The woman who crawled to the phone

Margarete Hicken tries to keep her voice chipper as she talks to her friend on the phone. "Oh," she says, "I'm just lolling about." Lolling, indeed. She is lying under the table in her tiny breakfast nook, unable to get up.

A half-hour ago, trying to throw something in the wastebasket, she lost her balance, then lost her grip on her walker as she fell. She wasn't hurt, but she couldn't bend her legs to get vertical again. So she inched her way toward the breakfast nook, hoping to get a grip on the table legs to pull herself up. She was lying there, pondering her options, when the phone rang.

When you're 101 and you don't answer the phone at night, well-meaning folks and busybodies alike start to worry. They summon ambulances and rescue crews that may take you to the hospital and then to rehab and then maybe move you into a nursing home. They set things in motion that you might not be able to undo.

So she pulls the phone off the table and answers with a bright, "Hello." She will see who it is and decide what to do. Can that voice be trusted not to jump to the conclusion that she should no longer live alone in the home she loves?

She's not sure, so she makes small talk. Later she scootches herself through her dining room to the stairs, hoping she can pull herself up by holding onto the bannister. It is now well past midnight, and she is still flat on her back. Finally, at two in the morning, she decides to push the button on the emergency alert bracelet she wears on her wrist, the same button that could have brought help hours ago.

Of all the snapshots of Utah as it ages, perhaps Margarete lying in her front hall at 2 a.m. is the most telling. It's the image of a woman fighting hard to control her future, full of gusto but frail. And caught, like Utah itself, in that gray area, not quite willing to accept what's coming, not quite sure what's inevitable and what's not.

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"To live independently and then die suddenly — that's what everybody in geriatrics prays for," admits Dr. Steve Fehlauer, a Salt Lake geriatrician who has overseen care of hundreds of Alzheimer's patients at local nursing homes.

"Aging in place" is the buzzword — the ability to grow old in your own home and your own town, or at least in a senior apartment with your own pictures on the walls. It's partly an effort to keep costs down, partly a human need to be near what is familiar. At its core is also an unnamed fear: of ending up aging in another place, at the mercy of family or strangers.