Commentary: Trouble In The Grandmother Lodge

Old people have become a burden and we don't know what to do with them. They need so much tending, which interferes with our own sacred lifestyles, so we shunt our grandparents and great-grandparents away to retirement homes where they can become someone else's problem. We assuage our guilt by dutifully visiting with them for an hour or so every Sunday after church, while turning a blind ear to their complaints of being ignored or mistreated by the home's overworked and underpaid staff. "That's just grandma," we say, knowingly, to ourselves. "She always did expect too much."

In olden times it was different. Up until the 1960s we kept our families' elder members in our homes with us. We made sure they were comfortable, and we did our best to help them retain their dignity until life's final passing. There were no retirement homes in those days, at least not for common folks like us. There was no insurance or medicare to help defray the enormous costs that are the reality of assisted living.

We had no option then but to do the right thing, and so we cared for our elders as part of our extended families, and made little note of the fact that they didn't do much to help, or that with each passing year, as they sank deeper into infirmary, they took up increasingly more of our time. They were just old people who were a part of us by right of kinship.

Besides, no matter how much attention they demanded or needed, they were rarely completely a burden. Even when they had grown too feeble-minded to be trusted to watch the kids for even ten or fifteen minutes while we took a quick jaunt to the corner store for a gallon of milk, even when it got to the point where we had to watch them nearly every minute to make certain they didn't accidentally burn down the house, their presence was something of a blessing.

Just by being there, they enriched our children's lives. Their presence alone taught our children volumes about the continuum of life. Their stories brought to life for our children times and places that existed before they were born, when we, their parents, were as young as they. Their tales were a living history lesson that helped explain how the past came to be the present much more effectively than any texts found at school.

They also helped both us and our children establish a relationship with the process of death, a most valuable lesson when you consider the fact that we will all one day meet the reaper face-to-face. With each passing year, with each passing month, we watched grandma or grandpa die a little more. Back then, death was not a stranger never to be seen, but a fact of existence that was part of our everyday lives. Our lives were enriched by this.

When death did come, it came not from someplace far away but from right in our own homes. When the time was finally here, our children were summoned, one-by-one, to have a final word with grandma (or grandpa) before she died. Often these deathbed encounters were the most important moments in our lives.

Then came the 1960s. Thanks to science, grandma and grandpa were living longer since deadly epidemics had all but been eliminated. Insurance, medicare and retirement plans were willing to cover the cost for assisted living, once a luxury reserved for the rich. Most of all, something changed within us. We became self-centered under the feel-good slogan of "do your own thing." For most of us, that didn't include taking care of aging and increasingly dependent family members. Old age, illness and death were all bummers, unwanted reminders that there was more to life than party time.

In hindsight, it's not surprising that this came about during the time when the average age of the American citizen was the lowest it had been in history, at a time when everyone over the age of thirty was seen as being "part of the problem and not part of the solution."

And so, we shunted the grandmas and grandpas of our world off to retirement homes, usually against their wishes, and convinced ourselves that we were doing what was right for them. Somewhere in the back of our minds we must've known that retirement home work is a horrible, underpaid job, that many of the caregivers in these homes are there because it's the only job they can find. But we convinced ourselves that these were all professionals who were doing a job they loved.

Most of us don't even realize today how dearly we've paid for this shift in the workings of our society. By carting our elders off to have them warehoused and neglected, we lose much of our connection with the past that existed in the decades before we were born. Most of all, we have lost our connection with death. By locking death away, we have not made ourselves immortal. We have only made death more unknown, which makes the reaper frightening instead of a reluctant friend.

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