Z and I have always wanted to have our parents to live close and take care of them when they get older. It does not make sense, we have been told. You don’t want to see the long and slow decay. Then I saw this piece on NYTimes: you are going to die.
Plenty of people before me have lamented the way that we in industrialized countries regard our elderly as unproductive workers or obsolete products, and lock them away in institutions instead of taking them into our own homes out of devotion and duty. Most of these critiques are directed at the indifference and cruelty thus displayed to the elderly; what I wonder about is what it’s doing to the rest of us.
Segregating the old and the sick enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism’s endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an inexplicably bad lifestyle choice, like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid if you’re well-educated or hip enough. So that when through absolutely no fault of your own your eyesight begins to blur and you can no longer eat whatever you want without consequence and the hangovers start lasting for days, you feel somehow ripped off, lied to. Aging feels grotesquely unfair. As if there ought to be someone to sue.
We don’t see old or infirm people much in movies or on TV. We love explosive gory death onscreen, but we’re not so enamored of the creeping, gray, incontinent kind. Aging and death are embarrassing medical conditions, like hemorrhoids or eczema, best kept out of sight. Survivors of serious illness or injuries have written that, once they were sick or disabled, they found themselves confined to a different world, a world of sick people, invisible to the rest of us. Denis Johnson writes in his novel “Jesus’ Son”: “You and I don’t know about these diseases until we get them, in which case we also will be put out of sight.”
Does anyone ask the old folk what they want to do? In our society, they often want to stay in their own home and be ‘independent’ …. sometimes the others in the family don’t think this is the right option, but the ‘oldies’ would be miserable having to live again with the kids; this time with the responsibilities reversed. I certainly don’t want that to happen to me.
addendum to my comment above: If I do get medical problems and need personal care, there is NO WAY I want my family to have to deal with the mess and inconvenience and constant vigilance. They have their own lives to lead, and hopefully I have been partly responsible for them having important lives in society. Also, I am shy about my personal medical problems, and don’t really want my own family knowing. I would much prefer professionals dealing with them, either carers coming in to the house, or going to a facility where there are professionals on duty. That would be my preference, if it were possible to organise. I talk to my family online mostly now, that would not be any different, as long as I had enough facilities to do so. And if not, then I would be so far ‘gone’ that it would be beyond the capacity of the family to care for me anyway, and I hope by then someone will just unplug all the devices that might be attached to me and save the funds and effort to help someone who still has hope.
So ask the people in your life what they want. It might not be what you think.
d.
The central idea of this post is to say “include the old and sick people in our life” instead of hiding them away. It shouldn’t conflict with the idea of independence. For us, our plan is to buy much smaller properties that are closer to our house and get our parents to live close by. They would still have their own life but I want to be able to drop by after dinner and have a chat. I have seen quite a few of my friends moved closer to their younger ones so that they can enjoy spending time with their grandchildren.
You do have a good point though that I should ask first.
Yes, it can work. Our parents moved closer to us when the kids were tiny, but then we moved away again – and they were happy where they were and didn’t want to follow us. Except for holidays, sometimes.
It can work both ways, the important thing is to keep the communication – nothing else really matters. That way there are no regrets.
d.