I was helping my friend move into town recently, and for two days, we were unable to put the bed together because he had misplaced the special screws in the packing process. They were somewhere among the diverse piles of boxes. He was sure he’d stashed them in a safe place, but that fact didn’t make him feel any better during those two days of wondering and turning around and then wondering again.
“The power is off again!” my Aunt Sylvia exclaimed into the phone. This wasn’t the first time I’d received a call from her like this. In fact, this was the second time in the last year that her power had been shut off and she’d called me in a tizzy.
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.
Getting stuck in a cycle of overwhelming days and restless nights may be quite common in our driven culture, but that doesn’t mean this way of living is reasonable or negligible. You may be able to normalize this kind of lifestyle in your mind, but it will wear you down and create greater consequences over time.
Back in New York, the Forresters had a great caregiver for Phil’s aging mother—“irreplaceable,” they always said about the woman who went above and beyond to help Grandma lead an active and joyful life every day. But when Phil’s job brought the whole family to San Francisco, they had no choice but to replace the irreplaceable. Phil’s wife even put off her new job search until they could find the right person to join the family and become the perfect companion for Grandma.
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.
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