"At age 78 the anthropologist Laird found herself ensconced in a Phoenix nursing home with no means, as she puts it, of escape. Limbo is her chronicle of the better part of a year at the pseudonymous Golden Mesa nursing home, written with often painful clarity and irony: "Recently a friend sent me a newspaper clipping telling of a senile patient in a Southern California nursing home who was found drowned in a therapy pool, still strapped in her wheelchair. Such an event would have been impossible at Golden Mesa; it had no therapy pool"(60:1)" (Cohen 1994:154)

"Anger here is powerful but nuanced. Laird's institutionalization is presented at the intersection of personal, kin, institutional, and state realities. The violence conveyed in the opening anecdote about the therapy pool is not, in her account of everyday life at Golden Mesa, the story of gross abandonment and abuse but rather of the ongoing banality, infantilization, and denial of personhood within the institution through the most minute, and damning, of gestures. Central to this denial, for Laird, is the grouping together of residents by physical functioning rather than social and cognitive awareness: the false mirror of demented roommates and hallmates. Ambiguity, the shifting meaning of old age, here as simultaneously wise and demented, is constructed. Laird suggests, through the social spaces mandating the institution. Limbo resists the easy romance of gerontological narratives of old age pathos and triumph. Laird had great difficulty finding a publisher; Buffington-Jennings (7) notes in an epilogue to the book that one prospective editor had written: "Maybe I'm a monster, but it doesn't move me."(Cohen 1994:154-155)

- [60]:Laird C. 1979. Limbo. Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharp

- [7] Buffington-Jennings A. 1979. Epilogue: before and after limbo. See Ref. 60, pp.171-78.

Source: Cohen, Lawrence., 1994 article:"Old age: Cultural and Critical Perspectives," Annual Review of Anthropology 23:137-58

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• Lawrence Cohen, UC Berkeley
  
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