Why They Do It

By Judy Steed, The Star.com

November 10, 2008

Canada

After a year in the trenches with geriatricians, I can say that almost every one I met was drawn to the field by love for an elder, usually a grandparent.

Neena Chappell, the gerontologist who set up centres on aging at the University of Manitoba and the University of Victoria, was profoundly influenced as a child by her father's father, the only family member who supported her parents' mixed marriage. 

When she did her master's thesis in gerontology, then her PhD at McMaster University in the 1970s, her professors would ask, "What's a young thing like you interested in old people for?"

She would reply, "People who have lived so many years have wisdom; they've learned a lot." 

Her grandfather, M.R. Chappell, was a lumber baron of his era, in Nova Scotia. He was a friend of prime minister Mackenzie King and, within the family, he was "held up as a man who believed in justice and fairness," Chappell recalls. They shared a special relationship, so special that, when he was 90 and the doctors wanted to transfer him to a nursing home, he refused to be moved until he had talked to Neena.

"My father asked him, `Why do you have to talk to Neena?' He said, `I know she'll listen to what I want.'" That's the heart of it. 

Dr. Michael Gordon is an ebullient geriatrician at Baycrest, Toronto's health sciences centre focused on aging. Gordon grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he shared his boyhood bedroom with his adored grandmother, Bessie, a Lithuanian-born rabble-rousing activist.

She was the keeper of the family history and, in turn, she conveyed it to him. "I had images of pogroms, of Cossacks and dead people, the boat to America. She finished high school in America and became an organizer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. I was brought up to the left of the left," Gordon says. 

His grandmother had a profound influence on Gordon's life, and you can see it in his bedside manner. If you are lucky enough to be his patient, he takes your medical file, sets it aside, looks into your eyes and says: "Now, tell me about yourself. Who are you?"

In the case of Dr. William Dalziel, it was a golf-playing grandfather who made a difference.

Dalziel, chief of the Regional Geriatric Assessment Program at Ottawa Hospital, points to a photograph of his grandfather on his office wall. "That's Gramps, Burd McNiece. He lived to 106 and three quarters." 

Dalziel's eyes light up as he talks about his Gramps. "He had five `hole in ones' after the age of 80. He was a banker in Saskatchewan and lived through the Depression. At the age of 75, he moved to Kelowna; at 95, he moved to Toronto, to be near his daughter." He also travelled around the world curling and he's in the Curling Hall of Fame.

It was a gift, Dalziel says, to be close to someone "who aged without being old, who was engaged in life till the end." 

Guy Proulx, Baycrest's director of psychology and neuro-rehabilitation, was drawn to the specialty of geriatrics through a different kind of love. As a child, he was aware that "there was something wrong" with his father, who couldn't talk. The senior Proulx was aphasic – unable to speak – as a result of a fast-growing brain tumour.

"I wanted people to know my Dad was a person," Proulx said. "He was more than what he looked like. For me, brain damage was a door to understand how the mind works." His father died of the brain tumour at the age of 48, when Proulx was a boy. 

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