Quotes About Independence

Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have, and, according to what little research has been done, having at least one daughter seems to be crucial to the amount of help you will receive.

Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days.

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home.

As fewer of us are struck dead out of the blue, most of us will spend significant periods of our lives too reduced and debilitated to live independently. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more than glancing attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

Oh thank God I can go myself to the bathroom," Makover told me. "You would think it's nothing. You're young. You'll understand when you're older, but the best thing in your life is when you can go yourself to the bathroom.

that I myself have said no.

And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained? In

They all believed that you didn't need to sacrifice your autonomy just because you needed help in your life.

They all believed that you didn't need to sacrifice your autonomy just because you needed help in your life. And I realized, in meeting these people, that they shared a very particular philosophical idea of what kind of autonomy mattered most in life.

My wife used to say I was a loner, but I'm not. I just like my time alone," he told me. So when the tour guide said that the Florence Center had single rooms, "I said, 'You must be kidding!'" The tour had only begun and already he was sold.

Serious illness or infirmity will strike. It is as inevitable as sunset. And then a new question arises: If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?

The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don't. This loss of freedom was what people like Lou Sanders and Wilson's mother, Jessie, dreaded. Wilson

And he let me go ahead.

Mr. Drury seldom questioned his daughter's choices, but this sounded to him like a bad idea.

Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It's been replaced by veneration of the Independent self.

Nursing homes have come a long way from the firetrap warehouses of neglect they used to be. But it seems we've succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life of worth and freedom is simply not possible.

what makes life worth living when we are old and frail and unable to care for ourselves?

But in my grandfather's premodern world, how he wanted to live was his choice, and the family's role was to make it possible.

At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don't. This

In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state—

The key word in her mind was home. Home is the one place where your own priorities hold sway. At home, you decide how you spend your time, how you share your space, and how you manage your possessions. Away from home, you don't. This loss of freedom was what people like Lou Sanders and Wilson's mother, Jessie, dreaded.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.

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.

If independence is what we live for, what do we do when it can no longer be sustained?