Part 1 of a Multi-Part Series on life and aging
Aging Gracelessly
The worst place to die. St. Petersburg, Florida is one of the best places to live in the country. It's beautiful. Winters are very mild and sunny. Taxes are low. Life is good. Death in St. Petersburg, it turns out, however, is another matter. Recently, St. Petersburg Florida has been ranked as one of the worst places to die. What gives?
Accepting the unacceptable. There are a lot of people in St. Petersburg who are old enough to retire and then some. You'd think they'd do death well. Not surprising, most of us want to die at home. But Florida is full of senior congregate care facilities (nursing homes of one flavor or another). This seems counterintuitive. If everyone wants to die at home, why is institution-based elder care such big business?
The answer is pretty simple: we haven't invested in caring for elders at home. Call it a cultural phenomenon that we don't want to see or deal with folks who cannot care for themselves. Senior citizen prisons, ugh, nursing homes, assure that our seniors are out of sight and out of mind. The rest of us can go on with our lives while our aging family members are cared for by strangers.
Now I suppose we could build a system that respected elders, stimulated their minds, supported a real purpose in life and kept bodies healthy and happy. This just isn't the system we have built.
It's all downhill from here
The senior care system we have built does just the opposite of what we want. Rather than supporting our seniors as they age and maintaining their physical and mental health, our system undermines both. A senior placed in a nursing home starts going downhill pretty fast. In some cultures, seniors remove themselves from the community and go out in the cold to die. It's their time. This keeps them from consuming precious and limited resources.
Viewed from this perspective, maybe nursing homes are our culture’s version of an ice flow, except that the system uses rather than conserves resources. Our senior care system honors neither life nor death. It accomplishes little of what we say we want except for keeping frail seniors out of sight and giving those of us who are healthy freedom from time and responsibility for caring for them. Yet, none of us ever want to use the system we've built. But, we will in turn, as we age and lose our productive value.
But could we have built a worse system? Consider this advertisement:
Life with no worries and no decisions. Lay back and relax as we make all of your decisions for you. Enjoy repetitive, tasteless meals served in a crowded dining room full of people you don't know. Share your room with a complete stranger who we assign to you. Enjoy exciting activities such as balloon volleyball and bingo, day after day. Forget keeping a schedule. With so little to do all you have to do is rest and relax. Our friendly staff are like family you've never met. They're comfortable taking your clothing or possessions that they like and helping themselves to your food. We know that you will come to love us so much that you won't mind and if you should happen to complain, rest assured that there is nothing that we can do about it.
Makes you want to sign right up, eh?
It's a bad system
Of course there are a lot of good, kind and caring people who work in senior care settings. Of course many of them really do make a positive contribution to the life of seniors. They're not all bad folks, but the system is poorly designed and leaves the seniors vulnerable to the inevitable predator who does find their way in.
How did we build such a system that does not serve the seniors it purports to care for and protect? Pretty simply, actually. We're not there to see it. We have turned the care of our elder family members over to corporations who, among their many motives, rank profits pretty highly. If we put the fox in charge of the hen house, what should we expect?