blog entry

In Her Shoes

Teaworthy

My Grandmother is 96. She has lost two loves. One child. Seven siblings. Great friends. Most of her vision. And most recently, her ability to wear high heels.

Knowing her has helped me understand how meaningless numbers can be. Yes, she is 96 and the cruelty of aging has taken away her ability to dance all night- which she would still do if her legs would allow it. But, she still loves to eat cornbread. She still will not answer the door without her lipstick. She wants to be beautiful, loved, independent and most of all, useful. She still wants to be treated like she has life experience and good sense – that she can make decisions for herself.

I get so incredibly excited that things like this are going on. It's an article about an assisted living facility that trains their staff by having them experience what it feels to have the challenges their residents have. It is absolutely brilliant. The exercise includes things like suits that restrict movement, glasses that blur vision, cotton balls to impair hearing, and so on. The emotional part of the exercise is even more brilliant. Participants are rushed through tasks and asked to use their non-dominant hand. They are insulted if they go too slowly. They are asked to give up all privileges and choose loved ones they will lose.

"[S]he asked each participant to write down five favorite possessions, five cherished freedoms and three loved ones on Post-it notes. Then one-by-one she asked members of the group to part with a possession, a freedom or a person: a car here, a husband there, freedom of travel next — until all that anyone had left were two possessions."

The creators of the program said some of their most memorable training sessions had been with children. “They related to it emotionally,” she said. “They said, ‘That could be my mother,’ or ‘That could be my grandma.’ ”


In Eat Pray Love, Elizabeth Gilbert explains that that empathizing Italians say, "L'ho provato sulla mia pelle," which means, "I have experienced that on my own skin". I love that expression. It is even better than the part of To Kill A Mockingbird about standing on Boo Radley's porch. More than being in one's shoes - to imagine yourself in their skin evokes a more visceral level of empathy, compassion and understanding without condescension. I love that this exercise asks the participants to do that - it asks all of us to do that really – to imagine how it feels to work your way up through life, to gain respect and accomplishments, to build a family and body of work and watch it all change and feel people begin to treat you as if you were a child. Of course children would get it.

My friend Nora and I exchanged letters for years until, when she was 94, her letters stopped coming. She wrote in pencil on thin stationary -front and back- about the funniest stories. I realize now that she was a writer with a capital W. The Eudora Welty of my life in the flesh. I miss her and her fantastic sense of comedic timing. I found out she was gone a month after her funeral. No one knew to tell me. No one knew that I had everything in common with a woman so much older than I was.

It is such a rich experience to imagine life in the skin of a centenarian and so comforting at times. On 9-11, I asked my Grandmother, “is any of this shocking to you?”  She said, “it is so sad and disappointing. But not much surprises me anymore.”  Life goes on. I found that very comforting from her, in all of her vulnerability, and in all of mine. There is nothing that is ours and ours alone. It is all fleeting. As one journalist said of Randy Pausch, he is living out all of our fates, just accelerated.

I think about that sometimes when there has been a storm and we're all piled in the full-sized bed together: husband, baby girl, dog, cat and me. I look at their faces. I watch their chests rise and fall and I can't sleep for trying to catalogue it all. I realize that we will not always be here in this way. I will not always be surrounded by books and stacks of papers and laundry. There will not always be small plastic toys littering the hallway. Everything is temporary. Even our skin.