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When I was a teenager, my church youth group made an annual Christmas pilgrimage to what people then called the "old folks' home." We took small wrapped gifts, perhaps a comb and bottle of after-shave for men, handkerchiefs, and hand cream for women. Our youth leader did all the cheery talking. We only had to sing and grin. The more virtuous or socially skilled among us might shake a few claw-like hands or pat several bony shoulders. The rest of us just sang carols, crowding around the bedside of strangers while exchanging sidelong glances to let one another know we understood this wasn't real, that we had no personal connection to all this creepy weirdness. As soon as we could, we escaped into the cold night air outside, our pent breath exploding in blasts of laughter.

I was not one of the better people. I dreaded these nursing-home excursions, and not merely because of the sensory and metaphysical assaults aging flesh inflicts on the young. Even at 15, I knew that we were putting on an act, performing—in all the variations of that word's meaning—our Christian duty.

For the most part, we had no idea who these deplorable figures were in their wheelchairs and sickbeds. We weren't even curious. The season demanded charity the way it demanded colored lights, and we provided it—or at least its ceremony. We sang at the nursing homes to warm ourselves with the glow of our own virtue in the same way we Texans use angel hair and tinsel icicles to work up a fake nostalgia for snowy winter landscapes.

As an adult, I made a few visits to elderly relatives or friends in nursing homes, but my next significant exposure came in Wyoming 22 years later. We had just moved to a new town and, having a lot of free time on my hands, I decided to volunteer at a VA hospital two afternoons a week. By then I was old enough myself to be curious about old people. A number of important people in my life were nearing 80. I was beginning to face the fact that they might get seriously sick or even die someday. What would that be like?

From the patients, mostly veterans of World Wars I and II, I got an introductory course on amputation, lung cancer, and stroke. Wheeling patients to the radiology lab or physical therapy, I observed their gauze-wrapped stumps, nicotine-yellowed nails, colostomy bags. Most were men, and fitness had not been a concept, much less a priority, for them. They would sit on the side of their beds, wheezing with emphysema or struggling to drag a recognizable word from under the avalanche of a stroke-damaged brain. A few would talk, but most were sunk in the silence that comes either from illness or living alone too long.

When my circumstances changed and I was no longer able to volunteer at the hospital, I found I missed those afternoons pushing wheelchairs. They had introduced me to a world I now could see was not only real, but one with which I did indeed have some personal connection. Still, I was glad that none of my elderly relatives was living in such a place. To my knowledge, none ever had. Nor, I was certain, would my parents.

It's ten days till Thanksgiving when I push open the double doors to Fair Acres Nursing Facility in Huntsville, Texas. And eight months to the day since we first brought my mother here. My father and I had spent a year and a half caring for her at home as her Parkinson's disease, dementia, and osteoporosis had become too severe. And my father, dealing himself with declining health, could no longer take care of her.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13