It’s something most people have to deal with at some point in their lives, and I think we don’t do it very well.  However, it’s one of those things that doesn’t have many good answers, and that is the care of elderly people.  As our parents age, what do we do when they struggle to care for themselves and lose independence?  For me, I think death is worse than losing freedom and independence, quite literally.  And as I look at medical costs as a government offering, keeping sick people alive longer as they lose their freedoms with more government dependence is the worst kind of sickness of them all, and I think people are better off no longer living.  But, we have a lawyerly society that is way too litigious and a snoopy medical industry that is full of cosmetic do gooders who have created policies and rules that pay a lot of money and give medical expenses quite an income, so there is a lot wrong with the entire industry and the problems come down to just a few basic human assumptions that are more emotional than practical.  And most of us would rather not think about it, but what cost is the nursing home industry to our society for the services they provide when the litigious decision making process puts the burden of care judgement on people not prepared to deal with an emotional crises, making a lot of the wrong kind of people rich off the process, feeding a parasitic health care industry with a demeaning end of life trajectory that the courts find acceptable, but on scale of human need, is dramatically lacking.   And it takes lives once well lived, and essential, and makes them into uneventful closures of forgetfulness and an almost vile hatred for the perpetuation of the human race that has vast evil wrapped all around it.

I usually don’t associate with many people in the healthcare industry, especially those involved in care for older people, for all the reasons mentioned.  However, I did run into Commissioner Dixon and his son, Brent, at a recent event, and we had a good discussion about this very topic.  I hadn’t seen Brent for many years, even though we live in the same general area, and I knew he had managed a nursing home facility, so we hadn’t seen each other since we were ten years old and racing together in a soap box derby event in Hamilton that was the talk of the town back then.  So it was fun to see him again and talk about what has happened over the last four and a half decades.  And I like Don Dixon quite a lot, so we had fun catching up.  But nearby, because of some nursing home talk, a couple of women caught on to our conversation, and it provoked in them discussions they were having about a father in their lives. One of the women was the direct daughter, the other one was a sister-in-law.  And they were talking about how their dad had fallen and hit his head, and they were worried about him and thought he was losing the ability to be the caregiver to his wife, who is in an entirely dependent state.  So, for the discussion with these two women, they were determining that their dad needed to go to a home before he hurt himself and let something bad happen to their mom.  And as I was listening to this conversation, it was getting more revolting by the moment because there were a lot of psychological things wrong with it. 

So, for clarity, I think it would be better for the dad they were talking about to pass away of natural causes at peace in his own home, on his own terms as much as possible.  But the decision was a legal one; if the kids knowingly allow the father to care for the mother and something happens to him, it would provoke something to happen to her, and then they would be found guilty of elder abuse in the eyes of the court.  But even worse than that was a social neurosis that involved the women regarding the decision-making process of how to manage their dad.  Here was a man who had lived his whole life doing things that were important to both society and himself.  And had raised a family and done many things, and now all that was coming to a close with the impending doom of losing personal freedoms to the point where he was just a fetus entirely dependent on the parental figures of society at large.  And this was not the way human beings should be planning their exit from life.  The women I noticed were very animated about this topic for unusual reasons, and it was not by accident that they both had kids who had just recently grown up and moved away from them; emotionally, they were looking for a new baby to care for.  Being middle aged women without the prospect of a baby to have, to give them the feeling of meaning that motherhood often does, they were instead taking that emotional baggage and looking to apply it to their parents, to make their elderly parents into incapable toddlers unable to care for themselves to satisfy the lack of importance they were feeling as aging mothers. 

It wasn’t hard to see how many terrible decisions were being made, which had enormous social costs and were destructive to the individual lives of the parental figures.  And baked into the rule-making process was a desire to humiliate older people and their personal lives into dependent toddlers who ended their life the way they started it, wetting the bed, having their diapers changed, and needing help even to feed themselves.  And there are a lot of women like these two talking who are feeling old, thrown away by their husbands and kids, and they gravitate to their elderly parents to turn them into dependents to give meaning to their lives, which is losing value by the day.  And, of course, a significant amount of money is invested in this process to generate something from it for a very parasitic industry.  In my opinion, I would say let the parents have their independence for as long as possible, because it’s better than losing it.  And if the dad passes away tripping on a pebble on the sidewalk, he is better off than a much slower death while in a nursing home.  And the lawyers should stay out of it.  And the emotional children who have been trying to give meaning to their own lives by making their parents into replacement children for their own grown children have created a real mess.  The costs associated are more parasitic to the burdens of those who define care than to the values of a life well lived, and to protect that meaning from life to death.  A few years in a nursing home and turning once strong people into complete dependents, in my eyes, is far worse than death.  And it is something we should completely reconsider.  Because the emotional children of older people are not in positions themselves to make decisions for their parents because they are dealing with their own sense of value as their children grow up and away from them leaving everyone feeling empty and useless in the process, and no amount of money can solve the problem in the way that human beings require it to be solved.  However, what we can be sure of is that we should not make our parents dependents to avoid dealing with our lack of security once our child-rearing days are behind us.  There is more to life, and adults need to figure that out, rather than putting their parents in homes to satisfy their selfish needs to care for somebody in an infinite state and quell the whims of motherhood once it has been unlocked in them for the perpetuation of the human race, for which they are no longer needed. 

Rich Hoffman

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