Articles

Now We Face Familiar Tune:
Aging Parents Need Our Help

Opinion by Sue Hutchison
Mercury News
Oct. 8, 2005

There is a small stack of cards, illustrated with nature photographs and etchings, that I keep to send to friends who have just lost a parent. I refer to them as my sympathy stationery, and lately it seems as though I've been sending one every few months.

I hear the voice of a friend, tight with grief, talking about how her mother finally has stopped eating at the hospital or how the fluid can't be drained from her lungs or how her face has begun to resemble a ghastly mask. Then I know it won't be long before I'll be choosing a card and writing my condolences.

Unavoidable Neediness

The rhythms of this slow dance at the end of life are becoming a familiar tune. It often takes years of decline and increasing dependence before someone reaches that coda. But my generation still seems to be in lock step with the philosophy that says you must focus on raising children and providing for your own security in old age, not also preparing to tend to an aging parent.

The evidence is everywhere that we need to start thinking about long-term care in the same way that we have been obsessed with child-rearing, stock portfolios and real estate. A report released last week by the President's Council on Bioethics, Taking Care: Ethical Caregiving in Our Aging Society, "sounds the alarm that we are not ready to care for a "mass geriatric society."

Already, more than a third of elderly people have a years-long cycle of terminal illness rather than a sudden death by heart failure or aggressive cancer. They need a lot of help before reaching the end. Leon Kass, who stepped down this month as chairman of the bioethics council, wrote recently in the Washington Post that it's time for us to get over ``preserving the fiction of autonomy in the face of unavoidable neediness.''

Becoming an Advocate

That means that in addition to worrying about getting into a good school district and keeping up on the reams of child development literature, we had better start clamoring for more and better geriatric medical facilities and skilled caregivers. Now that attending a ``Mommy and Me'' class has become a rite of passage for first-time parents, maybe we need to start a ``Mom and Me'' movement for adult children who want to help make their parents' lives in old age as graceful as possible.

For years, we have been hearing about the sandwich generation that cares for kids and parents simultaneously, but few realized that caring for aging parents might go on as long as a child's preschool years. Anyone who has had to watch someone's agonizing slide into dementia knows that resources for the elderly are often inadequate and come with a genuinely scary price tag.

It's time for us to start being advocates for the elderly long before they land in the hospital or nursing home. Providing home-care nurses needs to have the same priority as training top teachers. Community fundraising efforts need to benefit assisted-living facilities as well as day care centers. We need to make provisions for long-term care an important part of the battle for more affordable health insurance.

Just this week I found myself writing yet another note on my sympathy stationery. I reflected once again on how the most fitting tribute to parents who raised us well is being able to tend to them with equal devotion during that time when they can no longer take care of themselves.

Sue Hutchison's column appears Tuesdays and Saturdays. Contact her at shutchison@mercurynews.com.

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