Nurse with a Purse: The Growing Astral Problem of the Hospice Wife

A middle aged woman recently went viral on TikTok for an innocuous Get Ready With Me video. For those unfamiliar with the genre, a Get Ready With Me video is a casually-presented opinion or bit of information given by the video’s creator while putting on makeup. The woman plainly stated she had every intention of remaining single for the rest of her natural life. Her main reason for remaining single was the poor quality of men in the dating pool and the fact that most men her age and older were looking for a hospice wife. “Hospice wife” is the newest term for a woman trapped in a marriage of convenience for the man. This commitment entails the typically-younger wife providing the kind of in-home care one would expect from a dedicated, live-in elder nurse. The “hospice” part implies the wife will care for her sickly husband until he dies.

Comments sections are always the most fascinating part of social media and this one did not disappoint. The video’s comment section was full of older women declaring how transcendently overjoyed they were to be living the single life after being widowed or divorcing their insufferable, middle aged husbands. Every ten or so comments repeated the snarky phrase “nurse with a purse” in reference to to the suckers who were stuck caring for their aging husbands. Every twenty or so comments featured a hospice wife bemoaning her dire situation.

This hit close home for me because my husband of a quarter century is nearly a decade and a half my senior. To add insult to injury, I have been the primary breadwinner of our modest household since the early 2010s. As someone in relatively good health who has never been alcoholic, an abuser of food, or drug addict prescription or otherwise, I seem to be set for a vigorous old age. He, on the other hand, has a debilitating suite of chronic health problems that cause constant pain. Some of his health problems are genetic, some are the logical result of an adventurous and well spent youth, and some he caused all by himself via stupid habits and decisions.

When my father was still alive, my parents represented a more traditional marriage arrangement. My mother worked a few years after she married my father in 1965. She was a switchboard operator in downtown Chicago and she was very good at it. It was her seed money that bought the beautiful house I grew up in. After us kids arrived on the scene, my father took on most of the financial burdens until the day he died in 2023.

The single, middle aged women of TikTok and elsewhere are a group of disappointed souls. Men have let them down and now they swear they are done with men. The truth is that marriage — especially long marriages like that of my parents and my marriage — is not easy. I myself have often said that if my husband leaves me a widow that I won’t marry again because I don’t like people enough to marry a second one. This is a funny lie, however, because I love people. I am just extremely unsure that I could successfully match myself to a second one.

Taken for Granted Goes Both Ways

The number one reason driving divorce does not seem to be money or even cheating per se. I think it boils down to a lack of gratitude. For a long time, women in the industrialized West have been taken for granted. I coined the term etheric labor a few years ago to refer to the kind of mundane work both women and men do to keep a household up, running, and functional. Women tend to take on the lion’s share of basic etheric labor (think of it as a fancy term for housework) like cleaning, cooking, laundry, tidying, and decorating. Men tend to take on less frequent but equally crucial tasks like home repair, remodeling, and maintenance.

The TV and movie tropes of the last seventy five years led us to believe women’s work was replaceable and invisible. We are a long way from Disney’s Great Depression era Snow White, who cleaned up the seven dwarfs’ homestead in hopes they would put her in the role of house mother and allow her to stay. By the 1960s, Star Trek suggested that one day all cooking would be done by a replicator. The 1990s featured romantic comedies with sets by Nancy Meyers where characters wallowed in luxury. No character was ever seen tidying or cleaning the palatial, upper middle class rooms; that seemed to happen on its own. By 2016, Disney put out the animated film Sing!, which featured Rosita, an anthropomorphic pig with 25 children. In order to secretly audition for a singing contest behind her husband’s back and spend entire days away from home, Rosita constructs an array of clever machines to feed, diaper, and soothe her brood of piglets. If only it were that easy!

When a woman’s work is seen as soulless and essentially replaceable by unseen hands, hired help, or an array of machines, women feel taken for granted. Thanks to mass media of the types mentioned above, women have felt under-appreciated for nearly a hundred years. This kind of sentiment has built a powerful astral pyramid with nearly overwhelming gravity. Legions of women are remaining single after being married and bearing children or after being widowed because of this pyramid’s gravity. Many on the younger side are choosing never to marry or procreate at all.

The Marriage Trap

The old stereotype was to depict men as being reluctant to marry. Once the woman got the man to “put a ring on it” he was now settled into a role of long-suffering victimhood with the wife in the role of parasite to his host. In the television series of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, he was Ralph Kramden of the Honeymooners or Archie Bunker of All in the Family. The 80s and 90s brought Married With Children, with Al Bundy dreaming of a harem of suppliant blondes who looked suspiciously like his daughter. The Man Show and Sex and the City perpetuated kissing-cousin versions of the recalcitrant male stereotype. The pilot episode of Sex in the City featured women complaining they could not get a man to commit because they were considered well past their prime by the age of 41. The Man Show had its infamous Girls Jumping on Trampolines, with the girls in question being twenty-something young women wearing flimsy undergarments to the chagrin of cuckolded, age 35+ wives everywhere.

To say a great deal of resentment was built in women over the years due to these kinds of images would be a monumental understatement. Women are officially fed up, and they are slyly laughing now that the tables are turned and men are begging not to be left to age and die alone. Now look who is discarded because he is no longer youthful and vibrant! Why should a woman marry herself off at age 50, they ask, after a largely thankless couple of decades raising children and cleaning the house of men who never truly saw them? Why should they feel any obligation to provide for a sick and ailing man who wants a mommy but cannot afford to hire one? In this age of women being forced into provider roles with no attendant relief from housework, why on Earth would any “girl” take the sickliest and neediest of passengers aboard her sailboat if it wasn’t at literal gunpoint?

For some, there is no reason good enough to fall back into the marriage trap. My grandmother was widowed before she was 40 and she never remarried. She lived alone in a condo for the 15 years I was blessed with knowing her. I can understand the charm. If she hadn’t smoked two packs a day, her sunny, one-bedroom apartment would have been paradise: clean, compact, and orderly with no yard to worry about and a darling porch overlooking a lovely park with a lake. When I was nine, I envisioned a perpetually single existence for myself living in a condominium a hundred feet from the library. In this idyllic fantasy, I had a well-paying job in downtown Chicago as a typist/secretary. I came home to one or two cats and sipped tea among my books and houseplants. A man was not a part of the picture. Then puberty and the non-fantasy economy happened and that all went sideways.

The question I ask of myself is how my wonderful apartment fantasy would have worked in old age? Maybe quite well. I will never know. From what I have seen, not all elderly female singlehood ends as well as my grandmother, who died in a doctor’s office at the age of 79. She was gone in a flash due to a massive heart attack. She never suffered nursing home internment. I stopped taking my music students to play and sing in assisted living facilities because no matter how “nice” the facility, the student performers were beset with an array of pleas to “go home” solely from old, confused female residents. The sadness and despair of assisted living facilities reminded me of the foul, septic vibe of the casino where my husband used to work. Both had the palpable aura of desperation and tragic, lost gambles.

What’s Good For the Goose…

The reaction to a huge astral pyramid that glorified single men at the expense of older women has now created its predictable mirror in a huge astral pyramid that glorifies single women at the expense of older men. Now instead of Archie Bunker, we have Barbie, who carefully avoids her abusive, incompetent, stupid Ken. Or we have the now-cancelled Star Wars series The Acolyte, which featured lesbian space witches who did not need men to procreate. This is not better; it’s actually more of the same. It’s like a novella where the same crew of actors switches roles. The same YOU CAN’T DO ANYTHING RIGHT narrative is the punchline and fundamentally nothing has changed.

I will likely catch hell for this, but I think we should stick together more are stay committed to our marriages and family relationships. Of course there are copious amounts of exceptions: sometimes we truly marry (and have children with) the wrong person. Sometimes the husband truly ought to be kicked to the curb. My aunt was married to a raging gambler who later killed himself in a motorcycle accident and my friend was married to a non-functional alcoholic.

Everyone ultimately dies alone, and this reality was directly stated in the viral Get Ready With Me Video. Nevertheless, it’s decidedly more pleasant to go that final leg before actual physical death in the company of loved ones. The saddest kind of elderly death is the one where there is nobody to care or mourn. Freaking elephants have the sense to mourn and gather around their dead, for heaven’s sake, and we as “smart” humans should be able to figure it out.

Maybe Trying a New Strategy

Some of the women gloating over their modern singlehood may not be seeing the big picture. My mother had bouts of disease during her 56 year marriage to my father that occasionally rendered her incapable of taking care of herself. My father always swooped to the rescue. The “in sickness and in health” part of marriage vows should probably be emphasized more.

I think I have enough married experience to say the only way to keep a marriage sane and healthy is to focus on the positive with at least three times the force that one focuses upon the negative. The negative exists and there is nothing wrong with that. Hiding it or burying it is counterproductive because it needs to be recognized as part of life. That said, the negative cannot be a primary focus in any relationship because it is a Wendigo and it will destroy that relationship. When I am angry at my husband for one of his many faults, I try to make an often-impossible seeming effort to recognize three or more of his good traits or deeds. The reason I do this is because I too have flaws and faults, but I would rather be recognized and seen for my strengths and not my weaknesses. I must be the change I want to see in the world, and in my case that does not involve changing my man or kicking him to the curb. It involves recognizing the good and amplifying it by being thankful for it.