Quotes About Elderly

AT THE CENTER of Wilson's work was an attempt to solve a deceptively simple puzzle: what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

LOU SANDERS WAS on his way to joining the infantilized and catatonic denizens belted into the wheelchairs of a North Andover nursing home

So today, with our average life span in much of the world climbing past eighty years, we are already oddities living well beyond our appointed time.

Wilson is still trying to work out how ordinary people can age without having to choose between neglect and institutionalization. It remains among the most uncomfortable questions we face.

BILL THOMAS WANTED to remake the nursing home.

they provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living

medically dominated culture of care for the elderly.

So this is the way it unfolds. In the absence of what people like my grandfather could count on—a vast extended family constantly on hand to let him make his own choices—our elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.

The aged did not lose status and control so much as share it. Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It

The median income of people eighty and older is only about $15,000. More than half of the elderly living in long-term-care facilities run through their entire savings and have to go on government assistance-welfare-in order to afford it.

Compounding matters, we have no good metrics for a place's success in assisting people to live. By contrast, we have very precise ratings for health and safety. So you can guess what gets the attention from the people who run places for the elderly: whether Dad loses weight, skips his medications, or has a fall, not whether he's lonely.

In 1913, Mabel Nassau, a Columbia University graduate student, conducted a neighborhood study of the living conditions of one hundred elderly people in Greenwich Village—sixty-five women and thirty-five men. In this era before pensions and Social Security, all were poor. Only twenty-seven were able to support themselves—living off savings, taking in lodgers, or doing odd jobs like selling newspapers, cleaning homes, mending umbrellas. Most were too ill or debilitated to work.

We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals—from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly—but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.

The risk of a fatal car crash with a driver who's eighty-five or older is more than three times higher than it is with a teenage driver. The very old are the highest-risk drivers on the road

Each year, about 350,000 Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, 40 percent end up in a nursing home, and 20 percent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a 12 percent chance of falling in a year. Those with all three risk factors have almost a 100 percent chance.

The generation gap is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join hands and examine the living memory of the community, nor ask the all important question, Why? This gives rise to a historical amnesia that keeps us working to invent the wheel every time we have to go to the store for bread.

The old sleep poorly. Perhaps they stand watch.

bringing in an old woman with breathing problems, caught

Part of what I loved - and love - about being around older people is the tangible sense of history they embody. I'm interested in military history, for instance, because both my grandfathers fought in World War II. I'm interested in writing because one of those grandfathers wrote books.

Jews know this in their bones. Our community could not exist for a day without its volunteers. They are the lifeblood of our organizations, whether they involve welfare, youth, education, care of the sick and elderly, or even protection against violence and abuse.

Well, when you're being held at gunpoint by a geriatric madman in a metal skirt, you've kind of hit rock bottom anyway. It can't really get much worse.

Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.

As of 2016, more than twelve million Americans aged sixty-five and above live by themselves, and the ranks of those who are aging alone is growing steadily in much of the world.

You're mugging old ladies every bit as much if you pinch their pension fund