Navigating ‘invisible’ seniors through the darkest winter
Fact beats fiction once again. Consider these samples of flash fact, the sibling of flash fiction (aka, the short short story). These tales all take bitter turns.
Chapter I: A man with ALS, a condition that leaves him always feeling cold, can’t pay off his heating bill.
Chapter II: A wife caring for her husband, who suffers from dementia, saves money by cutting the dosage of her anti-seizure medication in half.
Chapter III: An 82-year-old man who sustained a career despite losing an arm in his youth has developed a medical condition as well as carpal tunnel in his other arm. Treatment costs jeopardize his home and his ability to care for his dog.
Chapter IV: A senior living in Section 8 housing counts on an annual gig as a department store Santa so he can buy gifts for his grandchildren. COVID-19 cancels the job.
Hardly the stuff of holiday cheer. Fortunately, these are false endings. They come from the casebook of SilverSource, a safety net for seniors. And yes, you can take comfort that “net” is a tip-off to more hopeful resolutions.
SilverSource is anything but a short story (its pages go back to 1908). Whole chapters could be written on the contributions of volunteers who talk to seniors in isolation during the pandemic. And that’s just one volume of its work.
I ask Kathleen Bordelon, executive director of the Stamford agency, for updates.
Chapter I: They helped the man with ALS catch up on his heating bill.
Chapter II: It was a mindful local pharmacist who tipped them off to the medication issue after flagging the dosage discrepancy. SilverSource helped pay for her medication, which costs $400 per month.
Chapter III: SilverSource came through with food, rental assistance, home care and more for the man with one arm. When they threw in treats for his dog, he responded, “I knew you’d be there for me, but I didn’t know you’d be there for my dog too.”
“That’s his family,” Bordelon reveals.
“That’s an ad slogan,” I pitch as a rejoinder.
Chapter IV: Then there’s Santa.
“A lot of seniors pick up parttime jobs during the holidays,” Bordelon says. “This one just happens to be Santa.”
They provided Santa and his wife, who has lung cancer, with assistance on rent and energy expenses and home care. And yes, a little extra to buy gifts for the grandchildren.
“We need a little Christmas,” Bordelon sings over the phone.
A little sentiment helps on this job, but I prefer the sparks of fire that smolder in some of Bordelon’s observations about her duties.
She points to grim shifts in trends regarding food insecurity. Twenty percent of the requests for food assistance are related to income, but the remaining 80 percent are “fear-based.”
“There was a resilience we saw back in March that I do not see now,” she says. “That resilience is gone.”
Back then, we reported Bordelon’s comment that seniors were expressing an anxiety that “a major storm is coming.” Seniors are now on the precipice of that storm, and the horizon is dark and frigid.
We happen to be talking on the shortest day of the year, the starting block of winter. I can’t help but observe that we’ve been through three seasons of COVID, but this next lap is the most foreboding.
Many of Bordelon’s clients live alone, so perils of seclusion always loom. But Bordelon points to an even more profound form of isolation. About 22 percent of the population of Fairfield County are people over age 60, but the concept of a strategic plan for seniors is treated like a novelty. “How do you ignore more than a fifth of the population?” asks Bordelon, whose clients span more than four decades in age, from 60 to over 100.
An even more nuanced issue lurks beneath the reality that most of SilverSource’s clients are women. This is one of the the consequences of a lifetime of being underpaid, resulting in the final indignity of Social Security not matching that of male peers. Bordelon speaks with hope of progress being made toward achieving parity, but that doesn’t correct sins of the past that leave older women suffering “right now, right this minute.”
It’s an American saga no agency can rewrite alone. Bordelon and her staff are busy enough trying to steer the plots of the stories they follow every day. It’s daunting to hear her refer to the ones we discuss as “fairly representative.”
So, if you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, you won’t find a finer one than to reach out to seniors, privately or through volunteer work.
“I feel invisible because I’m old,” is a common complaint heard at SilverSource.
There’s no better time to recognize them than now, at the start of the journey into the void of this heartless winter.