“I don’t know that there’s anything outstanding, really, to tell you about,” says Cary Stauffacher’s grandmother Ruth Corrine Hammer, sitting in her backyard in Monroe, Wisconsin. “I’ve reached the age of 85 and I’m still doing my own housework and I try to keep my house in perfect order all the time. That’s the only thing worth mentioning.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Ruth, whose husband Walter died ten years ago, is in a lawn chair with her back to her granddaughter’s camera. An empty white chair faces her. “Cut it off here if you want,” she suggests. This poignantly framed moment appears in Every Ninety Days, a video portrait of her grandmother that Stauffacher made in 1988. A few years later she expanded this sketch into Something Should Be Done About Grandma Ruthie, an account of her grandmother’s wrenching path to a nursing home as Alzheimer’s eroded her independence.
A physician prescribed a tranquilizer, which was slipped into Ruthie’s meals. “Drugging her every day,” as Joan puts it. But even in Ruthie’s frail state of 90 pounds, the drug seemed to have no effect on her stubbornness. When Joan told the doctor about struggling to get her mother into the car for a drive to the hospital, “He said two things: ‘Shit!’ and ‘Double the dosage.’”
Stauffacher says elderly members of her immediate family have typically died early or abruptly. “We’d say, ‘That’s the chair uncle so-and-so died in.’” Ruthie almost seemed upset by her longevity. “It was like an aberration of nature for her. Nobody was supposed to live that long.”
