There are two streams of information about aging, completely separate from one another. On the one hand, there’s information for “active adults.” And on the other, there’s information for caregivers.
Information for active adults falls into three categories. The first and largest pushes the idea that if we eat right, exercise right, and get enough sex (or mental stimulation or positive feedback or human growth hormone), we’ll live as long as we need to worry about.
The second has to do with finances and money management. We’re chided for not having saving enough during our working years, exhorted to delay taking Social Security, and offered help in finding senior jobs.
The third category addresses the issue of “estate planning”: the disposition of our assets after we die.
Information about the time between active adulthood and the activation of those estate plans is found in material for caregivers. Those without family disappear from view. The sad realities of decline are reported by adult children or by the occasional younger person caught in circumstances common to the elderly, e.g. A Man Depicts the Often Grim Atmosphere in Assisted Living.
Care-giving can be all-consuming. It’s costly in every way possible. Material for caregivers highlights the needs and issues of caregivers. Several of these raise red flags for people without family, especially the tales of dealing with the health care, assisted living, Medicare/Medicaid and insurance bureaucracies.
These are often horror stories of elders saved only by the persistence of their adult children from decisions made by those same bureaucracies, decisions not in their best interests (to put it mildly). Stories like these strike terror in the heart of those who expect to be without advocates in their neediest years.
Those “neediest years” are getting longer. Once most Americans died after a short period of illness or incapacity. But now death often comes after weeks, months, even years, of mental and physical incompetence. Among those over 85, as many as 50% show signs of Alzheimer’s and require significant care-taking.
As care needs have grown, family caregivers have become an indispensable part of elder care. Resources for caregivers have proliferated. Yet it’s widely agreed that there won’t be enough family caregivers (A Shortage of Caregivers) and that even if there were, relying on them does a disservice both to the needy elderly and to those harried caregivers themselves — mostly women — trying to be wage-earners, mothers and wives at the same time they mourn the passing of their loved ones and master the intricacies of the elder-serving bureaucracies.
Not only for those of us without family, but for our entire aging population, we need better ways to support old people. As I delved into the particulars of aging without family, I saw that the changes needed to serve those without family would make things better for those with family as well.