Madame President

They called her "Madame President" at the senior residence, and not without reason. For one thing, she had been there a long time, and in control of all of her faculties. She was still mobile, which was fairly rare, especially for an extended period of life. At 86, she was one of the oldest residents, although by looking around, one would think she wasn’t. She knew all the staff—nurses, aides, nuns, cooks, doctors, cleaning people—most of the other residents, and the inner workings of the home. And she was sturdy. No one trampled on her, pushed her around, or interfered with her own personal management.

She didn’t quite remember where or how she got the designation, but as we walked from where I met her in her room down two corridors and through the main lounge, a voice from one of the stony-faced women sitting in front of the television called, “There goes Madame President.”

Grandma Eckman pretended she didn’t hear it, but I noted how she simultaneously stood taller and walked faster. It was a tremendous honor and great responsibility, which she took seriously. She was a kind of a take-charge person, and in a place like this there was ample opportunity.

With pity she noted that many of the other residents had been dumped there by children and other relatives when they didn’t have children, or in some cases, when they outlived their children. “It’s a hard thing,” she noted from personal experience, “to outlive your children.” Yet she wore her grief at the unexpected death of her daughter—my grandmother—with dignity.

I wouldn’t say she had a regal bearing, but folks did take notice when she walked past or when she said something. Her voice was a flat alto with a lot of resonance. Sometimes I thought she was braying, but even if she was, everyone paid attention.

She earned the respect of her “the inmates,” as she called them, as well as the staff via an uncanny power to speak with people. When she did this, she invested an intensity that projected her interest and compassion. After all, there were many sad stories accompanying these people—of grief, loss, rejection, confusion. And she would sit with them, look at them with those intense blue eyes and stroke a hand.

She also paid attention, and she knew when staff members were behaving inappropriately to the residents, even surly or demented ones. And she never failed to stick up for the weaker. Her common phrase, often shouted across a waiting room or from the hallway, was, “Try it a bit differently.” And if she knew how, she would proffer that as well. “Hold her hand,” for example.

And she would broach no mistreatment or disrespect toward herself. I recall a time when I found her in the kitchen telling the cooks that the next time they served her a dried out pork chop, they would find it the next day in the most unexpected place they could think of. “And I guarantee you,” she concluded, “it will ruin your day.” Or she could be found taking her own linens to the laundry, if she was “inadvertently missed” on laundry day.

Once, one of the nuns told me that she had stopped a potential brawl between three angry and very dissimilar residents over which television program to watch, maneuvering all three into a compromise that kept them contented for months.

She told me that how she lived was important, as well as how her fellow residents lived. This was, after all, a place where they were to be cared for and, more importantly, their home, and she treated it like the place she was making for herself to live in.