Aging gracefully

Posted Feb 2, 2012 By Sheila Wray Gregoire

EMC Lifestyles - My husband is now on the wrong side of forty and recently I started noticing that when he was reading, he would push the book further away. As a woman who has required glasses since she was a young girl, I decided to make the most of the situation. Whenever I had a set of instructions with exceptionally small print, I'd hand it to him to read to me, just to see him struggling. Laughing at my husband is a great hobby of mine.

Finally Keith decided that he may as well bite the bullet and visit the optometrist, where he was given the diagnosis of "presbyopia," which basically means "old eyes." My husband is getting old. Which I suppose means I am, too.

We're all getting old, or at least older, though we may not like to acknowledge it, even when the doctor tells us to start taking those disgusting calcium supplements, or when they start examining places where the sun don't shine. But there's something those who are

aging need even more than calcium, or Vitamin D, or prostate checks. They need daughters and daughters-in-law. Or three of them, to be exact.

Research has shown that if you want to age gracefully and in style, you need three females of the younger generation to help you. Not one, not two, but three and males don't count. After a recent family wedding, my mother-in-law's in good shape. My mother and I, on the other hand, are not.

You just can't grow old without some help. When my grandfather was 93 he fell and broke his arm and cracked a few ribs. They had him in and out of that hospital so fast I'm not sure he even warmed a bed. But he couldn't go back to his house. Instead, he was quickly dispatched to a convalescent home. The only problem: no one would be in his room, and he was too disoriented to pull the bell if he needed help. I knew that if he were left alone, he would likely get out of bed and fall again, so I left my family behind and went to Ottawa to sleep beside his bed until he was himself again.

It used to be that the elderly were taken into the family's home. That made sense when people lived on a farm, and when medicine was a rather low-tech affair. Today, with our work lives, how can a family navigate surgeons' appointments and hospital stays? Or how can a family care for a parent with Alzheimer's who can't be left alone? If you have such a parent, can you trust that person to a home where there aren't enough eyes or hands to go around?

With fewer people having large families, and with so many living far apart, more of us will grow old with only our health care system to support us. And the health care system won't be there to baby-sit the disoriented older person, or the frightened, post-operative patient, or the stroke patient who just needs help getting in and out of bed.

We are living longer, but we are also having fewer children, so in those years when we require help, many of us will have to rely on strangers with heavy workloads and relatively low pay.

These will be very difficult years, because there just aren't enough resources to go around. We all still need people who care to navigate hospitals and social workers and nursing homes, people to make sure we're being treated well and people who are simply interested in talking to us in what, for many, are very lonely years.

But don't worry, Mom. If Anne of Green Gables was worth 12 boys, I'm sure I'm worth three daughters. Or at least, you'd better hope I am.