Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23

Notes from my Knapsack 5-18-23
Jeff Gill

Thinking about Aunt Esmerelda
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Over the last few months, I've been thinking about Aunt Esmerelda quite a bit.

Demographically, I mean.

The name is uncommon, picked for that reason. If there's an Esmerelda who reads this, my apologies, but I had to name her something with an echo of days gone by.

Aunt Esmerelda, in my formulation here, is that "maiden aunt" who becomes, largely by default, the family caregiver. She was the youngest daughter of the twelve children or something like that, and when Grandma got sick, she tended her. By the time Grandma passed, Esmerelda was too old for marriage, and anyhow, she was needed at Aunt Endorra's house, where she moved into the spare room.

Once that situation resolved, usually at the Grover's Corners cemetery, she went home to tend her mother or her father.

Seriously, if you do much genealogy, you recognize "Esmerelda Syndrome" pretty quickly. There were lots of kids, people died at home - heck, they had the calling and the funeral at home usually - and while the menfolk shoed horses and shot bears, and the women churned laundry and scrubbed butter, end-of-life care was taken care of "all in the family."

Plus, this is back when un-ironically people called pneumonia "the old person's friend" because it was the usual end of suffering, before morphine drips and other medications took over. And since some of those medications actually cured pneumonia, we all had to find something else to die of, and that list has been shrunk considerably.

So we live longer, and that's good, but by the time we get to the last few years of debility (if we're fortunate), our children and our prospective Aunt Esmereldas are older, too. This gets called "the sandwich generation," about the large numbers of us adults who have ailing parents and children needing care all at the same time, but if you're thinking about calling Aunt Esmerelda… well, we didn't have her. There aren't many youngest of twelves around.

Smaller families, shorter spans of childhood within a household, and you cut down on the sandwichian overlap, but you come up short when the elderly are no longer 60 or 70, but 90 and pushing up into the centenarian cohort.

Obviously, this is where assisted living facilities and home care aides come in for many families, and when well run and fully staffed they can be a blessing and a good solution to some of these questions.

But they aren't all that. They aren't all well run, and guess which have openings when you need one in a hurry? And fully staffed? Yeah, right. COVID cut a hole through that whole model we're still sorting out, as the elderly are still the most vulnerable to the virus continuing to make ripples of mortality through vulnerable populations. Plus they cost money, which makes for a grim calculus in many families. And I'm no good at calculus.

The situation of an Aunt Esmerelda was not good, and the fact that women aren't shoehorned into such roles as often as they once were, as even Jane Austen feared might happen to her as a "dependent woman," is an improvment. What hasn't improved is how we deal with such situations, as a society or in most families. It's a subject we're all likely to deal with at some point, all the more reason to consider how to handle it now.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; his middle name is not Esmerelda but it might as well be. Tell him how you've seen caregiving challenges dealt with helpfully at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.