The Elders we no Longer Visit

My grandmother lived in our house until she died. She slept in the back room. She ate with us. She told us stories we heard a hundred times and heard again, because that was what grandmothers were for.

When she got sick, my mother nursed her. When she could not get out of bed, my mother fed her. When she died, she died in the back room, and we all knew what was happening, and we were sad, but we were not surprised, because we had seen it coming.

My niece Rosa will not grow up with this. By the time she was old enough to know what a grandmother was, grandmothers were kept somewhere else. A place called a home. The name is strange, because it is not a home.

I understand why this happens. Nobody has time. The women who used to do the caring are at work. The houses are smaller. The medical care is specialised. The old, it turns out, need more than a family can easily provide.

But something is lost. Something bigger than we have admitted.

When the old are kept separately, the young do not see them. When the young do not see them, they do not learn from them. When they do not learn from them, the long memory of a family — the reasons certain things were done, the knowledge of how a marriage is held for fifty years — is lost.

And when the old die in places where strangers are paid to care for them, the young do not see death. They do not learn what is required of them when it comes. When it comes for their own parents, they will not know what to do. They will do the only thing that seems available. They will call a home.

The old in most societies for most of history were the carriers of the community's memory. They were consulted. They were respected. They were difficult, often, and that was part of it.

We have cut ourselves off from our elders, and we have not yet felt the full cost. The cost is not only what they would have taught us. The cost is who we become, when we have nobody to teach us.

Though I saw something, yesterday, walking home. An old man on a bench, and a boy of perhaps eight sitting beside him. Not a grandson, I do not think. Some other arrangement. The old man was showing the boy how to fold a piece of paper into something — a bird, or a boat, I could not see. The boy was concentrating the way children concentrate when they have chosen to. Neither of them was holding a phone. I walked past and they did not look up. I have thought about them since.