Buried While Still Breathing

The quiet horror of modern care systems and what we refuse to confront.

When I was little, I used to enjoy going over to my great-grandmother’s apartment.

I remember she would let me and my brother walk around the tiny space banging on pots and pans as drums—making music as we wandered through each room.

One day, we went to see my great-grandmother, but she wasn’t at home. She was in a place they called a nursing home.

A place that reeked of urine and feces as we walked through the fluorescent-lit hallways—people screaming as if in agony, begging for attention. It scared me. I did not like it.

It wasn’t long after that visit that she died, and our next visit was to the graveyard.

When my father’s aunt who he’d lived with as a teenager got older, her sons put her in a nursing home too.

This one was a little fancier. Overlooking Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, there were wall-sized windows in the cafeteria—the perfect opportunity to look outside of the fishbowl, though not to leave.

One day we went to visit, and my aunt told us upon our arrival that she was just talking with her sister, Mary—my father’s mother. Only Mary had been dead since before I was born.

Strangely, I didn’t find this odd, and I listened as my Aunt Bob—as we called her—told us about their conversation.

My mother and father let her know that Mary was dead. They tried to explain to her what time-space reality we live in, despite her belief in hers.

A side note about the facility, just to seed a story I’ll probably expand upon another day—I had brought my aunt a gift.

It was my grandmother’s wedding ring, that she had previously bestowed upon me.

I remembered how much she loved it, and what she had told me about its magical powers when she’d given it to me, and I thought it would serve her better in there than it would me.

I gave it to her in a blue ceramic jewelry box with a unicorn seated on grass, that I had painted as a craft project at summer camp.

My father’s sister was livid with me for doing that, claiming that one of the workers at the nursing home had stolen it.

It was a sophisticated, beautiful rectangular black onyx ring with three diamond chips down the middle.

The nursing home residents regularly had their cash and personal effects go missing. I had no knowledge of that as a child.

This I’ve continued witnessing and experiencing though throughout my life.

Soulless workers who steal from the vulnerable clients in their “care”—every single day, everywhere. It’s unbelievable, but it’s true.

Aunt Vene held that hostility against me from the time I was twelve years old, right up until I rescued her out of the “care home” her son Jimmy stuck her and her husband John in.

“You’re okay,” she told me—as if it were a surprise.

Thanks?

When I put her on the phone with my father, back in my hotel room, she told him how good I was for coming to her aid.

After the call, she apologized to me for having hated me all these years for giving her mother’s ring to Aunt Bob.

I had no idea that she’d hated me, but with that comment, everything else made sense.

I found Aunt Vene in untenable circumstances when I drove down to visit with her after John’s death.

What she told me and what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears in that house of death was too much to confront at the time. I insisted her children do better.

My aunt and her husband had lots of health issues, and their eldest of three kids couldn’t keep caring for them the way they needed. The other two were uninvolved.

So he found what he thought would be a good place for them. A “family-style” setting that came highly recommended.

Aunt Vene spoke with her son on the phone and told him how bad it was. He didn’t believe her.

John was getting ready to be discharged from the hospital and she told Jimmy, “Don’t you bring John here or they’ll kill him!”

Jimmy didn’t listen.

John moved in on Good Friday.

The next day, he was dead.

That’s how it works.

There’s all sorts of research done into Alzheimer’s and dementia. Billions of dollars shuffled around in the name of science. But I can tell you the spiritual truth of it all for free.

Of course, if you’d like to tip me, you’re more than welcome to do so via CashApp using $GrowthSeekers. I will greatly appreciate your appreciation.

When it comes to end-of-life care of anyone, at any age, and for any duration of time or reason, they’re cut off from their “normal” or patterned functioning and made to exist like an animal—dependent upon the judgment, integrity, and compassion of those “responsible” for keeping them calm, comfortable, and quiet.

Sure, you can use more flowery language if you’d like, but the truth is that once someone is deemed unnecessary or inconvenient, all the bill payer is really doing is the bare minimum they have to, to not commit overt homicide.

So what happens for these people who are trapped in dysfunction of their mind—much like inmates, slaves, and foster children—is that they’re forced to replay and reconcile memories for the rest of their lives.

Typically, you’ll hear them wishing to die, if you listen.

Staff is abusive, dismissive, and violent.

They put on good acts in front of cameras, supervisors, and family members.

But once the doors are locked and visiting hours are over, an entirely different reality evolves.

And the more they tell the truth, the worse they’re targeted.

Even in the independent living communities this happens.

My grandparents chose “the best,” and one of the most expensive “communities” catering to Jewish seniors.

While there, they were robbed and tormented. That’s definitely not a story for today though.

To wrap things here up, for now, consider this:

If someone in your life is difficult for you to manage, whether or not they’re in the throes of a degenerative condition, it might be worth slowing down and exploring how you might be able to work with them, rather than dismissing their inconvenience and your discomfort.

Before long, if you don’t, all you’ll have is regret. Just like they already do.

The screaming, the repetitive stories, the confusing timelines—it’s all part of the script.

Those who work on understanding the way always survive it.

Those who demand compliance with their owned narratives, don’t.