Annoying Agnes: The Story of One Old Lady

Not Agnes, but the expression is relevant

When she was a little girl, her older brothers teasingly called her "Agga Bag-a Turnip Seed”. She didn't like it one bit. She knew they loved her, but she was the only girl and the youngest child in her family which meant they could pretty much call her whatever they wanted.


Hers was a family that worked. In the huge cotton fields of South Carolina, even as a child, she ended up spending many of her days in the sun working (mostly playing) along-side her brothers. She was a cheerful little girl who dreamed of becoming a mother as she played with her dolls and pretended to keep house.


 When her own mother passed away, Agnes, who was only 9 or 10 as she recounted the story to me, was lost. Her father had no idea how to raise a girl and soon remarried. I'm not sure Agnes ever realized that, most likely, her father remarried just to have a woman around to raise her. Agnes and her new mother got along very well. Back in "her day", people didn't believe in taking time to grieve. There was too much work to be done and too much life to be lived.


By the time my path crossed hers, Agnes was 80 years old. She had always been an independent kind of woman. She raised her daughters single-handedly after her husband passed away. She lived alone in her own house, still drove her car, got her nails done every other week and did her own grocery shopping. The problem was, one day she suddenly got the news from her knees, that they were tired of holding her up. She had a series of tumbles and the last one left her with a broken hip. That's why she and I met.


 I think it was a spring day when I went bouncing into the rec room at the nursing home where I worked and found a very unpleasant lady in a geriatric recliner trying with all her might to get up. I had no idea who she was but I knew right away that she was angry. "Git me outta this thang!" She hollered. "I wanna go home! They beatin' me up in this place!"

I was still quite green when it came to handling situations like this with the elderly. I knew the nurses had strategically placed her in that room so I could keep her distracted from her anxiety about being away from home and not being able to get out of that chair. Up until that point, the most difficult elder I had ever worked with was a lady at another nursing home who used to yell obscenities at passers-by. It was easy to distract that lady, but this one I knew was going to be a challenge. I had been in the room 5 minutes and already I was feeling annoyed by this woman. I stood for a moment just observing her, listening to her wild ranting, venomous anger and absurd accusations. The accusations were, for the most part, directed at a Certified Nursing Assistant named David. David was a tall, big guy with a heart of gold. All the other residents on that floor absolutely thought of him as one of their best friends. Some of the ladies admitted that, at first, it was awkward having a man help them with their personal hygiene, especially a black man. But in the end, the finally learned something they hadn't known their entire lives: Black people are just as human, and just as "normal" as anyone else.


 People born in 1912, like Agnes, were raised by parents who still harbored fear and  even hatred for African Americans. Human-kind has always feared what isn't familiar to it. Many of our elderly folks today were raised by parents who taught them that black people were dirty, prone to raping white women and likely to steal. So with that belief system still in place, although perhaps not as strongly as it had once been in her mind, Agnes was completely terrified when David came to her room to help her to the restroom in the middle of the night.


 The nurse filled me in on the details about Agnes' run-in with David, and I went and pulled up a chair beside Agnes. I touched her hand. "Don't touch me girl!" she spat at me.

 "Okay," I said. "I won’t touch you. I was wondering if you and I could talk."

 "What would I have to talk to you about? Unless, you can take me home I ain't talking to you or nobody else!"

 "Wow, I'm sorry to hear that," I responded. "I was really hoping you could tell me what you are so upset about and see if maybe I could do something to make you feel better."

 "Well ain't you sweet," she came back at me, with the most charming southern sing-songy sarcasm I'd ever heard.

 "I try to be sweet, but sometimes I'm mean."

 "Y’all are all mean in this place. I got raped by a black man last night and nobody in this place even cares!' At that point I started to feel panic setting in to my own bones. I knew she was afraid of David, but rape?

 "Oh, my goodness! Are you going to be okay? Who raped you?"

 "That black man, I told you! There he goes right now! Don’t let him near me!" She pointed at David as he, embarrassed, shot by the door as quickly as he could.

 "Why do you think you were raped, Agnes?" "Look at all these bruises on me! Why else would I be so bruised up? I'm an old lady, who would want to have sex with me? He's just nasty!"

 Of course, her bruises were from the fall she took, wherein she broke her hip and ended up at the nursing home in a geriatric recliner. Turns out, the pain medication Agnes was taking was making her kind of delusional. She thought she could get up and walk around with a broken hip, and she was convinced that David had raped her and left her covered in bruises. Every day, day after day, I walked into my work-space and found Agnes sitting there looking angry and vengeful. She eventually came to love David, but she wouldn't admit it. She always griped to me about wanting to go home to her "perfectly good house." She wouldn't listen when I tried to kindly reason with her. In my foolishness, I tried lying to her by telling her that she'd get better and go home soon. I knew, though, that she was never going back home. She knew it too. She might have been old and confused at times, but there was no pulling the wool over her eyes. She was angry at us at first, and then her anger turned towards her children. One morning, as I was listening to the thousandth speech about why her children were evil for taking her away from home, I dropped my pencil and looked Agnes straight in the eye. "I'm tired of your complaining." I said.

 Without missing a beat she said, "Well I'm tired-a you wearing them stupid lookin' boots all the time."

 "I'm tired of you acting like I broke your hip" I said back.

 "Well that's just bullshit" She answered. "I broke my own hip doin' something I shouldn'ta been doin' in the first place."

 "Tell me about that," I said. She sat there with me and told me the whole story about the morning she fell in the kitchen and broke her hip. About the EMS people coming and about her daughter taking care of her at the hospital, and about thinking she was going home when they brought her straight from the hospital to the nursing home.

 "Wow! I can see why you are so angry." I said when she finished. "I think I'd be angry too." 


"Angry? I ain't angry" she said without making eye contact. Her normal harsh tone had disappeared as she finally sat in silence, looking out the window and picking at her fingernails. I left her with her thoughts for a while as I worked. Eventually she dozed off there beside me. On some kind of level, Agnes and I had bonded. For whatever reason, she was starting to feel safe with me and that made me feel amazingly good. I realized that day, that Agnes was a tough, independent spirited person. She didn't want to be placated or patronized, and that was what everyone around her, including me, was doing. She was an annoying old lady that everyone wanted to dismiss. Everyone who came into contact with her immediately started looking for an escape. They didn't want her to know how much they disliked her for her meanness, so they tried to say to her what they thought she wanted to hear, when all along she just wanted some honesty.


 For weeks after that, Agnes would come sit with me and we would talk about her house, her late husband, her children, and the garden she used to have at home. We even talked about her sadness about never being able to go back there. She was softening, and we were becoming friends. After a while, her true colors started to shine as she would make jokes (sometimes off-colored ones) and get into silly rants about the decor of the building or the behavior of another resident. Annoying ol' Agnes became one of our most beloved residents. She and the nurse bonded well with a relationship based on honesty and an absence of pretense. If you heard Agnes and me having a conversation, you might have thought we were arguing or angry at one another but we weren't. We were always honest with one another, and sometimes we didn't agree. For instance, I thought my boots were great.


Eventually I called her Agga Bagga, and she called me Rebecker. She came looking for me every morning and hung out with her nurse at the nurses' station every afternoon--cracking jokes about people walking by and telling Donna how to be a better nurse. Agnes always had handy advice to give out whether we wanted it or not. I recall one day when a CNA was talking about her boyfriend not proposing. Agnes very matter-of-factly told her, "Git yerself pregnant, then he'll marry you." One day she was looking through catalogues with me and we ran across a page of women's lingerie. "Oh you need to git some of this stuff, Rebecker. I bet your feller wouldn't know what to do if he saw you in that!"

 "Yes he would." I answered. And Agnes proceeded to giggle like a school girl.


Today when I was looking at my blog stats, something stood out to me. Since the tongue in cheek post I wrote titled, "The 10 Most Annoying Things About the Elderly" It has gotten more page views than any other post. So I did some digging, and found out the three search terms that bring up that post. And they are: "Why are old people so annoying?" "Annoying old people" and "Are old people annoying?" Turns out, on Yahoo answers, there are several "annoying old people" questions and rants from the youngsters about how old people are unnecessary, annoying and smelly. There are lots of comments about weak old men and slow old ladies and how irritating they are to be around because they're always telling stories about the war, etc. It made me kind of sad seeing that there are so many people out there who completely deny the elderly the human dignity and respect they deserve. They've done more living and more sacrificing than any of us have done. Whatever we are going through now, they've already been through it, often without the resources we have today. Yet they are still fascinated with what's new in the world. They want to know more, and they want to be validated as human beings who did the hard work it takes to even get old.


 After I left the nursing home and went to work for hospice, Agnes would call me up every afternoon from the nurses' desk to see how I was doing and tell me she missed me. I looked forward to hearing her voice every day. However, as her health declined, the calls were fewer and further between until she finally stopped calling. Her nurse kept me up to date on her condition and I went by to see her whenever I could. The last time I saw her, Agga Bagga was lying in bed. She was polite and very happy to have a visitor, but she didn't recognize me anymore. I was saddened by the loss of our camaraderie, but happy to see her anyway.


 A couple of nights later, I had a dream about Agnes. She was lying on the floor of a dark room and I was sitting beside her. I asked her if she was afraid and she said no. She told me she was ready to go see James. James was her late husband. I sat and held her hand in the dream and she told me she just wanted to say goodbye to me before she left. She told me she was ready over and over again and told me it wouldn't be long and not to worry about her. I shook my head and kind of laughed it off the next morning. I figured my recent visit and Agnes' memory loss had induced the dream. That could have been it, but I'll never quite be sure.


 Later that day at work, I got a phone call from the nursing home. It was Donna, Agnes' nurse. She told me that Agnes had just passed away a few minutes before she called. I told her about my dream and she insisted that I come by the nursing home. I left work and went over. Donna met me in the hallway outside Agnes' room and told me that just before she died, Agnes looked at her and said, "I'm ready. I'm ready to go see James. Don't worry about me, I'm ready." Donna and I both had goose bumps.


 This lady, this mean, annoying old lady that made my days so difficult for weeks and weeks, turned out to be one of the most influential people in my life. We forged a deep connection just by being honest with one another. Sure, sometimes we disagreed about things and sometimes we had to tell each other painful truths but beyond all that, we learned to love and appreciate one another just as we were. That angry, bruised up old lady with a broken hip--yeah, she was annoying. But she was also hurting and in need of someone to meet her where she was. When I was able to finally do that, her load became lighter and her last year became brighter and happier. She died in a place where she was so loved and she has been missed ever since she left us. I'm not claiming any kind of special powers with the elderly. I didn't know what I was doing with Agnes, I just kept trying until something worked and she taught me that starting with honesty and sincerity is the best way to reach someone's heart. I'm so blessed to have had her in my life for a little while.


The next time you meet an elder who is annoying or mean or whatever, stop yourself from rolling your eyes and giving that exasperated sigh. Think for a second about your own troubles and remind yourself that the elder you see has probably been where you are and made it out. That elder that you're so quick to judge as worthless and irritating is still battling problems and worries and he or she has never given up on the fight. Be proud of them, be honest with them, respect them and try not to patronize them. The world wouldn't exist as it does if they hadn't been here to shape it for you. Stop before you judge and hold your tongue. Trust me; elders get sick of annoying young people too.