The Matter-Of-Fact Inspiration of a 95th Birthday Party

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The other week, I was invited to a 95-year-old’s birthday party. While it was a celebration of the impressive span of her life, I realized it was also a tribute to human resilience in its many forms. At one point, I stood there in the community room at the nursing home and looked around at the partygoers. What struck me was how much tenacity must be sitting in that room. Then I was hit with a somewhat sad question: How many of those who hold this tenacity don’t even realize they do?

When I arrived at the party, a group had gathered in the community room atop a cluster of chairs and wheelchairs around a man hired to play guitar and sing old-timey tunes. Emanating from this were others at tables and in wheelchairs reaching out to the edge of the large cafeteria-like space. They were quietly taking in the scene, most of them residents, a handful having come to visit their elderly loved ones, and one sat in his parents’ arms, with head up and alert, no older than a year or two.

This party was arranged by the birthday girl’s family, and was open to the nursing home community because the more social interaction, the better, especially at that age.

This nursing home houses many people well into their nineties, and some beyond that. I’ve been there a few times over the last couple of years. Occasionally, I visit the birthday girl, who’s an offshoot of my extended family through marriage. She’s a fun lady, always with the next and the next story about her upbringing or adulthood, about her parents or siblings, about all the customs and experiences that made her life what it is. She’s from a farm in the South, and this is emphasized plenty in her narratives.

I love to listen to her chatter on, as she’s mostly unaware of how lengthy her stories are, with no idea how intrigued and amused I am with the way she phrases things and what she feels completely fine sharing. Yes, it’s entertaining. Yes, I learn a lot, too.

One of the things I learn is how resilient this woman is — to have reached this age, to hunker down in her apartment for most of the day, to continue with physical limitations but also with expansive life wisdom, which must sometimes seem pointless because who can truly understand it other than the few her age? It’s a day-to-day existence. Not to mention the waiting.

When I stood there looking out at the sea of silent, expressionless faces, what it really looked like was a sea of silent waiting. I don’t say this to be a Debbie Downer. For me, it was an exercise of imagining what it might be like to be pushing 100. It gets slower, and it appears to get quieter, and I wonder if it becomes more matter-of-fact. There’s only one way for me to find out.

The music was the connecting force at the party, with so many there responding to the lyrics and the beat, people either dancing on their two feet, tapping their toes atop the wheelchair foot rests, or nodding softly. Some of the lips in the room were following along with the lyrics here and there, as none of us could remember all the words to these songs from the 60s and 70s. Lyrics aside, I danced.

When I looked over at a group of residents nearby, a couple of them were upright and dancing to the beat, so I shimmied over and joined in. I will dance with anyone at all, but I’ve rarely gotten the chance to dance with ninety-year-olds. There was a woman who took me up on my wordless offer, who then took my hand and tried to teach me whatever classic dance steps she was cautiously executing. She was incredible. I was horrific. She knew this one-step two-step number, back and forth, left to right. I tried to follow, but got horribly mixed up.

How could she be so adept? I don’t need to ask how I could be so inept. If you dance with me, I’ll make you look really good. No regrets.

And that was my hope for the people sitting in that big room, most of them slow as butter, all of them winners in terms of life span: no regrets. But I know that’s an impossible thing. We all have some regret or other, larger or small. It’s part of life. Yet, resilience in life asks for those regrets to eventually take a back seat to forward thinking.

Resilience asks for acceptance because it’s the fuel we use to move forward. A lack of acceptance means getting stuck in the deep mud of what we can’t control, the past, or an obsession with all that is wrong. When I think about those silent, motionless faces at the party, I wonder how many of them have been able to let go of their loneliness. I was told that many of them never have a single visitor.

That’s hard.

Just sitting in the community room, having been wheeled down by a staff member, must take some kind of acceptance.

The woman who took my hand to twirl me and teach me the two-step had a confident yet welcoming look in her eyes: Come, let’s dance, because we can. I was taken aback by her face, which exuded such certainty. It said that what we were doing was not a random moment between strangers who’ll never see each other again, but an intentional act of asserting agency over our options. We could have kept to ourselves. We could have stayed seated. We could have said, oh, I’m a passive player in all this. We could have opted not to come at all.

But we decided differently, and once we did, we found a dance partnership waiting. Since that day, I don’t know if she has thought of me, but I certainly think of her.

After partying it up with those I came to see, which included the brave middle schoolers hanging on for dear life through their boredom, I looked out onto the room one last time.

I saw the young parents sitting in the middle of the room with the baby in their arms. They, too, were tapping into resilience at this stage in their lives, grappling with sleep, investing precious time in learning to be parents. I looked at my extended family with so much on their plates right now, and yet tending to a once-in-a-lifetime birthday party because it was important. I noticed the man playing guitar and wondered about his life, but was certain that he, too, must have things he’s grappling with, because of course. Finally, I watched the birthday girl, fragile and happy, host a stream of well-wishers bent over her wheelchair, wishing her a happy 95th.

We all struggle, and we all wake each day and continue on. Does resilience have to be a shiny adaptation to challenge? To me, the willingness to be wheeled to a birthday party, to choose to tap the feet, to sing old lyrics — this was something to admire, a matter-of-fact inspiration. I don’t want to let that party go. I hope I don’t.

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Party on, friends.