I’m an Old Lady Life Prepper

Field notes from spying on old women

Photo by Mathias Reding on Unsplash

As the taxi stopped in front of a Chicago high-rise, I could feel the ease and joy of our new relationship retreat like an illicit lover. I was old for starting over, and on this visit to my new mother-in-law, also divorced and widowed. Counting my new husband, all three of us were widowed. I yearned for the dogs and wooded yard of our real home as we stepped under her portico to begin this familial diplomacy. I didn’t understand that the tactical maneuvers starting would secure the power in our triad.

My husband paid the driver, and I saw her waiting for us outside the lobby. She hurried over and began asking why we’d taken a taxi from the airport instead of the subway. This was my first crime, and we hadn’t even stepped inside. My husband placed the blame for it on me as he knew better than to take responsibility himself. The taxi had been my only request on this trip, and his betrayal stung. It was clear at the entrance that, in her presence, I was on my own.

Once the doors to the crowded elevator closed us in, she turned and began her inquisition. “Do you have a phobia about being underground? Is that the reason you didn’t want to take the subway?” she asked. I nodded because the lie allowed me to remain silent in front of the elevator strangers who had also turned to assess my mental state.

It was a long ride to the eighteenth floor in my new persona. Many implications settled onto me, all of them foreign, but right by her assessment. Flawed woman, gold digger, elitist, cold. You’re probably thinking I’m all these things now too simply because I’ve repeated them. Labeling becomes a stain that’s hard to remove even when it’s falsely imposed. But it gave her a tool to bond with him against me, securing her continued place in his life.

That’s how I’ve reckoned with it now anyway.

Back then I still thought of my new mother-in-law as a retired psychologist. Later I understood she was a social worker who had counseled patients privately. She displayed her degrees and experience with authority. As someone whose young life had been dominated by criticism, she now had the documentation to scrutinize the rest of us into deference.

Here are the numbers: We stayed in her apartment three nights (he could never last longer than that). It was my second and final visit there. She was in her early eighties. We had been married two years. It was a one-bedroom apartment, so we slept in her bed. I imagined an escape plan 214 times.

We were like schoolchildren on that trip, following her instructions around the city. In the subway station, she directed us away from the escalators and into a urine-scented elevator. I’ve forgotten now why she preferred it but when I complained about the smell, she shamed me for it in front of the only other passenger.

“She doesn’t want to be in the elevator because it smells like urine,” my mother-in-law said to the woman on my other side.

“I don’t either,” the woman replied.

I’m grateful to that stranger who reminded me for a moment that this wasn’t normal behavior, no matter how many degrees or levels of control were employed.

I unfolded once we returned to the green forest of our Virginia home. Together we walked to the pool and toward each other again. Then I took a deep breath and made my practiced announcement.

“I’m never going to Chicago again.”

As I braced for the backlash, he just said, “Okay.”

My relationship with her deteriorated even from afar until we’d stopped all contact. The breaking point came around the time an ancestry test discovered my husband’s half-sister by a different mother. His mother initially took to the news of a newly-found descendent of her husband’s with enthusiasm. But it expanded our triad, and she used the discovery as yet another tool to wield her power over us. She started by inviting the unmet woman and her husband directly to our Virginia home for an overnight visit without first consulting us. Even though she didn’t include herself in this invitation, it was a bit too bold to be seen as anything other than manipulation. Clearly, she intended to direct this new relationship.

I saw some of my mother-in-law’s ugly descriptions of me in an email she sent him. My husband said, “If it makes you feel any better, she’s never liked anyone.” Mostly her criticism pinned me as an outsider (and maybe that was the point) but I’m not sure how that’s possible when the two of us were the insiders, especially in her absence. There was no problem without her involvement in our lives.

Having been widowed and left without children, I knew what it felt like to face a long uncertain future alone. Now that history is another kind of stain I’m afraid will mark me again. I’ve developed a fascination with older women who live alone. I want to prepare myself for what’s to come in case I’m left again. Watching her age through her eighties with such bitterness, anger, and judgment of the people close to her has added a surprising to my vision of the future. I hadn’t expected it to be possible to drag the worst of your younger self into old age.

But now things are starting to look a little different. As 90 approached, she started making an effort with me. I relented after a few months. I’m not ashamed to admit I carry a grudge and don’t forget cruelties. But I understood her fear and the gravity of her remaining years. Maybe I was afraid of my own bad karma too. I responded to her emails. Delicately, nicely, we started again.

Some things were understood between us without discussion: I would never return to Chicago. The nice-old-lady routine she employed was just a front for her fear of needing me. She was “nurturing” our relationship so that, should her son die before either of us, I might feel more kindly toward her predicament.

She no longer takes her beloved subway and rarely uses the bus as she’s witnessed a new intensity of violence on both. Now she’s the one waiting for a taxi at her building’s portico. She’s stopped telling us how great city condo life is as an old person and instead shares the frightening crime warnings she receives from her building’s management. She lives with signs up on her walls that say Do Not Resuscitate. She uses a walker to go to the grocery store once a week even though it’s by a gang-run drug market near a hotel that’s used for prostitution. Her neighborhood has become unsafe, especially for an elderly woman.

In the middle of our move out of Virginia, she made a surprise announcement. “I’m moving too. There’s an independent-living building in our old neighborhood and I’m touring it next week. Then you’ll need to come here and move me.”

Her timing was curious. Until now, she had always refused any suggestion of moving. My husband was suffering from a shingles infection, and we were already overwhelmed with our own complicated out-of-state move, but he agreed to fly out and help when she was ready. While a move for her was wise, the place she’d chosen wouldn’t help should she become ill or disabled. It was just a building for old folks with dining on site and a bus to groceries. Unless her plan to die suddenly at home came to fruition, she’d have to move again.

But she hated the tour. The apartment was tiny. The residents all looked dead. She wasn’t going to be presented with a coloring book and crayons for some imaginary activity hour. We returned to our move, and she remains clinging to the life she knows even as it robs her of options.

When I think about the early days of coming to know her, my resentment rallies. But I can’t look away. I know that if she had been able to be a kinder person, her life today would be better. I wonder if this is a kind of karma.

For now, she sends me an email every morning to check in. My husband emails her every evening with an update. She’s alone in the world, in her family, even on the floor of her apartment building now that the other residents have left. Her greatest fear is that she will lie dead alone for a week before anyone finds her, the way her own mother had in a New York City apartment. She’d planned carefully to avoid her current fate, but the circumstances kept changing around her.

Somehow, I’m in awe of her. That she’s managing on her own. That she’s capable. That she’s tolerating the silence and loneliness without cracking. She says that’s because of me and her son. That knowing we’re here at the other end of an email is just like having people in the next room. Maybe this is putting her psychological skills to good use.

How needy we are for each other, even as we struggle against that presence. I’m making mental note, just in case I’ll need to employ her skills someday too.

At our new house, an eighty-something woman lives alone across the street in a huge and beautiful old house. On our first two encounters, she walked right into our home unannounced. On the third occasion, I’d engaged the locks while unpacking boxes and found her rattling a door to gain entry. When I unlocked it to see what she wanted, her eyes went to the box-cutting knife still in my hand and she never tried that again. She works in a little garden in her backyard and talks to my husband when he’s out there but, since the knife incident, pretends I do ’t exist. She, like my mother-in-law, doesn’t know that I watch from a distance, wondering how she manages her life old and alone with no one to visit. Both of them have cleaning crews who come every couple of weeks. But beyond that, there are no visitors. Not even pets. That part will be different for me.

Lately, our neighbor has been offering cucumbers from her garden. My husband doesn’t eat them, but I do. They’re pickling cucumbers so they’re small enough to enjoy whole as a snack. I make note of her early bicycle rides, big sun hat, and knowledge of every person’s name and occupation in the neighborhood. Maybe we are her long-term plan and that’s why the cucumbers started arriving, as an offering.

Sometimes aging looks like becoming a baby again only without a caretaker. We are born needy, we peak to independence, then start a slow return to where we began. Our shoes are bigger, our minds retain a chunk of the rich life we’ve lived, but unlike our newborn self, we know now what we’re missing. When I look toward aging in this way, it seems unnecessarily cruel.

While I’m still here in this strip of independence, my brain tries to protect the future old lady I will become. I learn by peeking at the processes of these women far ahead of me. I see what’s working and what’s not. But I’m reminded by my past of an obvious and frightening truth. I could never have predicted the events of my own history that brought me to these women’s lives, and there’s little I can do to alter what might come next. That doesn’t stop me from trying.

We’ve been discussing whether an elevator to the second floor of our house might be possible. I’m an old-lady life prepper, though whether or not that will protect me remains to be seen.

Trevy Thomas is the author of the book Companion in Grief, with essays and short stories published in literary magazines. She writes the weekly Substack column titled “Mortal Beings” at trevythomas.substack.com. She lives on the East Coast with her husband and five pets and has a virtual home at trevythomas.com.