The woman who met me on the front lawn of the Eastwood Assisted Living Facility had her silver-gray hair in a neat bob, a high, sweet voice, and a cool, brisk handshake. She wore khakis, a sweater, and a nametag with KATHLEEN YOUNG written on it, and she led me through the doors with a bounce in her step, like a former high-school jock who’d stayed on campus to teach phys ed. “Let me show you around!” Her bubbly, energetic manner only made the handful of residents—a man in a wheelchair by the door, hands shaking as he held up the Examiner; a woman in a pink-and-white bathrobe, using a walker to make her slow way toward the art room—look even older and sadder. I tried to picture my father here, my smart, strong, competent father in a bathrobe, requiring the kind of care a place like this could give him. It hurt, but it was a distant kind of pain. The pills let me consider his future without feeling it too deeply. It was almost like watching a movie about someone else’s sorrows—now her father can’t remember his granddaughter’s name; now he’s having temper tantrums; now he’s having accidents, and wandering away from home, and crying—and knowing they were painful without feeling them acutely.
