Old, sick determined to cast one final ballot before dying
Annamarie Eggert has voted in every presidential election since 1948, when she cast her ballot for Harry Truman. Now she is 94 and ailing, but she is determined to vote in this one, too.
Eggert, a Biden supporter in York, Maine, has expressive aphasia, a condition that has made it difficult for her to talk, although her mind remains fully intact. “We — need — to — get — Trump — out — of — there,” she said, each word painstakingly coaxed from her lips. “Come — hell — or — high — wa — ter, I — will — vote.”
In this most contentious of elections, in which the very act of voting has come under fierce national debate, the determination of many very old, ill and infirm Americans to cast what could be their last vote is profound.
Although aware that they might not live long enough to be affected by the results, they say they are voting for children, grandchildren and their future — a final heartfelt, empowering act as American citizens.
“Most of my life at this point really is vicarious,” said Jill Haak Adels, 82, who has an aggressive form of cancer and a progressive lung condition that makes her increasingly short of breath. Yet she is making sure she will be able to vote and intends to cast a straight Republican ballot.
“The president we have now is just fine,” she said. “He’s done a lot of things that have been overdue for a long time.”
She does not have a car to get to her polling place in Beverly, Mass., near the assisted living facility where she lives. So she has placed several calls to the town hall to remind the clerk to send her a mail-in ballot.
“I’m getting a little bit nervous,” she said recently, when the ballot still hadn’t arrived. “I’m going to call right now and harass them.”
Eggert in Maine has been so determined to vote, she laid out a plan, complete with contingencies. If her mail-in ballot failed to arrive, she would have her caregiver drive her to the polling place on Election Day.
Her ballot did arrive, on Tuesday. She filled it out — casting her vote not only for Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, but for Sara Gideon, the Democratic challenger to Republican Sen. Susan Collins — and a friend drove her the two miles to the York Town Hall to drop it off.
There are several reasons the very old can be determined to vote, said Dr. Barry Baines, a palliative care physician in Minneapolis who is an authority on ethical wills, the documenting of one’s values and life lessons for those left behind.
People in their late 80s and 90s today, Baines said, belong to the Greatest Generation, who grew up during World War II. “At its core, this was the most civic-minded generation,” he said. “If you’re an American, you vote because you have the freedom to vote. So that generation has a sense of how effective one person’s vote can be.”
Also, Baines said, only the human species possesses what he called a transcendent dimension. “That’s an awareness that life goes on after we’re gone and that we can do things that will be remembered,” he said. “Voting is one of those things. The idea is, ‘I might not be around for what happens after the votes are counted, but at least I know that I put a footprint in the future.’ ”