Living

On leave but it actually feels like I'm on mc...... sleeping in all day, lunch/din delivery, ODing on warm honey lemon and meds, these earworms:

Aside - penning these quotes down from Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, as a constant reminder for the grandparents and with time, the parents:

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On death:

It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death - losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, "Old age is a continuous series of losses." Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: "Old age is not a battle. It is a massacre. We do not like to think about this eventuality. As a result, most of us are unprepared for it. We rarely pay more attention to how we will live when we need help until it's too late to do much about it.

Studies find that as people grow older they interact with fewer people and concentrate more on spending time with family and established friends. They focus on being, rather than doing - and on the present more than the future. As your horizons contract - when you see the future ahead of you as finite and uncertain - your focus shifts to the here and now, to everyday pleasures and the people closest to you.

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On a system of care for the dependent and debilitated:

When I saw him three months later, he was still despondent. "I feel as if a part of my body is missing. I feel as if I have been dismembered," he told me. His voice cracked and his eyes were rimmed red. He had one great solace, however: that she hadn't suffered, that she'd got to spend her last few weeks in peace at home in the warmth of their long love, instead of up on a nursing floor, a lost and disoriented patient.

She couldn't put her finger on what made her unhappy. The most common complaint she made is one I've heard often from nursing home residents I've met: "It just isn't home." To Alice, Longwood House was a mere facsimile of home. And having a place that genuinely feels like your home can seem as essential to a person as water to a fish. Her apartment might have been called 'independent living', but it involved the imposition of more structure and supervision that she'd ever have to deal with before. With her home went her control.

In almost none (nursing homes) does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible. This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals - from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families' hands to coping with poverty among the elderly - but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we're weak and frail and can't fend for ourselves anymore.