You just know she made the best PB&J ever.
It would have been tough under any circumstances to say goodbye to the one and only Alice: She helped raise a couple hundred million of us. She was pretty damned good at it too.
It’s tougher all the more that we had to lose her in, maybe, an all too avoidable way. Ann Davis wasn’t a young lady, but by all accounts she was a sprightly and lively one. She fell in her bathroom and never woke up.
Everyone able to do so values their independence and rightly so. Makes it hard to cede independence—that’s surely what it feels like—when the body becomes a bit less nimble than the mind. To admit that’s so, to ask for help to compensate, has to be one of the hardest things any of us has to do.
There comes a day when surroundings and environments that you’d navigated without thought, for half your life or more, become deadly. Things change in an instant.
Seventy years ago the world exploded in war and when it was over people fucked like bunnies. Seventy years on we’ve got maybe the largest generation of senior citizens the world has ever seen.
They’re stubborn as hell and they don’t want to listen. To us, most of all, because they raised us—sure as Alice did. They don’t want to listen when we tell them we don’t want them to trip and fall.
I don’t know how the hell we’re gonna do it, folks, but we need to ornery-senior proof the planet.
