You awake in a cramped, smelly hospital-style room. Looking around, you see a few meager belongings on your side of the bisected room from the days when your life was your own. On the opposite bed lies an unresponsive stranger. This room is different from the one you shared with a stranger who passed away, but the bleak surroundings are essentially the same.
Standing on shaking legs, you shuffle out the door into the hallway. Here and there are other residents, cellmates, slumped in wheelchairs. You pass a common room with others in wheelchairs and various states of alertness parked in front of a TV. At the end of the hall is a door. You know you can’t pass through it without that magic combination of numbers to press into the keypad. Once, when you lived in another part of the facility, the door opened for anyone. But when you tried to open it, the bracelet on your ankle alerted the staff that you needed to placed in a more secure environment.
The visits from your children are too infrequent to sufficiently mitigate the grinding monotony of all the days between. As they leave, you stand in your doorway and watch forlornly as the door shuts behind them. You once asked, “Why am I being locked up? I didn’t do anything wrong?” Your children evaded the question and the anguish in your eyes.
When your children visit, they must request permission from your wife to take you out to dine in a restaurant like a person who still owns his liberty. This is because she has power of attorney and therefore dominion over you in all things. How she came to get it is unknown, but an educated guess is that you didn’t give it away with full knowledge of the import of the papers you signed.
My father spent the last five years of his life in this manner. Five years. A Stanford rapist was given a sentence of one-tenth that length. Imagine being admitted to a semi-private hospital room and then spending five years in that room. Nursing homes in the U.S., by and large, follow a hospital model in their facilities. There is nothing of a residence for their residents — no homey furnishings, no privacy, despite the fact that their occupants are there for the long haul.
The ideal situation is for the adult children of aging parents to care for their parents at home. However, this is not realistic for most Americans given the need to work full time to maintain their households. The expense of providing for home-based care is out of reach for most. No matter how much they may fervently wish to care for their parents at home, it is typically just not possible and they are reluctantly forced to turn to nursing homes. As long as nursing home care is privatized and driven by profit motive, these facilities will be understaffed by workers who are underpaid and they will place as many beds as possible into the smallest spaces possible. They will cut corners at every turn and the result is a living space that resembles a prison.
As we baby boomers age, demand for long-term care increases without any sign that the quality of care available will increase. The dilemmas faced by our parents will become our own dilemmas. My only hope is that when my time comes, we will as a nation either have provided for more compassionate care for our elderly or I will have the means to take matters into my own hands. The alternative, to end my days as my father did, is unthinkable.