Well there you have it.
Definitely not able to put him on the waitlist for a care home but they’ll give us a few more hours. And yes, we are very grateful and yet….why must we be grateful for scraps? Are we not human? Do we not have rights to dignity and decency? The answer is no unfortunately. Did we once have that here? I honestly don’t know.
The journey with my mother felt very different on a lot of levels. She was much different than my Dad. She stopped walking the moment we moved her into her first facility. She pretty much stopped talking too. She stopped using the bathroom the moment they put the briefs on her. She no longer always recognized us in the year before we moved her. It was all heartbreaking. And to get her there, wasn’t easy. The hoops were very much there to stop us but they were just slightly more manageable. But it did not feel dignifed nor decent.
My grandparents lived in a small town in Saskatchewan and when they moved to their respective care homes, it felt “normal”…. almost. My grandma needed more care so she eventually ended up in a home that looked after her greater needs. But they were both in their town and the transition to the home was expected since the day they were born and felt dignified and decent. Or at least it did to me but I was a lot younger so my perspective was possibly quite skewed.
Why didn’t health care for the aging stay “easy” and accessible without any hoops? Why is it so so much harder to access as the years go on in our country? This makes no sense to me. Governments should have gotten better at this, not worse. Each generation should have an easier time, not a harder time.
I’m pretty sure, last I checked, that we’re all getting older. That’s life. So why can we not honor our lives? Why must we beg for our lives? Why must we continue to jump through so many hoops just to get a little bit of help? It’s demeaning.
Still….we are very grateful for the extra few hours and they will have an impact if we can designate them the way we would like to, in order to truly help us.
But, sigh…..
