddenly as the result of spine injuries? Did you ever wonder what personal health care plans, such as diet and exercise, might reduce the number of geriatric patients who have non-hereditary arthritis, because they’ve associated arthritis with aging and never planned to make choices that would reduce the damage “wear and tear” has done to their knees? (I have. Both. Often.)

Then there’s the (multiple trigger warnings) poem by Elizabeth Bennett where the grandchild “made a wooden bowl, sanded the rim smooth, / carved my initials on the bottom” for that child’s Grandma in the most respectful way, but nevertheless:

“I found the bowl in the trash.

Dad said, we won’t need that anymore,

but I...put it on the shelf next to Old Crow

so I could find it when Mother got old.”

Vulnerabilities run in families. That’s why thinking about the very old can be so frightening for so many of us. Probably the reason why I’ve been able to read this book all the way through, and recommend it, has something to do with my having grown up surrounded by inspiring examples of Eldering. (Some of them are still alive, the ones who seemed “old” when I was a child, who I realized as an adult were only in early middle age...who are still making me think “I want to be like her/him when I grow up,” now that I’m past fifty. Serendipitously, a primary school teacher, whom I'd not seen recently, was in the building where I uploaded this document...seeing this person still walking around, with a limp but without a cane, made my day.) 

I don’t associate old age with senility; Alzheimer’s Disease doesn’t run in the family, although ordinary cardiovascular disease and strokes do, after age 75 or 80, and relatives who’ve had a few strokes can be almost as confused and annoying as if they did have Alzheimer’s Disease. I don’t associate white hair, thin dry skin, or beaky noses with illness, death, or necessarily even retirement. Even Wal-Mart usually prefers to pension people off after age eighty, to the endless annoyance of my mother, who wanted to walk to work at the new Wal-Mart that opened three blocks away just as she reached that age—but when you’re self-employed you never have to retire. Or you retire from specific things, like singing on stage or training horses or working in someone else's office, but continue with the rest of the work you’ve always loved, like teaching or gardening or writing.

“The days of a man are but threescore and ten,” said the Bible writer, generalizing. Some accuracy must always be sacrificed in pursuit of a generalization. Some of us may actually be genetically programmed to grow old and useless after age 70, while others are built to remain active and healthy up to about 100. My father was saying a long time ago that we don’t need a single one-size-fails-to-fit-all plan built on the expectation that anyone will be willing to retire at 70, or fit to work at 30 for that matter. These things are not subject to planning or prediction. It would be far better if tax-funded pensions were based entirely on disability, without regard for age—if we could bring ourselves to admit that the whole Social Security scheme was unsustainable all along, and give it a decent retirement, repaying what individuals have paid into it but closing future payments in or out. Publicly funded retirement could and should be reserved for the disabled, and the disabled could keep the option of emerging from retirement if, e.g., it turns out not to be cancer after all, or new technology provides a satisfactory replacement for those stiff knees.

How old are these women, again? What does "old" mean? I'm in the habit of thinking that it means "past age 80," but some things I've read suggest that a better definition might be relative. Whatever age we are, in years, is "old" when all of our living relatives are younger than we are. When Great-Aunt Oily McFilthy finally got around to dying, age 99, my mother and her first cousin finally looked around and admitted that--relative to the family--at ages 82 and 88, respectively, they'd become "old."

Enid Shomer’s poem, “A Woman at Forty,” describes a poor soul who clearly thinks forty is old—and maybe for her it is. For most baby-boom women forty was a glorious age,the season of our lives when we’d gained enough seniority and gravitas to be respected while keeping enough sex appeal to interest younger men. We could have amended Valerie Harper’s book title as Today I Am a Ma’am (But Still Look and Feel Like a Chick and Reserve the Right to Act Like One). For a woman with rheumatoid arthritis or with the gene for fatal breast cancer, though, forty can feel “old.” Other “old” people (men and women) in this book are fifty, and the speaker in one poem invites her mate (is he still alive?), “I will be there / waiting with withered hands / gnarled fingers / that will leave their marks / of passion on your back.” Granted that “older” and “elder” are relative terms, that a three-year-old is among the “elders” a two-year-old needs to learn to respect, at what age can we say with a straight face that a person is old?

In a relatively long short story, Carole L. Glickfeld ponders why a private art teacher she obviously admired became “unfit to teach” at fifty-two. Miss Inwood ran out of patience with the stupidity of nonartistic people, stopped going to meetings on time, may have become a reckless driver, threw chalk to get students’ attention, but her real crime, we learn, was giving B’s to two slobs whose parents wanted them to get A’s. To what extent do we confuse senility with dissent? This story, “Out of the Lion’s Belly,” is followed by a poem, “Hurricane,” about an eighty-year-old storm chaser who really regretted having been taken somewhere safe; she wanted to watch the storm in all its fury.

Then there are Bonnie Michael’s “Women who wait”: for children, in divorce courts, and finally in nursing homes, “to die of uselessness...widowed by men who couldn’t cry and couldn’t touch / and died of heart attacks.” There are people who run through life in a panic, and people who spend most or all of their lives waiting, and people who move steadily through life at the pace that is right for them. Which are you?

Yes, Martz gives us a real feast for thought. That’s what you’ll appreciate about this book if you’re middle-aged or old, or look forward to growing old just like your grandparent...and what you probably won’t be able to endure if you’re one of the people who really need a book to prompt them to think about old age. The people who can appreciate this book don’t need a book to prompt us to do that. We have relatives.

To buy it here, send $5 per book, $5 per package, $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address as indicated below. Addressing U.S. postal orders to "Boxholder" rather than "Priscilla King" (a screen name) simplifies the process of cashing them. Paypal payments go to the e-mail address you get from Salolianigodagewi @ yahoo, not directly to that mail-sorting account. At least two more books of this size will fit into a package.