What cheerful start to the day. Why Don wants another 4 years of that just because someone else died a 88 is beyond me. I'm very much hoping to avoid the nursing home misery and going straight to the real thing.

Don with all his talents could surely contribute
more to the people he shares the nursing home
with. I imagine that he would have tremendous
stories to tell and share with others. His time
would pass far more quickly and it might encourage
others to contribute as well. Also what about his
family members? Don't any of them visit him?
It sounds like he's in a bit of a slump at the moment.
But things could definitely improve. Where there's a
will, there's a way.

I'd also speak to the facilities manager and ask for
entertainment and activity programs to be made
available (if they're not already) to get people to
be more active. Sitting and concentrating on death
and dying is not healthy even for the fit, let alone
people who feel excluded and isolated.

Prof. Aitkin - chin u p. If I knew where you were I'd
pay you a visit. You and your friends - and I'm sure
that I could cheer you all up and you'd do the same for
me. You've lead a very worthwhile life - one that's
certainly worth sharing with others. And being only in
your eighties - you've got many more years left.

My mother was 96 when she passed away. So don't give up yet.
You need to grab life with both hands. It is worth living.

A moving and thoughtful piece on a subject few talk about. It touches a chord with those of us not far from the final straight.

Thank you Don for your frank sharing from 'God's waiting room.'

You wonder about what happens after death.

A brilliant scientific book on this is Ervin Laszlo's tour de force:

'What is reality?:
The New Map of Cosmos, Consciousness, and Existence'

Please read it and tell us what you think.

All the best.

Please keep writing and continue sharing.

On ya Don

May you hang in there, to 89.

Pete

Don. Nursing homes are the last thing any of us want. First of all, it costs less to provide a similar level of care in the resident's own home! At least forty per cent less, according to one ivy league study.

I've seen things in geriatric care that'd make your hair curl. Including a male nurse equipped with a huge rubber covered torch, rummaging through a patient's belongings. And when I switched on a light, he said, turn it off you'll waken other patients. At which point the other light sleepers tuned theirs on, enquiring, what's going on!

How many are smothered as they sleep if they prove too troublesome, ask difficult questions?

For mine, these great big rubber torches need to be restricted to the psyche wards. As someone belted unconscious? Could in the absence of CCTV or an eyewitness, could be merely written off as a fall? And there are lots of falls in nursing homes aren't there? Some of which are never survived? CCTV should therefore be mandated! so as to eliminate some of the more troublesome apets of aged care!

Showers? five minutes if you're lucky and dressed still wet?

Then here is, for-profit, aged care where the shareholders share millions?

Don. There ought to be a sign over nursing home entrances and it should read, abandon all hope ye who enter here! And never a truer word spoken, Don. And likely explains why at 88 you're the last surviving member of that table?

You need a will to live and go on having a will to live, when aadoned in a gulag for old people? Given that's what many surely are? I'd swing before allowing myself to be incarserated in one. Where the last shred of independence is taken! Independant living is only ever proven if there is tangible/recoverable evidence of the same!
Alan B.