Gray Area: Not the last one standing

Today, the Deseret News concludes a 10-part series on aging in Utah. When we think about our futures, most of us skirt the part of the picture that might include dementia, dependency and Depends. And we forget that it might also include newfound meaning, new friendships and second chances to reinvent ourselves. You can catch the entire series — and additional stories and resources — online at deseretnews.com. Click on the icon reading, Not the same old stories.

Not everybody lives to be 96, which is why Priscilla Paul had outlived six siblings and every one of her friends by the time she moved into the Park Lane senior apartments. That's the downside of longevity: You're sometimes the last one standing.

Or sitting. The other day Priscilla sat on her sofa talking about her best friend, Marge, who moved into the senior apartments about the same time Priscilla did. Last month Marge was admitted to the rehab wing of a nursing home, and since then Priscilla has been feeling blue. Priscilla and Marge used to go to the dining room together and watch "Oprah" every afternoon. It was Marge who got Priscilla hooked on Barack Obama.

"I miss Marge terribly," Priscilla says. "I've never had a friend as good as Marge."

That they became best friends when Priscilla was 91 and Marge was 87 speaks to the never-ending need for human connection. "We're social animals, we're primates. ... We're made to interact," says Clara McClane, a geriatric social worker with Jewish Family Services. When babies don't have social interactions, they don't thrive physically, "and at the other side of life, if we find ourselves in situations where it's harder to have relationships, we suffer in other ways."

By the time a person has lived eight or nine decades, she may already have been to the funerals of her spouse, her siblings and her friends, may have moved from her old neighborhood, given up her driver's license and watched her mobility and sight diminish. Sometimes, thinking about all the things and people she has lost, Mabel Gates lies awake in the middle of the night and feels lost herself.

It wasn't that long ago that Mabel, now 89, and her two best friends, Thelma and Lois, were a fun-loving threesome, going out to eat and to the movies. She and Thelma took trips to Oregon and California, and once, in their 70s, they pitched a tent outside Las Vegas because they couldn't get a hotel room. When their vision and health began to fade, the three widows talked on the phone almost every day. Then Thelma died, and last spring, so did Lois.

"As you get older, it's hard to make friends," Mabel says. And besides, "anybody my age would be more infirm than me."