I don’t know what made me have a lifelong interest in death. Perhaps it was because my grandmother died in our dining room, converted sick room, when I was only four. My older brother told me long ago that she thought of me as her sweetheart.

As the oldest daughter of four, I had the special status of guiding younger sisters through diaper changes and toddlerhood, teaching them how to ride bikes and skip ropes, and as adolescents navigating the physiology of puberty with a minimal amount of knowledge, fighting over the age rules of lipstick.

I only had insight about my grandmother’s death much later in life and what it must have been like as a little girl. Awareness happened long after she died when I was in crisis about who I was and how I got there. Each of us had a place in the family primarily defined by our mother and father but also the country, culture and events of the society we were born into.

I figured out my grandmother meant a great deal to me; her death must have seriously impacted me. As a descendant of the Victorian culture, children were protected from death realities. I went to bed one night; she was alive in the converted dining room / sickroom and when I woke the next morning, I saw her bed stacked like a rack of bones next to the back door.

I have no recollection of any conversation about her dying and in retrospect know I carried an undefined feeling of abandonment like a knapsack on my back for a great deal of my lifetime. In my profession, I worked with elderly and disabled people most of my life.

When I reached the designated age to be legitimately old myself, (much sooner than I expected), I thought I knew everything there was to know about aging and how I would navigate my own end of life. But the world has changed profoundly since my grandmother’s day and since I practiced my profession. We are living increasingly longer, and the change happened very quickly. In typically human fashion, we are unbelievably inventive, and technology has become the mainstay of health care even though society still thinks with the minds of the 1960s. We wonder if the quality of life should supersede the supremacy of the medical technology that has led to lengthened longevity.

At one of my recent hospital stays I sat next to a fellow patient in the waiting room at the hospital who said, “It’s bad enough being sick let alone the added anxiety of a health care system unable to meet the needs of us old people.”

Most people who I live with in my retirement home are grateful for the care they get. But its true, the health care system has been unable to keep up with the impact of medical advancement and longer life spans.

Unfortunately, the opportunity for timely solutions has passed and society finds itself in crisis mode, governments having not studied at depth what could happen. We have known since the end of the Second World War (1945) there would be a baby boom and a change in the demography of the elderly (to be expected by 2022). Politicians chose to talk about it but did not prepare for either it or the marked lengthening of life expectancy. 

The baby boomers are knocking at the door now, arriving at the same time as a new extended lifespan with more and more seniors reaching over 90 years old, coping with frailty, increased mobility issues, the demands of chronic diseases, the effects of climate change and global catastrophes, and the unknown justice of the earth.

Submitted by Wendy Weseen