Why the Elderly Needs Nursing Homes?
None of us want to die in a nusing home. Most of us would probably say we would kill ourselves first. But most of the people who are currently living in nursing homes probably said that. By the time you're on your way to a nursing home, you may not be physically or mentally capable of escaping it -- in any way
At least a million elderly people in this country are living in 24,000 nursing homes: 70% of them are women. The average age of entry is 84, although many are younger. One-third of the people die within a year of moving to a nursing home (presumably, many of these were sick already); another third die within three years. Unless you are directly related to them, it is easy to forget that they exist. But they are there, in our own neighborhoods, many of them sitting all day in tiny, white, metallic rooms that smell of disinfectant. We have a humane society: we kill our older people slowly -- very slowly.
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Because older people are protesting their condition through organizations like the Gray Panthers, there are more options than there used to be for older people who are healthy and somewhat together, but there are still few options for those who are less independent. First, I will mention the housing options available for independent older people (with some specific examples from the Washington, D.C. area in case any of our readers need to know about these resources) and then discuss nursing homes.
I am extremely biased because I gathered the material for this article not out of comparatively disinterested muck-raking zeal, not, in fact, for this article, but because I have been searching for a place for my mother, who has been diagnosed as having organic brain deterioration. She is sufficiently untogether so that none of the residential places for the elderly that I describe below would accept her. (I contacted them last spring.) She was in the one residential home that would accept her. when state inspectors doing a spot-check said that she was too seriously disturbed to be in anything less "structured" (a common euphemism) than a nursing home. On August 26, right after the ERA march, I received a call saying that she would have to be moved within a few days. I considered a legal challenge of the inspectors' finding, but after discussions decided that would be futile. I hastened to visit the nursing homes of the D.C. metropolitan area.
I shall try to be calm while describing what I have learned, but I'm damned angry. Angry that no place is as good as I want it to be for her, angry that I cannot find anything better, angry that I did not understand her condition sooner (she was living in California until last winter) and somehow provide for it. Remember that none of the places I saw or will describe are as bad as some, such as those exposed in books like Why Survive? Being Old in America (by Robert Butler, 1973, Harper & Row) and Too Old, Too Sick, Too Bad: Nursing Homes in America (by Frank E. Moss and Val. J. Halamandaris, 1977, Aspen), both of which are fine exposes which document real horrors like homes in which patients lie around in their own wastes.