NEAR THE END OF HIS DEVASTATINGLY depressing yet profoundly humane “Old Friends,” Tracy Kidder quotes the newspaper obit once written for Joe Torchio, a resident of the Massachusetts nursing home Kidder observed for a year, and one of the book’s two main subjects. Torchio, said his obituary, a probation officer with a law degree, was “a vocal supporter of low income housing, more facilities to handle family problems…an enlightened parole policy, and an alcoholism clinic.” The obit never ran because Joe (as Kidder calls him throughout) survived the midlife stroke that led to its being written. “The paper would surely shorten it when Joe actually died,” Kidder adds. “His public accomplishments would count for less than they had nineteen years ago. The things he’d done that were bold and innovative then had become commonplace…Certainly there’d be nothing to add…These days, Joe lived a life that was reduced in most respects–reduced, it might be said, to awaiting death.”
As nursing homes go, Linda Manor is nearly top of the line. But in the eyes of the outside world (when it can nerve itself up to look), the residents’ lives are devalued: not just in the present, where changeless days pass in a babble of TV and bingo, but retroactively as well. What remains of another stroke patient’s avocation–the painstaking restoration of antique sleighs and buggies–is two albums of photos, to which he points, saying, “Excellent. Excellent. Buggy. Buggy.” Lou, Joe’s much older roommate–who becomes, as the book progresses, his friend and mentor-ran a pen factory and worked as a model-maker and a maintenance man; Linda Manor’s staff largely brushes off his well-informed suggestions.
For people like Lou and Joe, the problem is, in Robert Frost’s phrase, “what to make of a diminished thing.” Our culture’s ideal of a healthy, vigorous old age, as Kidder notes, “leaves out a lot of people”; without sentimentalizing, he turns his book into an inspiriting demonstration that the “moral life doesn’t have to end with youth or public life, or even with confinement in a nursing home.” That’s why the angry, stubborn Joe finally holds our attention more than the wise, kindly, more appealing Lou. “Joe’s obituary would be shorter than the prematurely written one,” Kidder concludes, “but his life had expanded…He’d made himself as useful as he could. He had entered a little society founded merely on illness, and,…realizing it was all there was for him, he had joined it and improved it.“Kidder surely intended the paradox: this passage is a truer obituary than any summary of Joe’s public deeds. Even the last days of a life, it suggests, have incalculable value; if we look away, we, too, are diminished.
