I’ll never forget the day my grandpa fell in the shower and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, the cordless phone was close enough to reach, so he called my mom. Without saying a single word, she got in her car and drove an hour to my grandpa’s home to help him up. He was pretty injured from the fall, and my mom was devastated. That’s when she decided to help him move into a nursing home.
We had a frequent guest, Jean, who had grown up in Chicago. She told us how when she and her children were looking into nursing homes, she used lessons learned from her very first apartment search. Her first apartment was right near the El tracks, and she said that every time a train went by, the water in the shower would stop. Of course, she didn’t know that before she moved in.
Betrayal is dependent on your expectation. If you don’t have high hopes for someone, you won’t feel betrayed. If you go into business with a man named “Jimmy Con-Artist,” you might not be surprised if you get swindled. But when you actually do have expectations of or trust in someone, like a professional caregiver, if they engage in cruel and harmful betrayal like financial abuse, it cuts deep.
Where do we go when our mind betrays us and when the person that we have been our whole lives gets lost in the recesses of our brain? It’s a question with deep and often terrible philosophical, moral, and emotional implications, and the lack of an answer is one of the crueler parts of dementia and Alzheimer’s for a sufferer’s loved ones. But there is also a more tangible, though no-less-difficult, question: Where should they go?
Imagine that you meet two individuals today at a senior center. Each offers to help you identify some important resources that will make your life better. Both of these people identify themselves as volunteers for nonprofit advocacy organizations. They tell you that, as an older adult, you are eligible for some generous support through programs that you had no idea even existed. Both of these kind individuals express a genuine wish to help you gain access to these benefits, so your life can turn around and you can start living more comfortably.
Claire’s 84-year-old mother, Eve, suffered several small strokes and a few falls in the two years after her husband passed away. While Eve was still living independently in the family home, Claire was constantly checking up on her and was continually plagued with worry that something would happen to her mother while she was home alone. She’d bought her a lifeline, a shower rail, and an adjustable bed to make living at home safer for her, but after Eve’s third fall landed her in the hospital with a broken hip, Claire knew something had to change.
When Rose Mary’s father could no longer take care of himself following a major heart attack, she was faced with a very tough decision. She could either help him move home or to an assisted living community, an idea that he firmly resisted, or become his full-time caregiver so that he could stay in the house he’d called home for more than 60 years.
When Tasha realized that her uncle had been stealing his mother’s money for years—small amounts at a time that had been getting bigger—she says she felt paralyzed by the shock of it. Lee had offered to manage his mother’s bills and other finances, and the rest of the family trusted that everything was taken care of. Tasha could hear her uncle’s voice in her head if she were to ask him about it: “I think my mom wants me to have some compensation for all the time I spend. It’s not really a big deal. I’m going to inherit a lot of it anyway.”
It wasn’t that long ago that housing specifically for the LGBT community was, at best, unthinkable, and at worst, very dangerous. There might have been some instances when apartment owners turned a blind eye and rented to “spinsters” or “confirmed bachelors,” but larger groups of LGBT members living together could be turned on in an instant by authorities or by the community.
“I can’t remember the last time I went to the dentist,” said Charlie, a retired automotive engineer. “I’ve always had pretty good luck with my teeth, so I don’t expect anything will go wrong.” Charlie is one of the roughly 70 percent of older adults without dental insurance in this country. His mindset is a pretty common, though shadowed, one around our responsibility to keep up with dental health. It’s also reflective of the feeling of helplessness when prospective dental costs seem overwhelming, other expenses always seem to take priority, and we are unaware of low-cost dental care options for older adults in the Bay Area.
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