The day before my dad died, everyone in the family went to see him. It was a coincidence, more or less. His health had been up and down, and home hospice had been set up for him. The weather the next week was supposed to be miserable, record-breaking rain in San Francisco, so everyone wandered over to the house that day to say, “hi,” and spend some time before the storms hit.
Sometimes, the people who fall through the cracks aren’t the ones we’d necessarily expect to. But that’s how it has been for approximately 14,000 adults with middle-range incomes in San Francisco. These adults, some of whom are living with disabilities, face unique challenges when it comes to having access to the home care they need because their incomes surpass the federal poverty threshold, which disqualifies them from obtaining subsidized benefits, but they don’t make enough to pay for private home care.
Death, for many of us, is a sad and scary thought. Whether it’s losing a loved one or being faced with our own mortality, pain, suffering, and fear typically flood the forefront of our minds. After all, as human beings, we are biologically wired to be afraid of the unknown, and death is the greatest unknown of all.
Human beings are, by nature and habit, prone to entropy and pattern. It is hard for us to make changes unless changes are forced upon us. How many times do we wake up, look around, and realize we’ve been drinking the same coffee every day for five years, or been in the same job for a decade, or the same house for as long as we can remember?
I’ll never forget the day my grandpa fell in the shower and couldn’t get up. Thankfully, the cordless phone was close enough to reach, so he called my mom. Without saying a single word, she got in her car and drove an hour to my grandpa’s home to help him up. He was pretty injured from the fall, and my mom was devastated. That’s when she decided to help him move into a nursing home.
I knew something had to change when I fell asleep at the wheel and nearly got into an accident. I’d just completed a long and stressful evening of parent-teacher meetings, and I was driving to check up on my aging father.
We had a frequent guest, Jean, who had grown up in Chicago. She told us how when she and her children were looking into nursing homes, she used lessons learned from her very first apartment search. Her first apartment was right near the El tracks, and she said that every time a train went by, the water in the shower would stop. Of course, she didn’t know that before she moved in.
Claire’s 84-year-old mother, Eve, suffered several small strokes and a few falls in the two years after her husband passed away. While Eve was still living independently in the family home, Claire was constantly checking up on her and was continually plagued with worry that something would happen to her mother while she was home alone. She’d bought her a lifeline, a shower rail, and an adjustable bed to make living at home safer for her, but after Eve’s third fall landed her in the hospital with a broken hip, Claire knew something had to change.
Your life is nothing if not a highly complex collection of interrelated parts and pieces. We navigate our colorful emotional journeys and simultaneously cultivate our roles in families, in the community, and in the workplace. And, of course, we manage the many layers of our health, our relationships, and our goals and dreams. These different parts can’t function altogether separately from each other. On top of it all, we must strive to build and maintain bridges between the interrelated elements of our lives.
With the barriers of walls and doors, how would you know if your own neighbors are struggling to keep up with vital home repairs and maintenance? More and more, this is becoming a challenge for older adults in the Bay Area—especially if their homes are older and haven’t been updated for their evolving needs.
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