In The Giver, the elderly live together alone. They don't have families and family members. Instead, the children are volunteering to help them. It has me thinking about our own community.
It's similar because old people mostly live alone together. Old people live just with the people they don't know and they didn't grow up with. They make new friends, but they have to be with other old people and not with their families. America doesn't like to think about the old, so they put them in big buildings with other old people.
I think that this is a bad thing to live alone, because the old people want to be with their families and their homes and their communities. They want to live where their stories are and not with old people that they don't know and people paid to be around them. They want to be with people who love them and not people who volunteer to see them.
photo credit: Levy Carneiro Jr via photo pin cc
"They want to be where their stories are..." What a powerful statement! What does it say about our community and us as people that we do this to our elders? Do you think calling these places "facilitated care communities" is just our way of freeing ourselves from feeling guilty for putting our seniors away? You made some great connections with this post.
ReplyDeleteI AGREE COMPLETELY.I WILL BE 80 YEARS YOUNG IN DECEMBER AND AM PROUD I'VE BEEN ABLE TO CARE FOR MY HANDICAPPED SON THROUGHOUT THESE LAST 30 YEARS....WE HAVE DISCUSSED THE POSSIBILTY OF MY PASSING AND WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO HIM IF I DID..HE IS AN AWESOME AND MADE THE DEANS LIST IN COLLEGE LAST YEAR. I COULDNT BEAR TO THINK OF HIM GOING INTO ONE OF THE PLACES WHERE THEY SEND ALL THE UNWANTED OLDSTERS,OR THE EQUILIVANT.HIS FATHER LEFT WHEN HE BECAME HANDICAPPED AND DOES NOT SUPPORT EITHER OF US,FINANCIALLY OR SPIRITUALLY.HOPING GOD KEEPS US AROUND TOGETHER FOR WHATEVER HE PLANS TOGETHER.
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