Growing up I was frequently told by my father that your job as a parent is to make your child independent. You were to love your children, sure, but not if that love got in the way of their road to independence. To him that was not love. His parenting philosophy led to a lot of freedom for me and my siblings, which we appreciated, especially during high school.
Now Atul Gawande, in Being Mortal, a book recommended by several speakers at ICLE’s Elder Law Institute, tells me that I will have to wrestle with the tension between freedom and safety for my own parents. Being Mortal is an examination of aging, dying, and the places in which we do these things. In an effort to determine why current assisted living facilities fall short, Gawande interviews Keren Wilson, the founder of assisted living. Wilson points out that assisted living facilities are designed primarily to keep our elders safe. There are very precise ratings for health and safety that managers of these facilities pay attention to. It is easy to measure whether a parent loses weight or has a fall but not whether he is lonely. Wilson says our elderly parents end up with a “life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.”
Gawande recounts one assisted living facility resident who valued his independence but had taken a couple of falls, once in the bathroom. Should he be moved to the nursing home section? Even if he would be safer but where he would be unable to entertain and have a drink? These are hard questions, and Gawande concludes that making lives meaningful in old age requires more imagination and invention than merely making lives safe.
If there should ever come a time where my father begins to fall, or leave the stove on, or regularly eat ice cream as his main course, I hope that I will remember how he watched from a window with a small smile while my siblings and I rolled the family van silently down the driveway so we could catch the forbidden midnight movie on a summer night. And I will try and find a solution that values his autonomy highly, maybe even more highly than his safety.