PSU-IPPRO

Our modern perception of age is that the elderly are a burden. That they are people who take and have nothing left to give. That their wisdom is not especially wise and cannot show us how to live. That their conversations are mired in boring irrelevancies. But all of these are more or less conjectured presumptions which have no basis at times with reality. Try to find a nursing home at www.elderlycare.net and you would agree with me in this proposition—old people deserve elderly care and understanding.

There are elderly people, who offer up bountiful visions of tomorrow, affirming—amid their losses and limits and multiplying infirmities—that existence is good. Hear the miner’s mother, at eighty two still scrubbing the doorstep and tending her son, who says, “Life is so sweet…I still find it sweet.” Hear the artist Goya, whose drawing of an old, old man—pained at eighty with desperately failing eyesight—bore the triumphant inscription “I am still learning.”

Hear the Montessori teacher—vivacious, amused, alert, who says, “I am nearly ninety one and I am arthritic from the top of my head to my toes…” but “I see well, so I read. Thankfully, I read. Oh, books, how I love you!”

Hear the student, age seventy-two, who is busy getting his Ph.D. in psychology and who says, “I have more projects than I can do in the next fifty years, “I do not have the time to die.”

They may not be the type that needs nursing home services, but they are certainly the type which are worthy of emulation.