Slam Poetry About an Elderly Woman

This is Rock Wilk. My sons took poetry writing classes with him, with a small group of homeschoolers. It was arranged by a homeschool mom who is friends with him. Wilk also sometimes visits schools to work with schooled kids.

Wilk's poetry touches me. All of it.

After he wrote his one-man show and brought it to the live stage our whole family went to see him perform. I felt it was good for my kids to see a person they knew take a dream and make it into a reality. While some of the content of that show was a bit mature for my kids, and some of the language in that show was profanity, I felt their exposure to it was justified and worth it.

This piece is special to me as it addresses a sick hospitalized 85 year old woman who Wilk loves.



Eldercare issues deeply touch my heart. It all started with my maternal grandmother who fought hard to remain living independently in her rural Maine home with a desire to die in the home she and her husband built with their own hands. For decades I heard of her wishes to remain living with dignity and independence for her whole life. She was 98 when she finally passed. (If you are curious she was brought to my uncle's house during a blizzard and passed during the storm. At least she never did have to live in a nursing home.)

I feel that elderly people have a right to live with dignity until the end, if possible.

It is hard for a person such as myself to try to be an advocate for an elderly person while navigating the waters of what other relatives are responsible for. Different relatives have different responsibilities for helping the aging person and when there is more than one person involved it can quickly get complicated.

Back to the topic in the video, I often ask myself what hospital staff think about the patients. They really have no clue who the patients are as people or how they normally are when they are not so sick and are "not themselves" or are dying.

I wonder also what nursing home staff think, if they wonder who the people were when they were more independent and able-bodied.