By ROBERT JUMPER
Tutiyi (Snowbird) and Clyde, N.C.
You hear it all the time in our community. We love and appreciate our elders. And it shows.
The Tsali Manor gives extensive care to our senior community on the Qualla Boundary. Tribal Public Health and Human Services department employees work hard to ensure the safety, health, and well-being of tribal elders.
If we live long enough, the day we need care that goes beyond our family’s ability to keep us safe, healthy, and well-being will come. Our physical bodies are just not designed to last forever. We are what produce department managers would call perishable. I know as I continue into my golden years, things that were common and easily are becoming more challenging. This recent cold, wintery, icy, snowing episode would have been a chance to play in ears gone by. Now, it is a challenge. How long can I hold out without getting out into this dangerous, slippery world? How long will my power hold out? Will anyone care enough to check on us to make sure we are okay?
My grandmother spent her last years with us at my mother’s home. “Mammaw”, that was our name for my grandmother, was an incredible woman. My grandmother was my best buddy when I was a boy. Off and on, she would stay with her sons and daughters after they had moved off and started their own families. During those times, she didn’t move in because she needed “taking care of”. She was typically invited so that she could take care of grandchildren while the mother and father of those kids could work or have a rest from the daily onslaught of duties that come with child rearing. Mammaw was an expert caregiver. You see, she had raised nine children of her own, and she raised some of those children during the Great Depression in the Appalachian Mountains. Her husband, my grandfather, was drowned when he dove into a local river to save my uncles who had been pinned under a log in swift water. So, Mammaw was left to raise all those kids alone. She worked and fed them all. She kept them in school and attended to all their needs. She guided my uncles to manhood, many of them serving in the Navy, Air Force, and Army.
For several years, after my mother’s divorce and we had moved to Virginia Beach, my grandmother was my caregiver. Mom worked while Mammaw fed me, got me off to school, helped me with homework, made sure I was clean, dealt with my issues mental and physical. One memory I hope that I never lose is a humorous moment with my Mammaw during Hurricane Camille in 1969. Mammaw and I were space nuts. We loved watching anything having to do with astronauts, rockets, etc. When an Apollo mission was on television, we were glued to the set. So, when Camille hit, Mammaw and I were sitting in the living room, watching a replay of the Apollo 11 walk on the moon. My mother, who had been at work, comes bursting through the front door, obviously frightened and worried. She says, “Are you two okay?” Mammaw assures her that we are fine and wants to know why she is home from work and in such a tizzy. Mom says, “Don’t you know that we are in the middle of a hurricane?” Mammaw, never taking her eyes off the moon walk, calmly replies, “Well, we knew the wind was blowing awfully hard.” It took a lot to rattle my Mammaw.
As she grew older, the reasons for her visits flipped. As I went to college, Mammaw came to live with my mother, not to take care of anyone, but to be taken care of. She needed help doing most things. It was even risky business for her to get up to go from one side of her room to the other. My mother and my sister would come when Mammaw would call to help her from one place to the other. When I was at home from school. I would join in the day-to-day care of my Mammaw. There was bathing, cleaning her room, feeding, and spending time with her. With increasing frequency, she would have medical issues that would mean a trip, either in our personal vehicles or in an ambulance to the hospital. Finally, one of those trips to the hospital was the one when God said it was time to come home and she passed from this life to the next. That last trip to the hospital only lasted a few days and she was gone.
I have watched friends and family have to make the difficult choice to pass caregiving on to strangers in an assisted care or total care facility. It can be gut-wrenching. Looking at an elderly person on the street, you are not able to see the contributions of love that they have given to a person or community. I am always appalled and saddened by those who make sport out of harming the elderly. In 2013, Daniel Kelley contributed an article to Reuters titled “’Knockout game’: A crime trend or random violence?” in it he says, “Police throughout the United States are investigating whether a rash of teen attacks on strangers, many of them elderly, is a crime trend known as the “knockout game” or a series of random acts of violence. A savage assault outside a pizza parlor in Philadelphia left a man severely injured, but with all his belongings intact. Reports of “knockout game” incidents – a shocking new national crime trend to some, and an urban myth to others – have emerged across the country, and officials have been left wondering how to address the problem. The “knockout game,” as it has been reported, works like this: Teens punch a stranger, hoping to send the victim into unconsciousness with a single blow, generally while being filmed for posting on social media.” (www.reuters.com) Now, you might say “never in Cherokee”, and most incidents of elder abuse on the Boundary are not as random or blatant, but all you need to do is look at the Cherokee Police Department arrest reports or the Court’s disposition reports to see that physical violence against elders is not just a “colonizer” thing.
Fortunately, we have some of the best protections for elders and some of the most outstanding caregivers in any municipality right here on the Boundary. One of the great advantages of being a small, close-knit community is that most of us feel a deep sense of family for everyone in the community. This historically matriarchal society truly “mother’s” every person in the family. Commitment to children and elders here is as strong as in any community. And being a relatively small community, manpower and resources may be centralized and focused in a way that few municipalities may create. Tribal health services on the Boundary do not need a governmental mandate to be motivated to provide care for the elderly. It is in their blood. And, on top of the nurturing nature of our people, there are indeed governmental mandates that protect our elders, providing directives for care and provision.
Whether our Tsali Manor and tribal elder program services, or surrounding county elder care facilities, professional caregivers have a special mission. They are part of a society’s giving back to the people who cared for us when we were young and unable to care for ourselves. On top of their contributions to being in the workforce and creation of the community that we live in and perpetuating the culture of our people, elders made personal sacrifices for the members of their families. And if you don’t know that or if you haven’t been engaged in the life of a person for the decades of their lives, it is easy to just see that weakened, older person as a burden instead of the treasure that they are. But in the mind of the gifted caregiver, every elder has value, worthy of honor and respect and the best of care.
I am moving through the stages of life with the knowledge that if I live long, I will need more care. I am thankful for those who choose the profession of caregiver and for the services that are provided by our community, for myself and for the many others who are already in their care.
