It fell my lot to be with my grandfather the night he died. I was in my early twenties and had never seen anyone die, so as the day wore on I became more and more frightened. In the early evening a tall middle aged man dropped by to check on my grandfather. He recognized immediately that death was too near to pass the night and he seemed reluctant to leave. He had dinner with us and then said if it was all right he would just spend the night. I was thrilled and relieved beyond words. As we sat together through the long night, I found out that this man made his living nursing old men who could not take care of themselves and had no family to live with. The man he had been caring for had died that morning and so he was between jobs, but assured me he would be employed within days. He helped my grandfather die and then disappeared like an angel in the night.  

After that experience I began to notice other men who offered this kind of care. I noticed several women who nursed women as well. I met some who took elderly women into their homes and cared for them until they died.  This was our version of nursing home care. There were very few nursing homes then. Although this story sounds like it happened before there were automobiles, my grandfather died in 1955. There were a few efforts at building nursing homes but they were crude by today's standard and not very successful. The need for such facilities was limited.  Most people were cared for by family members or by the care of people like my night visitor.  

Now there are nursing homes of all kinds with more being built. In the square mile where I live there are two very large retirement/assisted living/nursing home complexes, at least three assisted living centers, and more to come. Did we build facilities like these because we stopped loving our parents or spouses? Does this generation care less than the ones in the past? Why don't we take care of our loved ones like they did?

The long term care did not change because we stopped loving, the changes were forced upon us by some radical changes in our society. These change can now make it much more difficult for us to give the care in our homes. The most important of these changes is we are living longer. That comes as no surprise. We are constantly bombarded by the fact that we are an aging society that more of us are living far beyond the life expectancy of just a few years ago and that will increase with time.  

The hidden point of this fact is, we do not live longer because we stopped getting sick. We live longer because we can now live with diseases that once took our lives. We can have a great deal of quality life long after other generations would have been dead with the same illness. But, in the process, we can demand so much more care than before. I was grown before I saw my first walker. I wish I had invented it, but if had done so fifty years ago it would have failed as a product. Back then, people who needed walkers died. 

I often say that I promised my father he would never go to a nursing home and I kept the promise, he just outlived my ability to do so. He had to have care I could no longer provide and, promise or not, he died in a nursing home.  

I had to face the fact that love is doing what people need, not what they want. Love is doing what people need, not what we want. I never thought the day would come when I would sit beside the bed of my father and tell him in spite of all the promising and bragging I had done, he was going to have to have care we could no longer provide in the home.  

I understood that intellectually. It was easy to see from the standpoint of his condition. Even my mother could face these realities. It still hurt. We still felt guilty. I could not help but look back to that night when my grandfather died and long for the simpler times when our loved ones did not live beyond our promises.