Giving Up the Car Keys--and Much More

Roland Acles was 85 when he made his final two trips behind the wheel of an automobile.

First, he went out one dark, foggy morning last fall and sideswiped something--he never found out what--on a narrow beachfront street. The molding ripped loose from the side of his car, but Acles did not even stop. He drove on until he found a place to buy coffee, then sat, terrified, realizing for the first time that he was no longer safe on the road. From there he made his last trip straight to a dealer’s lot and sold the battered ’81 Plymouth wagon for $350 in cash.

Nine days later, Acles sat by his window in a bare-walled Venice apartment, glancing down at the traffic five floors below. This was where he was spending nearly all of his time now, in a steel-armed chair with the phone propped on the windowsill. It rarely rang. The morning sun would stream in and warm his craggy face, and by nightfall he would watch the mist blow in and see the headlights moving up and down Rose Avenue.

“I look at the four walls and watch the people going in and out,” Acles said, describing the cooped-up monotony of his life. “I watch the cars: One will pull in, another will pull out. I amuse myself that way.”

His voice faltered, and tears flooded his eyes. “It’s lonely,” he said. “I used to feel like I could do things I wanted to do. . . . Now I feel very lonely.”

Among all of life’s milestones, this is one of the most wrenching: Giving up that last set of car keys. To many, the surrender is a bitter turning point--the death of one of the treasured privileges of adulthood. It is an end that every motorist may face--one that removes about 70,000 drivers each year from California’s streets.

That number is expected to continue to ratchet upward as the population ages. Drivers 70 and older number 1.3 million statewide and account for an ever-rising percentage of California’s 20 million license holders, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Mindful of that, and of other demographic changes on the highways, the DMV is tightening procedures to keep unqualified drivers off the road. Several years ago, it ended automatic license renewals for drivers 70 and older, requiring that they take at least a vision test and usually a written test at a DMV office.

Driving skills deteriorate rapidly beyond that age, DMV studies show. While seniors in their 60s are the safest motorists, those in their late 70s and 80s are among the highest accident risks, rivaling teenagers.

Usually the elderly quit driving because of fear, wrecks or losses of memory, reflexes, eyesight or coordination. Some give up voluntarily; others yield only after it becomes impossible to pass the driver’s exam. The DMV often administers road tests to seniors at the request of concerned doctors or family members. Those who fail the exam may lose their licenses immediately, regardless of the expiration dates.

Afterward come the saddening adjustments that need to be made, particularly in the freeway-laced sprawl of Southern California. Even for the more mobile, life gets much harder.

Routine errands turn into daunting challenges: It can take hours or even days to arrange a trip to the supermarket. There are bus routes and train schedules to learn, or guilt to fight after pestering others for a ride.

Nighttime ventures take on a heightened sense of risk; a great many choose to stay home rather than wait in the dark at a bus stop or chance being stranded at midnight without a cab. Never mind getting to the desert, or the mountains, or to the homes of out-of-town family.

“You don’t have control over your own life anymore,” said Dr. James Birren, associate director of the UCLA Center on Aging, who said the loss of a car sometimes accelerates the downward spiral that often comes with growing old. Although many senior citizens cope, and a few even thrive, too many wind up feeling more isolated, inadequate and extremely depressed. Some even become ill, much as they might if a spouse were to die.

*

For older men especially, the emotional adjustment is difficult, Birren said. Trained from childhood to be strong, to be bread-winners, to go out into society and achieve, they recede into the dark spaces of seclusion and inactivity with all the gnashing of a stripped-out gear.

“Depression is a very destructive process,” he said. “You’re seemingly quiet on the outside, but inside you’re churning physiologically.”

The senior citizens who adapt best are people who are fortunate enough to be surrounded by helpful friends, family members and places to go.

Priscilla Bartlett is 82 and plagued by a bad hip that forced her to stop driving a year ago. But she has two sons and a wide network of friends. Her daughter-in-law drives her to Weight Watchers classes and a ceramics workshop. She lives in Santa Monica, where shops and activities abound and where a free van operated by the WISE Senior Services Center will whisk her to the doctor’s office, the supermarket or elsewhere.

The van shows up at 10:15 every Sunday morning to take Bartlett to church. The grocery store is less than two blocks from her apartment; she walks despite her hip.

Only her night life is much different. Rarely does she dine out. The van stops running at 6 p.m., so she also misses most of the evening worship services and social functions at church. She stays home to read, watch movies or work “spot-a-word” puzzles.

“My neighbor upstairs used to say, ‘You don’t need an apartment, you need a tent, because you’re never home,’ ” Bartlett recalled. Now the walls enclose her more; she feels “like an invalid.” Still, she adapts. If she gets too bored, she gets up in the morning and walks around the block. Another advantage of Santa Monica is that it is mostly flat, thus easy to stroll.

The loss of a car can be far more difficult in hillside areas. On the steep, winding streets of Whittier, the Hollywood Hills and Pacific Palisades, door-to-door van service does not exist--nor are there convenient bus routes. Calling a cab can be exasperating, seniors complain. Chances are a driver will be late, rude or simply won’t show up, apparently because the tortuous trip up isn’t worth the fare that accrues from driving down.

Only those with extraordinary pluck manage to maintain a normal life in such circumstances. Marcia Lebow, who won’t give her age but who admits to voting for Franklin Roosevelt, wages her own quiet war against time and immobility from the crest of a bluff high in the Palisades. She has lived there since 1953, in a home she bought with her late husband. She gave up driving because of eye trouble several years ago.

When she tried to arrange for a cab to reach a doctor’s appointment last month, Lebow was told that the wait would be 10 or 15 minutes, she said. “Forty minutes later, I was walking. They never came. They’re not reliable.”

But walking is one of her loves. She still gets just about anywhere she wants to go, using several routes to climb down out of the hills. Her favorite is a steep, narrow street that descends the face of the bluff until it gives way to a rugged dirt footpath filled with succulents and dry brush; Lebow calls it the “rattlesnake route.”

It is about a mile from her home to bus stops on Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway. Once Lebow safely crosses that roaring intersection, the buses carry her to shops in Pacific Palisades Village, to UCLA’s museums and to the Music Center in downtown Los Angeles.

The downhill hikes are relatively easy, but getting home is arduous. It requires occasional rest stops at places with spectacular views of the coast. The activity keeps her fit--Lebow’s blood pressure is good, 130 over 70--but she has taken the trouble to find markets that deliver food.

“I can’t carry anything very heavy,” she said. “Sometimes I use a backpack. I’m becoming the village eccentric.” That idea causes her to laugh, but it is clear that her bluff-top roost is precarious--and that someday those slopes will seem far steeper.

“If I weren’t this sturdy, I couldn’t stay here,” she said. “It isn’t easy. I’ll have to leave the hill when I can’t get around. It’s too bad, because it’s a sweet house.”

The creeping advancement of age makes it that much harder to live without a car. Each day brings reminders of mortality: longings that can’t be met, inconveniences that are magnified by waning vitality.

*

Abe Venger’s life is a series of recurring frustrations that would be greatly eased if he still could drive. With a car he could get out to eat and shop without having to wait for a cab. He could go to movie theaters, where his bad eyesight, blurred by arterial hardening, could make out the faces he no longer can distinguish on a TV screen. He could get his wife home from the senior center after lunch, allowing Clara to rest her aching arthritic knees. Then he could drive back alone to join the afternoon discussion groups, or to take classes in Braille.

“But unfortunately, I can’t do it,” Abe said wistfully, taking Clara’s hand at their modest apartment in Tarzana. “My poor wife . . . “

She shook her head. “I used to think I could conquer the world. I was really strong. But I’m 85. I’m just not that young anymore.”

Clara suffers slight memory loss; she stopped driving in the early 1980s. Abe, 82, quit two years ago after Clara had to scream at him to brake for a crossing guard.

Now they carefully ration taxi coupons. Through a city program each pays $15 for 60 coupons, worth $1 apiece. The coupons are supposed to last three months, but they use four every time they ride to or from the senior center. They like to go every day to have lunch and talk to friends.

Abe’s son and daughter-in-law often help with shopping trips, or Sunday breakfasts out. But there are times Abe would like a ride and Leonard’s busy schedule--he’s a lawyer--won’t allow it.

“He does get frustrated . . . he barks at me,” Leonard Venger said. “It gets to him. It saddens him when he wants to be active and do things and he’s got a transportation problem.”

Abe and Clara used to play poker once a month with a couple they have known for 60 years. Now they only talk occasionally by phone.

Nights are devoted to making supper and watching TV--”Jeopardy,” the evening news. Neither one can cook anymore, so the fare is simple.

A few nights later, Clara began suffering heart palpitations. She woke up, tried to dial 911, but hung up in the middle of the call. Abe also awoke, soon realized that she did not really need the paramedics, but wanted to get her to the hospital as a precaution. At 1:45 a.m., he called Leonard, who drove them to the emergency room.

Clara was all right, but Leonard did not get back home until 4 a.m.

Abe fretted over Clara’s health, and he fretted over keeping his son up half the night.

“I’ve been independent all my life,” he said. “To depend on people to help me, that tears me up. I’m under stress all the time.”

*

Worsening health and other difficult changes late in life can make the loss of a car a crushing blow. Acles was a case in point: a man who was stranded alone in his apartment after separating from his wife in August.

Having broken his right hip a year ago, he was unable to walk much. Last fall, severe swelling invaded his hands, wrists and ankles. His social worker feared congestive heart failure.

Yet Acles was still driving. The car gave him a tenuous grip on self-reliance. He could get to the doctor and the market. He was still preparing his own meals. It seemed as if the emotional pain of the separation and his failing health hit him with full force only at the end of November, when he scraped the side of his car and sold it.

“It scared the life out of me when I hit whatever I hit,” he said. “I thought and thought and thought, ‘What am I supposed to do? I can’t go on like this. I will probably hit somebody.’ God have mercy on me, I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

After selling the car, Acles found himself imprisoned at home. No relatives lived nearby. He had yet to sign up for cab coupons. The nearest bus stop was 300 yards from his building, up a slight hill, but it might as well have been on the moon.

“You’re not using the bus system, are you?” his health care coordinator, Linda Laisure of the St. Joseph Center, asked during a visit in early December.

“No, no, I couldn’t get up on the bus,” Acles said emphatically. “They won’t wait long enough. The step is too high. I’m so weak, I can’t walk up that hill to get a bus.”

Laisure expressed concern over Acles’ deepening depression. He was not the same independent spirit she had seen a few months before. He had taken fewer than half of the tablets prescribed to reduce the swelling in his limbs.

“You need to start taking them,” Laisure scolded. “You can get sick and pass out and you can die.”

Acles said he would talk to the doctor. “But I can’t get over there. I was going to Vons, the market, the doctor’s. I can’t do that anymore.”

He rattled off complaints about his room--his desire for a television, his tinny radio, the seemingly endless nights lying awake in a barren room that had become his whole world.

“I’ve been getting up about every two hours,” he said. “I see my clock and I say, ‘Oh, Lord, is that all the longer I’ve been asleep?’ ”

A volunteer delivered groceries each week, but Acles said his appetite was poor. One meal a day was about all he could get down.

Laisure made a note on a clipboard: “Wants a TV.” Out of his earshot, she voiced distress over how bad he looked.

“When people give up their licenses . . . they tend to go see their doctors less and less, because it’s such a hassle to get there,” Laisure said. “They become so frail they have a difficult time getting on and off the buses.”

Laisure arranged for Acles to see the doctor and drove him there herself. He received medication for a newly discovered thyroid problem; even so, he collapsed a few days later.

Acles had to be rushed to the emergency room. He spent several days in the hospital before gaining enough strength to be put in a nursing home. Soon, he awaited another transfer to a residential care center, where his laundry would get done, his meals would be prepared, and someone would drive him to appointments.

Told that he would have to share a room, Acles was glad. “That’s what I want,” he said. “I don’t want to be isolated.”

The car no longer seemed quite so important. Acles smiled and raved about the terrific dinner he had eaten the previous night--two pieces of chicken and a dumpling.

Acles spoke without a trace of anger or sorrow, even when discussing arrangements he had made for his own casket and burial. It seemed he was beginning to reconcile himself to where he stood in life: A man who really did not need his car anymore, because he had come so near to the end of the road.

“I don’t know when the Lord’s going to take me,” he said, “but when he does I’m going to be happy. I pray, Lord, I’m ready any time you are.”

Two days later, on Dec. 22, Acles fell ill again. He died on Christmas Eve.