The Aging Family

A child of the baby boom today, has parents that are living longer than any previous generation in American history.  Of course, it is wonderful that families have three, and even sometimes four generations, still sharing love as only a family is capable.  A mother’s and father’s love, a Grand parent’s love, even a Great grandparent’s love, all are a precious gift of family.  Man’s will to extend life is the natural consequence of an evolving environment.  However, man’s will for change, even with the best intentions, starts a new direction, in the ebb and flow of the river of life.

The consequences of an older society and the effect of ageing on our society, is first felt at home.  The consequence of getting older is the susceptibility to the ever more debilitating ravages of age.  A father diagnosed with cancer, and a mother in a nursing home with late stage Alzheimer’s disease.  A surviving grandparent doing well, but too old to drive a car, requires some basic care.  Suddenly, the son or daughter becomes their parent’s parent.  Compiled by the cost and complexity of health care, and the family commonly separated by hundreds of miles, as the children left the nest to seek their fortune, the care and custody issues, all can become emotionally, and financially overwhelming.

The fantastic improvements in medicine and the intended purpose, improving quality of life, are overshadowed by cost.  Medical advancement, developed with the best intentions, has inadvertently become an Albatross around the neck of the family.  Everyone wants their family members to live; to share in the joys the family continues to experience together.  However, prolonged illness, which reduces the once proud and successful parent to needing twenty-four hour care, diapers changed, and spoon fed on baby food as if an infant, is not living.

There are two glaring drawbacks to this new medical longevity.  The costs, and the quality of life, have overshadowed the advances in science.  The children’s emotional pain and the loss of memories, supplanted by the trauma of seeing a parent in this heart wrenching condition, pale in comparison to the patient’s own pride, and sometimes-insurmountable debt.  These problems are becoming more and more real to thousands of families.  The baby boom generation is coming to the stark reality that the United States of America is ill prepared for the epidemic of geriatric patients looming in the foreseeable future.

Throughout history, change has usually come too late, and as the result of a great deal of pain.  If the country acts now, possibly there is still time to save our most precious resource, the family.