Johann Hariwrites an eloquent and impassioned summary of his grandmothers final years spent in care homes in Britain.
My grandmother did not believe in moaning about anything. So when I first visited her in that first home, and found her in a wheelchair staring into space, with a cold and foul pie in front of her, she said everything was fine. Although homes are supposed to lay on activities every day, I hardly ever saw any happening. There would be rows of people in metal chairs looking into the middle distance, and occasionally a surly member of staff would give them a balloon to pat to each other. Yet if you stopped and spoke to these people, they were lucid – and agonisingly bored
It gets worse:
She had been saying for months that it was far too painful, but the “carers” told her she wouldn’t get any food if she didn’t do it and it was “necessary”. “I’m not walking,” she said, crying. “It’s agony.” The staff were clucking and telling her she was “misbehaving”, as if she was a toddler.
This was so out of character that I immediately knew something was wrong, and I insisted they call a doctor. They hummed and hahed and only agreed when I got angry. She was finally taken to hospital and X-rayed. The doctors found that her legs could no longer support her weight – she was a big woman – and had suffered severe stress fractures and breakages that must have been there for months. They had been forcing her to walk on broken legs.
The shocking truth is that his grandmothers story is not unique.It terrifies me to think too much about the content of his article. What sort of society are we becoming when we treat our elderly so badly? Johann nails it when he says:
we are punishing the people who saved the world from the Nazis. Didn’t my grandmother – and yours – deserve a better ending to her story than this?
People train for marathons, hikes and bike rides. But can you train to withstand the challenges of elder care?
A series of new studies and reports on the emotional, physical and financial challenges of caring for aged or disabled loved ones suggest it might be a good idea. The nearly 1 in 5 Americans who provide elder care face a sharply higher-than-average risk of dying themselves, research shows. And nearly half of U.S. workers say they expect to be providing elder care at some time during the next five years, the Families and Work Institute reports. (This recent SmartMoney piece highlights some of the hidden financial costs of caregiving.)
In 1993 Conchy Bretos was appointed Florida secretary for aging and adult services, a position that allowed her to see the thousands of low-income elders and disabled adults who were not getting the services they needed to stay in their homes. Bretos became the driving force behind the nation’s first public housing project to bring assisted living services to older adults who just need a little help to stay in their homes. Now she runs a consulting company that has helped 40 public housing projects nationwide bring assisted living services to their residents. The video preview is of her discussion with Dr. Ruth A. Shapiro as part of the Commonwealth Club of California’s Social Entrepreneurship in America series.
Relationships between elder and younger members of a family can be strained and positive and negative in nature, even when affection is shared. A new study from the Journal of Marriage and Family finds that long-term caretaking duties puts further strain on adult parent-child relationships.
Authors of the first international comparative study of its kind, analyzed levels of affection and conflict among more than 2,600 parents and children in six developed nations: England, Germany, Israel, Norway, Spain and the U.S. They found that certain nations have developed prevalent, acceptable ways of behaving towards their elders, but that long-term interdependence and heavy care-taking responsibility introduces a major challenge to the relationship. [continue reading…]
