Senior Citizen Care These Two

Senior Citizen Care These two readings discussed the experiences of modern senior citizens. In past generations, such seniors would have lived with their children and their spouses. However, today it seems that they remember the horror of being stuck with their own parents, and they also consider their independence much more important, and seek to establish their own independent lives apart from their children.

Like Margaret Mead, I feel that in many ways this is an intensely important social change, for it allows the elderly to enter into a period of self-expression and self-discovery which they may not have been allowed at any other time in their lives. They have none of the responsibilities of working or parenting adults, nor do they have the parental oversight that they did as children. It is possible that after retirement a person today might live the most fully of any period in their lives.

I have seen just this sort of experience occur with my paternal grandparents. My grandfather had a career in the military and his wife raised several children and was trotted all about the globe after him. They took orders and marched in step their whole lives. Today, though they are old, they can live for themselves. They pursue interesting hobbies and travel all around the country. Their health is relatively good and they have very full lives.

Of course, they are also involved with their grandchildren (who live scattered all around the country). In them I see the involved and active spirit of the narrator of "The Happy Memories Club," though little of her rebellion. On the other hand, I feel that I am justifiably worried about the trend of disconnecting the older generation from the young. I have also known elderly people who were hustled off to nursing homes where they were intensely lonely and dependent on everyone around them.

They did not have time and room to pursue their own interests, and they were just there waiting to die. I feel this is the sort of home which the narrator of "The Happy Memories Club" was struggling against. The power of her experience was minimalized by her children and her contemporaries, in much the same as when she was young.

She has entered a wonderful second childhood, once again able to love intensely and with brave imagination, once more able to just dream and play - but what is not wonderful about her state (anymore than it is about the state of true childhood) is that she is constantly being shushed and bossed about by those in charge. There is some sense in which she is more independent now than she has been since she was a young child, but she is losing it that independence.

Her fragile independence is balanced with degradation, and the falling apart of her body. That seems to be the most worrisome trend of our treatment of elderly individuals - they are independent, and this is absolutely wonderful, but they buy their independence at a very steep price because as they age and become less capable of being independent that freedom from obligation becomes a new enslavement to those they've hired to help them.

It seems there should be some way to assure that the dignity of senior citizens to determine their own fates is left to them, to protect their right to fall in love and to have strong emotions and so forth. Perhaps there is some degree, however, to which such rights can never be assured to the.