Alternately, if someone is 99 (and has a wife much younger but averse to technology)… the whole family needs pitch in long distance to bridge the non-smartphone gap. My very sharp father only has la lively flip phone (text turned off) - relies a lot on our help. And an Ipad they never embraced. His wife decided to not replace hers when 2G went away. Good progress though is we’ve convinced wife to let us set up more autopays (with me or sis creating online account).
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Neither of my in laws could ever master anything related to technology. This definitely had a negative impact on them in later years, but now in her really-late years, we’re glad my MIL doesn’t have a computer or smartphone. She has had to cede control of her finances, which is a really good thing at 99.
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The lack of modern tech is a huge problem for us with an elderly family member who has been tech resistant for the last 25 years. Refused to learn how to use a computer, let alone a smart phone. She’s also driving a 25 year old car because she doesn’t want that “new technology.” As a result, everything has been much more complicated for us trying to help from afar.
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You are exactly describing my mil. She is proud of her aversion to any technology
We got her an iPhone recently, my husband has spent time trying to her to use it. I even came to help because I’m better at my iPhone than my H. My H wanted to install YouTube for her to view exercises to do when she was struggling with some back pain. I told him she could do it through the browser, but made the trip to install the app which she was uninterested in learning to use
She will either be uninterested when trying to help or do something for a short period of time.
My mom at the end of her life was unable to do things that she could before.
I feel for those who’ve been left behind and now don’t have the ability to learn
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We have found there is no end to the way parents can thwart our best planned intentions to make their life easier. And then there’s willful ignorance.
My MIL has 6 gmail accounts. She makes a new one whenever she can’t remember the password. Doesn’t know where she wrote it down; can’t remember how to open the app. FIL is using a 10 yr old desktop because he can’t figure out anything else. She has a cheap stupid tablet because buying a real one was " too expensive". They didn’t know their wifi had a password for the router, lost power, wifi went down. We found out later they just bought a new router.
I’m convinced it’s revenge for every worried night we gave our folks 
But I learned how to use parking apps, how to use stuff like Venmo, etc. because you gotta learn this stuff while learning is still part of your skill set. I think for elders, learning is significantly more difficult.
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The gmail and router stories make me laugh. I remember back in the day my brother got tired of doing laundry so just bought new underwear.
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My parents have always been very proudly tech-adverse (my father) and afraid of it (my mother). My mother has always been curious about the tech, but unconfident in her ability to use it and easily convinced by my father that they didn’t need to use any of it. It has created so many additional difficulties over the years.
A silver lining to my father’s illness is that he is no longer able to bully my mother out of trying new things. It has taken a lot of patient hand-holding 
but she now has and can use an iPhone. She has learned the ‘language’ (swiping and looking for hamburger menus if she can’t find something and looking for the microphone icon to dictate text, since she has neuropathy in her fingers) and gotten more comfortable with it than I thought she would.
She texts her friends and her grandkids. She plays audio versions of NYT articles for my dad, who can no longer read. She now has access to her bank accounts online and we’ve set up automatic payments for recurring bills and she just has more peace of mind by having visibility into the accounts instead of waiting for a monthly, mailed statement. I have installed Uber and showed her how it works, but she hasn’t used it yet, but when the time comes, she’ll be able to. She keeps saying, “everything is so much easier to do” with the technology.
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