A Pill for Old People

She was coming up on her 92d birthday. After two lens implants, her eyesight was good and her hearing was, well, selective. She had had a few Stokes-Adams attacks, a bit of angina, and mild hypertension treated with diltiazem, but her mind and her Irish wit, every bit of it, were all there.

She had told me when I was a boy, “When people get old they ought to give them a pill”. This went right by me, as did her casual remark 50 years later that she was never going to Hebron Hall, the skilled nursing home in her retirement community.

After 53 years of marriage, she had laid to rest an irritable, demented lover, and at the age of 84 had begun a new life …