Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

My grandmother chose to do this because euthanasia wasn’t legal in South Australia.

She was starting (barely) to lose her marbles but the real issue was that, at 97, she had outlived all her friends! Also she had moved into an old age home a year before, and didn’t rally like being around, in her words, “old people”. Eventually she decided she was really just hanging around waiting for a centennial letter from the Queen, and that wasn’t worth waiting for.

It’s not like she did’t have family: a couple of her kids, many of her grandkids and great grandkids, but though she had a visitor pretty much every day, everybody younger was busy doing stuff and she felt like she was in their way.

This issue of out living everybody you know is a bit haunting.

View on HN

We, made that by abandoning generational homes. It's artificial.

There is a point at which typical families aren’t equipped to care effectively for elderly.

How ever did we cope all the time before the recent few years of modern medicated ageing incarceration?

The elderly died earlier.

Yep. Before social security and medicaid, the USA had a ton of homeless and suffering elderly people.

still does

Call me callous but that's the point at which it's ok to die.

There is very little quality of life and very little sense in being alive in a hospice, surrounded by strangers, hooked up to machines, living a lonely existence.

The problem is that we don’t want to die. That instinct can be ruthless, even when it doesn’t make sense.

Plenty of people want to die. The reason end-of-life care is extended as far as possible usually has little or nothing to do with the people themselves. They may rarely be lucid or even conscious.

Yes, the amount of effort it takes to care for someone with dementia and/or mobility issues is huge. You end up needing a full time care giver to either keep them from wandering away or taking them to the bathroom and feeding them 5-10 times a day. Doing that in a humane fashion is quite challenging... and at some point you realize it's largely for their surviving relatives.

In the old days we just let them wander off or wallow in bed until they died.

The generational home depended on an enormous amount of unpaid labor. Elder abuse was common (much I believe, simply due to exhaustion from the sheer level of demands placed on the caregivers).

I hope for significant automation (robots) in future so he family members can spend there time on the good stuff: actually being with the parent.

When my mother in law died (at 60, cancer) she died in the same room she’d been born in. The German social services (e.g. Diakonie) provided enough support that her daughters had minimal bedpan-changing and maximal social interactions with their mum, at least until she was too far gone.

There is. I thing like that with the inhumane system in the USA.

In some cultures, this is the way. You live by their side (or they with you) till their last moments. Where I am from, old people in the family are generally considered a blessing. Same is for parents. Taking care of parents/grand parents is part of process/life.

What I have understood of western culture is that independence has a very high value. Even when parents/grand parents are old and weak, they still want to stay independent or let their children remain independent. And children probably think that its best for old and weak parents/grand parents to get better care in dedicated places.

Where I am from, they would prefer being with their kids at that stage rather than being sent somewhere away from everyone they knew. There are care homes for people, but generally for different reasons (abandonment because of poverty or other domestic issues as I remember seeing an interview).

As someone who was born and raised in the West, I think it's a little bit more than just valuing independence.

It's pretty common to see the older generation torpedo the relationship with their adult children by basically just abandoning them to work out the early stages of adulthood and marriage on their own.

Then, 20 years later when they're lonely and riddled with health problems, they come crawling back and wonder why their children don't want anything to do with them.

That is part of western culture. From the east, we see it as valuing independence.

In the East, parents sacrifice pretty much everything for their kids. They watch over them and will do anything i.e selling their homes/draining retirement accounts or working extra hard so the kids can go to really good schools, have downpayment for their first homes etc. Here what is valued is community.

But as the society keeps evolving things are changing in the East as well. We are slowly becoming westernized as well.

There is nothing wrong with either approach. It depends on which culture you are born and brought up in.

I think what OP was referring to is the lack of compassion and empathy when the children move out. It’s often poorly done; permanently damaging the relationship between parents and children.

It’s like a switch flips. You’re independent now so magically you can handle all that entails.

Don’t ask me, figure it out yourself.

We do hear about parents kicking out their kids when they are 18. I use to think it's true, then later realized that no parent would do that and that's a misconception. They are raised with the idea that when they are adult, they should move out and live own their own. They don't really have to, but that's the culture part. If they don't, it will be something to be ashamed of I guess.

But what you are saying here is that kicking out actually happens. If kids don't move out, the parents will force them to. Are kids raised as a fixed 18 year job? That's weird if true.

It's not common over here to actually kick kids out once they turn 18, but it is common for parents to feel they no longer have any responsibility for the wellbeing of their adult cildren once they're able to physically/financially fend for themselves.

I guess my point was that the big 20+ year break in responsibility, which is initiated by the parents, will turn around and bite them in the arse when they themselves become dependent on their children.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com