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Rebecca Hoch lay on the floor of her apartment, her left leg twisted beneath her and her right leg broken. She knew it was broken because she could see shards of her femur piercing the skin above her right knee.
“Keep still,” she told herself. “You'll make it worse by moving.”
She was 94 years old, and she had been sitting in her apartment at the Terraces of Baycrest, a Toronto retirement home. When she stood up to go to her afternoon poetry class, her leg gave out. The Terraces gives all residents a “lifeline” alert button to wear in case of such an emergency, but Mrs. Hoch had taken hers off – she didn't like the way it felt around her neck.
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She yelled for help until she was hoarse, but no one heard her through the heavy fire door. Finally, two hours later, a neighbour heard her cries.
Now 96 and in a wheelchair, Mrs. Hoch winces when she remembers the fall – not because of the pain, which she says was not too bad, but because the paramedics cut off one of her favourite outfits, a navy skirt with six buttons and a beige blouse with a blue floral pattern that her daughter-in-law bought for her in Israel.
“I loved that blouse,” she sighs.
The fact that Mrs. Hoch is alive to mourn her lost clothing is remarkable. Not many 94-year-olds could survive such a brutal fall. Even fewer would battle through rehab to get out of hospital, then through a nursing home and return to independent living at the Terraces. But Mrs. Hoch has done it, with help from a home health aide and by the grace of her own determination.
What drives some people to fight back against illness and recover from loss, while others simply fade away? Where does someone like Mrs. Hoch, who looks so frail in her wheelchair, find the strength and the resilience to keep going?
“I'll never give up,” she declares in her native Scottish burr. “Hope springs eternal – even if it's just for another hour, you hope to live. It's within you.”
We all know we're going to die some day. Most of us think of that day, if we do at all, as way off in the misty future.
But when you're staring down your 10th decade, death is a daily reality.
At the Terraces, the administration announces deaths on white slips of paper that are distributed to everyone's mailboxes: “It is with sadness that I inform you of the passing of …” Residents open the familiar notes with a combination of curiosity and dread, wondering who it will be this time. Last winter, they got so many of the little slips that some complained of death-notice fatigue.
Lawrence Sandy, a 93-year-old with a resonant voice and a flair for the dramatic, says the notes make him sad, but he moves on quickly.
“It sorta gets you down for a minute or two, but it disappears very fast. Life goes on,” he says. “It happened to them, it'll happen to us, too. You go to bed at night and you're grateful when the morning is another day.”
Mr. Sandy devised a strategy to protect his positive attitude. When he says hello to people he never asks, “How are you?” He doesn't want to get trapped listening to someone moan about their prostate or their indigestion, he says. So instead, he greets everyone with a jaunty, “You're looking great!”
If residents dwelt on every death and illness, the retirement home would be an unbearably gloomy place. But they don't, and it's not. Death stalks the hallways, but less like the grim reaper and more like a pesky, familiar visitor – unwelcome, but not terrifying.
Death is “unbelievable, it's unthinkable,” says Ruth Hanff, 94, a Terraces resident for eight years. “But the older you get, the more acquainted you become with it. The more acquainted you become, the less terrible it seems to be.”
