Being Mortal - on perhaps dignity more than anything else

Currently reading - Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End by Dr. Atul Atmaram Gawande.

I am enjoying this book tremendously, now that 3 out of my 4 grandparents have passed away, and I am able to draw many parallels with what’s being described in the book to what I witnessed in my families before my grandparents’ deaths and also with with the bigger scheme of things here in Hong Kong.

Growing old is difficult. There are no 2 ways about this. One loses more and more of one’s physically abilities, cognitive clarity, power to make decisions - hence often choices are made on one’s behalf whether one has a say, or not. It is extremely expensive to grow old in “comfort”, though Dr. Gawande has also pointed out poignantly that “comfort” has been defined for the elderly, and often on not his or her own terms.

I have never met an elderly person who’s been glad to enter an old folks’ home - a common journey for a number of years, prior to death in Hong Kong. The loss of one’s home, belongings, a sense of self, one’s schedule, freedom, decisions, privacy, pets, friends, family… the list goes on. For too long now we force our elderly to accept that an old folks home is allowed to look like a rendition of the hospital - beds, laid side-by-side, where the grandparent is subjected to prodding and poking, feeding and bathing at the discretion of the service provider, and not at the elderly’s wish nor desire.

What I’d often hear us younger folks tell the grandparent is - “You will just have to accept this, we can’t take care of you at home, this is a part of growing old” - in a format or another, yet I wonder if I would be able to accept this much loss, at that age, at any age. It must be what death feels like, when you’re still alive?

I don’t imagine that there can be complete freedom of choice, seeing that it is a facility to serve many, at cost efficiency - yet I do believe that there can be a better way of doing things. A better way where dignity can be accorded to after all, a gentleman or a lady who’s lived at least 60, 70, 80, 90 years.

Dignity, will be all that I ask of my caretakers that I am to employ when I am old.