Sylvia Miller walked through the heavy wooden doors of the dining room at her new retirement home and looked around eagerly.
Light streamed in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the faces of people greeting friends across their tables, catching up on the latest gossip. Servers busily set out bowls of soup and plates of bread, and the room buzzed with chatter and laughter.
She wound her way between the clumps of parked walkers to her assigned seat. The four women at her table were all about the same age and single just like her, so she hoped they would have a lot in common.
But being the new girl is never easy.
“Nobody at the table talked to me,” Mrs. Miller, now 89, recalls. “They talked all around me.”
That was two years ago, and the memory still stings.
She tried chatting about the weather, the food, anything, but her lunch companions just looked right through her, she says. She never learned why they decided to freeze her out – she was new, and she supposes that was enough to earn their scorn. She remembers keeping a smile plastered on her face through every silent meal. But inside, she fought with a growing sense of dread.
“You sit there like an idiot and nobody talks to you,” she says.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?'”
It would be nice if age smoothed the rough edges of human nature, erasing all traces of cattiness and pettiness. No such luck. As Mrs. Miller says philosophically, “People are people, and women are certainly women.”
As Canada ages, the retirement home industry is preparing for a massive influx of seniors who are looking for more support than they get living on their own, but more independence than they would have in a nursing home. Currently, about one in 10 Canadians is 65 or older; by 2031, one in four Canadians will be a senior.
The retirement home industry is preparing for this demographic high tide with a nationwide building boom.
Much as the suburbs expanded to house the baby-boom generation in its childhood after the Second World War, retirement homes are proliferating now in anticipation of the boomers' senescence.
But future retirement home residents may be in for a surprise. Rather than the dull, anaesthetized places many assume them to be, retirement homes are fraught with the same jealousies and bad behaviour as any close social environment. And cliques abound.
There are geographic and linguistic cliques at the Terraces of Baycrest, an 11-storey retirement home in north Toronto: the Montrealers, the Hungarians, the Romanians.
There are the cliques everyone respects, such as the Holocaust survivors who gather to share stories every Friday night after Shabbat dinner.
And there are the cliques that stir envy, and maybe even resentment. Jean Goldstein, 86, and her husband, Milton, 87, share a lunch table with two other couples. All of them are in relatively good health (the key word being “relatively” – Mr. Goldstein has survived a stroke, heart attack and cancer). The male halves of all three couples can still drive, which is a huge deal. Much like in high school, a driver's licence is a membership card to the cool kids' club, conferring freedom at a time when it's in short supply. And in a world of widows, having a live husband who drives is the equivalent of dating the varsity quarterback with a sweet Mustang.
“They probably hate us,” Mrs. Goldstein says.
Not that she and her lunch friends are snobby: Mrs. Goldstein participates in a dozen different clubs, and another couple at her table play host to movie nights every week. But their efforts may reek of noblesse oblige to those who are less blessed with health and companionship.
And just like in a John Hughes movie, everyone knows who's from the wrong side of the tracks. Some Terraces residents have their rent, which starts at $3,264 a month for a bachelor apartment, subsidized by the government, while most pay out of their own funds. Of course, nobody officially knows who's who, but even with failing eyesight residents can tell a Coach handbag from a Wal-Mart knockoff.
