Maritime Morning - Andrew Krystal

Frequently, we lionize policemen and firemen, but not front line healthcare workers. Why?

The workaday, everyday, tender mercies ministered by personal care workers, licensed practical nurses and nurses themselves, often go unheralded, and uncelebrated, lost in the lonely universe of taken-for-granted professionalism and the quiet urgency of the elderly and infirm.

It is also the elderly, whose ranks we will all become, but whose inevitable fraternity we deny, that receives the least attention. The elderly are actively ignored in our society; the lack of frequency of visits to nursing homes and assisted living facilities is but one testament to this fact and but one barometer of our collective omission.

Attendant to our active denial of the elderly, are the attendants themselves; the lack of attention given to caregivers is a direct result of our collective lack of a senior citizen focus. Not only does our society, generally speaking, avoid the issue of death and dying and the later stages with our eyes averted, it is the path of least resistance —  ignoring the inexorable to make hay while the sun shines.

Partly, this is the cultural result of a consumer orientation where children gain relevance by virtue of the products that surround them and the products for which they nag parents; where people are broken down into consumer age categories and targeted by marketers as such, and where those who are no longer in need of much, who are, in fact, shedding their earthly belongings like the elderly, have no consumer value at all.

One of the dirty little secrets of our society is how badly we marginalize the elderly, how little respect we give them and what little time most of us put in to seeing them or bringing them comfort.

And most of the time the elderly don’t complain. They are grateful for whatever time their loved ones grant.

One of my favorite quotations is from John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

The next time you find yourself aging or losing your powers: be it sight, or focus, or acuity, or health, or you see the mirror graying and the reflected layers lined, and creased, and freckled, think of John Donne.

And ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.