I was roped into appearing on one of the Religious Television shows to talk about my book When Love Gets Tough: The Nursing Home Decision, I had no idea what I was getting into nor what position the evangelist in charge would take on the issues. This was in the early eighties and very few people were talking about such things especially on these kinds of programs. They promised to sell books and so there I was.

Television shows all seem to have a room called “The Green Room” where guest sit until time for their appearance. There was another guest in the room so we met and had time for a brief chat. He was an evangelist from Canada and seemed to be a very nice person. 

He was called first and immediately said, "there is no such thing as a good nursing home and no Christian should ever put a loved one in one of them. The host agreed and they had a very animated discussion. They became so engrossed that they almost forgot me and then, after a rather bland introduction, I walked into the lion's den.

To paraphrase my rather lengthy rant, I explained that fifty years ago I would have agreed with their statement. Today I disagree. There has been some changes in our society in the last fifty years that make that no longer a good statement. The first change is we now live longer than ever before. We all know that, seems like every newspaper has to have an article on our aging society. We know that soon there will be more people over sixty-five than under eighteen. We are bombarded with that constantly. I read the other day that a female born today will spend one year longer caring for her parents than she will her own children. That is scary to those who have thirty year old children still living at home.

We miss a vital point in those statistics. We are not living longer because we stopped getting sick. We live longer because we can now live with diseases that once took our lives. There was a time when we were up until we went to bed and died. Now we are up and down, at death's door one day, dancing the next. But in the process we can demand so much more care than ever before.

I was forty years old before I ever saw a walker. I wish I had invented it, but if I had done so fifty years ago, I would have starved. Back then people died before then needed walkers. Now you never go to the mall without seeing at least ten different types of them out shopping. 

Living longer is a marvelous achievement of modern medicine, but the result is, we can live beyond our children's ability to take care of us. I promised my father he would never go to a nursing home. I kept the promise, he just outlived it. He lived beyond my ability to take care of him. He lived until a nursing home decision was a necessity, not an option. 

We also live long enough to need care between the time we can safely live at home and when we need more care than can be given in the home. That is the new world we live in. If we do not die prematurely, we are all headed for either taking care of aging loved ones or being taken care of by our families. It behooves us therefore to face the realties of these changing dynamics and prepare ourselves for caring and being cared for. Far too often, the need for care and the facing of the decisions related to care happen suddenly and with no preparation. The results of quick decisions made under the stress of time, can result in poor care and torn apart families. Long term care slips up on those who refuse to look.