Final Jeopardy

I’m thinking of this scene in the movie Annie Hall that takes place in a bookstore. Annie (Diane Keaton) is eyeing a big book of cat photographs, but her new boyfriend Alvy (Woody Allen) encourages her instead to purchase a couple of highbrow treatises on death. The morbid, neurotic New York intellectual explains to his flustered Midwestern date that death is “an important subject.” He further shares his conviction that life is divided into the “horrible” and the “miserable.” Not wanting to seem a lightweight, Annie buys the death books. But her expression says she’d much rather look at cats.

The reason I’m thinking about this scene is that death will be a theme in this post, as indeed it’s been in many of my posts since I started writing this blog last June. I’m hoping it hasn’t seemed obsessive—that it hasn’t made reading this blog feel too one-note, and hasn’t struck my loyal readers (reader?) as unduly depressing. I mean, you might rather, figuratively speaking, look at cats. In fact, I love cats. We have a very sweet girl named Tess, and we just lost a wonderful feline companion named Winnie back in December. Perhaps it’s surprising that I didn’t write about that, since death was involved and all, but it was just too sad. Who’d want to read a post about how much I loved my cat, anyway? I’m conflicted enough as it is about having a blog in the first place—there’s an undeniably self-absorbed and showy “Look at me!” aspect to it—without willfully dragging other people into subjects like my heartfelt but hardly unique grief over a beloved pet. (Not that I didn't do it once. See "Ellie," from last summer.)

But the thing about death and this blog is … well, there actually are two things. One is that the deaths of famous or somehow notable people can serve as jumping-off points for reminiscences and ruminations that hopefully are interesting, or at least quirky enough, to hold reader attention. In that regard, just recently I’ve noted the passings of Jack Lalanne and a Swedish actress who got her start in an infamous porn movie. The other thing about this blog and death is that the Grim Reaper stalks my extracurricular life in ways that place mortality squarely in the forefront of my brain. Which, in turn, is bound to affect this blog’s subject matter.

For more than 10 years now I’ve been a volunteer visitor at Springhouse of Westwood, an assisted living facility that’s part of the Manor Care chain of geriatric health care facilities and is about a 5-minute drive from my house. Most Monday nights over that span, I’ve arrived at about 7 pm to consort with the “night owls”—those few residents, almost always female—who aren’t already in their rooms for the night at that “witching hour” immediately after the dinnertime news. When I’d first approached the then-activities director more than a decade ago and proposed to share some time with the seniors (I should say “older seniors,” as, by AARP’s lights I now am one, too), she essentially asked me to describe my shtick. Did I sing? Play an instrument? Would I be telling stories? I confessed I had no talents—and no big desire, frankly, to be an all-attention-on-me entertainer. This fazed the activities director not one bit. She wasn’t one to look an unpaid gift horse in the mouth.

She had said that Monday evening around 7 or 7:30 would be a good time for me to do my visiting. “What would you be doing if you were home at that time?” she asked. “Watching Jeopardy!,” I answered. “Well, do that, then,” she responded.

And so it’s been that ever since, each time I ride the elevator from the ground level to the second floor of the facility, I read “7:30: Jeopardy with Eric” on the daily activities list that’s taped to the wall. (Staff never think to include the exclamation point, which annoys me as an editor, but to date I’ve let it go.) So, as I’ve already noted, I arrive around 7. I typically spend my first half hour watching Wheel of Fortune with whatever ladies already are seated in the open TV area, and/or visit in their rooms with residents who’ve aged out of communal activities because they’re too blind, deaf, gently demented, or what have you. Then we watch Jeopardy! Mostly I watch, and call out my answers (or, questions, if you prefer), and the ladies watch me. We make small talk amongst us along the way. Then we usually watch the first half of Antiques Roadshow on PBS from 8 to 8:30, or, in season, the first half-hour of Dancing with the Stars on ABC. Then I bid them adieu, telling them I’m hungry and ready for the late dinner Lynn will have waiting for me. For the past several years, the last words I’ve heard before hopping on the elevator are 90-ish Helen telling whoever is in the room, “I can’t believe he waits to eat until this late!” Her tone suggests I’ve just climbed Everest or achieved Olympic gold.

Anyway, I’ve attended a lot of memorial services and funerals over the years, and printed out a lot of obituaries. I’ll always remember my first group of night owls: Imperious Augusta and “Greek Ambassador” Marianthe, who loathed each other; Phyllis, who loved to laugh; and Ruth, a humble but whip-smart Missourian whose daughter was a US Attorney. They’re all dead now. As is Jean, who’d helped Rachel Carson research Silent Spring, the book many credit with kick-starting the environmental movement. And then there was Golde, who was still reading the New Yorker well into her 90s and spoke often of all the fascinating adult ed courses she’s taken in her beloved San Francisco just a few years before moving East. And I’ll always remember charming Richard, the rare man on the assisted-living scene, whose breath suggested his lifelong battle with the bottle perhaps always had been a rather passive fight.

I always tell my Monday-night homies they’re my friends, and they are. Compartmentalized friends, Monday-night friends, but friends nonetheless. I send them Christmas and birthday cards, bring them chocolates for Valentine’s Day. Lynn and I sip middling champagne with them and their middle-aged (or older) kids at occasional celebrations in the downstairs dining room to which family, friends and volunteers are invited. I expect to lose each friend eventually, and I do. But I truly enjoy the time we have together.

Recently I lost Ralph, who’d never once watched Jeopardy! because he didn’t want to leave his wife alone in their third-floor room. Ralph had Parkinson’s disease and was in a wheelchair. Bette had—has—Alzheimer’s. But one of the staff members had told me Ralph could use some company, so I introduced myself upon arrival at 7 one Monday night last summer. He showed me the extensive collection of scrapbooks he’d compiled about his experiences as an escaped POW during World War II. His plane had been shot down in France. He was captured by the Germans, but got loose, and eventually to safety with the help of the French Resistance. He never forgot their bravery and kindness, and devoted the rest of his life to publicizing it through the reunions and events of the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society, which he co-founded in 1964. He was a native of western Pennsylvania, and his death merited an extensive news story/obituary in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. I expressed my admiration to him many times. But the sad truth often is that, when you’re dealing with people who are very old, in ill health, and subject to verbal wandering even if they’re still lucid, neither conversation nor understanding are always, shall we say, fluid.

The recent death that hit me unexpectedly hard, though, was that of a woman about whom I knew very little. Joyce was a tall, thin British native (a war bride) who revealed nothing about herself, and whose last name I didn’t even know until after her death. She was very outspoken about certain things, however. One was that life at Springhouse was boring her to death. Another was that I was wasting vast economic potential by watching Jeopardy! with her at an assisted living facility rather than being on that soundstage in Los Angeles with Alex Trebek. I’d shout out a correct response and she’d berate me, “Think of all the money you’re missing!” Every week she’d ask me when I was going to get on the show. Every week I told her I’d tried, but it’s a crapshoot even to get an audition. Every week she all but rolled her eyes at that response, signaling her certainty that with just a little extra effort—which I obviously was unwilling to expend—I could be on that game show set at that very moment, raking in the dough.

The third subject of Joyce’s extremely vocal scorn was the stated value of the items people brought in to the Antiques Roadshow. She’d scoff at how hideous-looking or otherwise useless the presented lamp or vase or piece of jewelry was, then share her incredulity at the appraiser’s estimated auction value of $10,000 or $25,000 for that obvious piece of crap. “Who’s going to pay that?!” Joyce would exclaim. “Sell it, if someone will pay that ridiculous amount!” she’d urge the happily stunned owner of the offending item.

Joyce’s death hit me unusually hard for a couple of reasons, I think. One is that the last time I’d seen her she hadn’t looked even slightly ill. In fact, I still don’t know the cause of death. HIPAA rules and all that. Nobody’ll tell you anything, and I searched in vain online for an obit. The other factor was that TV-watching was my sole context for her. I never visited with her in her room or even knew where it was. I never met any members of her family. While I liked her immensely, she’d been, to me, mainly the Lady Who Couldn’t Believe I Wasn’t a Jeopardy! Contestant.

But then came the recent cold winter Monday nights without her there. A couple of weeks ago, a chipped and particularly ugly Tiffany lamp commanded some hyperbolic appraisal amount on the Roadshow, and I wanted Joyce’s British fury to raise the roof. But I instead was sitting in a room with two old women who were dozing while this outrage played out on the flat-screen TV. Then, this past Monday night, there was the much-hyped men-vs-machine match on Jeopardy! with IBM’s “Watson” casting aside the two human champs as if they themselves were trivial vestiges of an irrelevant age. I had to wonder what Joyce would have made of that?

“That could be you up there, beating that computer!” I could imagine her shouting. Or, “That thing’s not even human, and it got on the show. What’s your excuse?!”

Unlike Alvy Singer in Annie Hall, I’m not morbid, I don’t think. I don’t deem everything in life to be either horrible or miserable, although I do believe the globe’s heading increasingly in that direction. And I’m sure as hell no intellectual. I wouldn’t recognize the book titles Alvy was recommending to Annie anymore than she did. But I will go so far as to agree that death is an important subject. It’s a big part of my life—even apart from my worries about my aging parents and my friends with cancer, not to mention the fact that my own life may well be in its final third now.

Death is certain to maintain a regular presence in this blog. I hope it hasn’t been, and won’t in the future be, a tedious or dispiriting presence. But if you find that to be the case, you can always buy the cat book.