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I left the Painted Desert behind with the wind still buffeting my body, daring me to press on when it would’ve been easier to pull over and wait it out. But “waiting it out” might take a couple of weeks—who was I kidding?

This is where I should mention the small but mighty invention of heated grips. I’ve learned over time that if I keep my hands and neck warm, my core temperature will stabilize. I may still be chilly from all that wind, but my teeth don’t chatter uncontrollably. Of course, this is much more difficult when the ambient temperature is below 55F.

I took the first opportunity to get off I-40 and head north toward Farmington, New Mexico, after a brief hesitation about traveling through the Navajo Nation. I was a tourist, of course, and wanted to be “the right kind.” What I’ve learned after sixty-three years on the planet is to listen more than speak, and to err on the side of humility. Fortunately, I don’t ride a noisy bike or have a great need to speed or trespass.

I hoped that counted for something.

Riding with Reverence

I didn’t see much evidence of human habitation for several miles, other than the paved road and some pasture fencing. To be honest, I was braced for the stereotypes I’d absorbed—images of neglect, want, and disrepair.

Reservations aren’t just waypoints on a map; they’re sovereign nations with their own stories, struggles, and ways. I know this through my friendship with Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, an enrolled citizen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and a novelist whose work often wrestles with what it means to belong—to land, to people, to story.

She lives in Cherokee, North Carolina, within the Qualla Boundary—a 57,000-acre land trust held by the U.S. government for the Eastern Band. From Annette, I’ve learned that tribal lands are not relics and their cultures are not fixed in the 1700s. They’re contemporary, sovereign spaces, alive with intention, culture, and complexity.

To me, travel is a form of continuing education—wherever it takes me, whatever it shows. I turned onto a road that some sources call Indian Route 12, others Navajo Route 12. The first reflects federal nomenclature, the second the Nation that maintains it. I’ll go with both: Navajo Indian Route 12. It’s part of the Dinetah Scenic Byway, which includes both Route 12 and Route 64, offering access to various points of interest within the reservation.

I didn’t want music or podcasts that afternoon—just the hum of the bike and the quiet awareness that I was a guest. Gas was scarce. Cell service, spotty. I stayed in the moment and rode.

I’d plotted my route using Google Maps like always, favoring green spaces and curving roads wherever I could find them. This stretch didn’t come with roadside attractions or Instagrammable cafés. It offered juniper-scrubbed mesas, sun-bleached signage, and a windswept landscape that demanded respect.

I filled up at a station inside reservation boundaries and noticed a small decal on the pump that referenced tribal revenues being retained by the Navajo Nation. It struck me as more than a bureaucratic footnote—it felt like a declaration of sovereignty in gasoline and service. My puny three-gallon fill-up wouldn’t make much difference, but it felt good to do business there.

I pulled the bike to the edge of the tarmac so others could use the pumps, then ducked inside to use the bathroom. On my way back out, I passed three men standing just outside the door. I’m used to men watching me as a female motorcyclist, and there’s something reptilian about the vigilance that kicks in—I’d be foolish not to clock them. My body did what it always does—braced, quickened my pace, eyes on the bike.

But when they didn’t break their stream of conversation, I realized they were probably at the crossroads for companionship, gossip, or simply to rest awhile—ordinary reasons, like anyone. I kept walking, noticing the gap between reflex and recognition, a little ashamed at how quickly my body had cast them as a threat.

When I passed the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital Board, I slowed a bit. The Tsehootsooi Medical Center stood like a statement of purpose—its broad archway, clean lines, and well-kept grounds suggesting care shaped by community, not commerce. I thought—not for the first time—about how a care system grounded in place and culture, even with fewer resources, might do a better job of honoring its elders than the one my parents rely on.

Care Beyond the Code

Do you know how Dad’s doctor reacted to his Type 2 diabetes diagnosis? He wrote a prescription for Metformin and gave him a virtual pat on the head with this sendoff: “Cut the carbs and sugar.” That was it.

I got Dad a glucose monitor and learned how to use it right along with him, found an app to help track his readings, meals, and meds, and wrote to his doctor through the patient portal—starting with the dreaded words, “My daughter is here from North Carolina…” and ending with a request for a referral to a clinical dietitian who could walk him through better food choices and menu planning.

We spent hours on the phone with United Healthcare, trying to get a medication review—denied because the company hadn’t reimbursed enough on Dad’s prescriptions yet. That’s right: his care hadn’t cost them enough to trigger preventive measures.

Wondering where I stand on for-profit health insurance? Here’s a clue. This isn’t about bad actors on the other end of the phone. It’s about a system built without a conscience. For-profit health insurance doesn’t care if you’re sick. It cares if you’re billable.

And let’s be honest: I didn’t step in because I love glucose monitors. I stepped in because I couldn’t stand the thought of my parents trying to navigate that system alone. Dad gets the brunt of it now—because diabetes has numbers. It has charts, protocols, prescriptions. It’s the kind of condition Western medicine knows what to do with.

The Cost of Comfort

But Mom’s the one I worry about. If her mind really starts to slip—and I suspect it already has—it won’t show up on a lab report. There’s no tidy metric for memory loss, no universally respected protocol for ambiguity. In our culture, the body is treated with science. The mind? With suspicion. Psychiatry and psychology still occupy a not-quite-reputable domain—soft sciences, whispered about.

We treat mental decline like we’re still half in the Dark Ages—first with denial, then with shame. As if confusion were contagious. As if madness still needed to be put down. It’s a stigma with long roots—tied to centuries of fear, misdiagnosis, institutional abuse, and religious interpretations that cast mental illness as possession, punishment, or shame.

Even today, we’re more comfortable discussing blood sugar than brain fog, more likely to seek medication than meaning. And when it comes to the elderly, we often conflate forgetfulness with failure.

Mom will keep performing competence until the wheels come off. That’s how she’s built. And I’ll keep doing triage from a distance—reading between the lines, checking with JJ before I try filling in the gaps.

Still, it’s not just her stubbornness I’m tracking now. Something else feels off. I wonder how much of her change in personality is chemical. She’s been on gabapentin for years—prescribed for restless leg syndrome, though studies have shown it can impair cognition, behavior, and memory over time. I didn’t know that until recently. None of us did.

We treat women’s discomfort like a nuisance to be medicated, not a clue to something deeper. And we rarely talk about what those medications might cost in the long run. It’s not just about side effects—it’s about how much we’re willing to dampen a person’s clarity to preserve everyone else’s comfort. To keep them quiet. To make them “more manageable.”

That’s the setup we give ourselves. And it’s a stark contrast to what I’d just passed on Navajo land.

A Different Kind of Elderhood

I didn’t know what kind of care people received inside that Navajo medical center’s walls, and I wasn’t going to assume. But from the outside, it looked like a place that belonged to the people it served—not just a stop on a PPO network map.

From what I’ve heard and read, the Indian Health Service, underfunded as it is, operates on a care model that’s fundamentally different from the private system I had briefly navigated on behalf of my parents.

In Cherokee, North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians runs its own health system—the Cherokee Indian Hospital Authority—under a self-governance model. In 2021, they became the first Native nation to launch a Medicaid-managed care entity: the EBCI Tribal Option. Housed within their hospital system, it focuses on relationship-based care, community trust, and culturally relevant services.

No system is perfect, but this is a deliberate effort to align care with identity and place—something that feels a world away from the siloed, impersonal systems my parents face. It’s closer, in some ways, to the VA: centralized, eligibility-based, with both local clinics and larger regional hospitals. But unlike the VA, many IHS and tribally run facilities weave cultural practices and community ties into patient care. Not every tribal system has the same resources or outcomes. Still, the ones that do it well offer a glimpse of what’s possible—care shaped not just by budget, but by belonging.

Maybe that’s what I sensed—that possibility. That care could come from somewhere deeper than billing codes and fifteen-minute windows. That you could be treated as kin, not as overhead. That maybe, just maybe, intention matters as much as budget.

I don’t pretend to understand the full cultural framework behind Indigenous models of elder care. I only know what I’ve been told—that in some communities, aging doesn’t strip a person of worth. There’s reverence, or at least recognition, that growing older isn’t just a decline in utility.

Elderhood has its own purpose—for the individual and for society, if we will only choose to see it.

Yet in America we tend to sideline the elderly once they’re no longer productive, especially if they’re inconvenient or slow. I feel the tension myself—between compassion and exhaustion, between love and the question no one wants to say out loud: How long will this go on like this?

I remember standing in the garden in Duncan, Arizona, watching Deborah feed the cats. After ushering the two fat ones inside to their dishes so the others could eat in peace, she reached for the garden hose and, lowering her voice, said with quiet certainty, “We live too long, Tamela. I believe that. Medicine has pushed us too far, and society can’t keep up.”

I didn’t disagree. How could I disagree?

But on further reflection, maybe the problem isn’t that we live too long—maybe it’s that we haven’t embraced what those final years demand of us. The inconvenience, the surrender, the intimacy. Maybe we haven’t reckoned with the character-forming nature of caring for the infirm. Or being willing to be cared for.

By the time I pulled into Farmington, the sun was well on its way below the horizon. I showered and walked to a pizza joint, cupping my hand around my earbud to keep the wind from whisking my voice away as I checked in with Matt.

I didn’t have the words yet—not even for him. But something had begun to shift inside me, quiet and deep, like the pressure animals feel before the ground gives way.

Something real that didn’t yet have a name.

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