No more shortcuts when it comes to the elderly

When you’re young and immature, it’s no surprise you can hold some self-centred attitudes. One that I’m not proud of comes to mind amid discussion of elderly deaths during the current pandemic.

As young adults, my sisters and I were discussing what to do when our aging parents were no longer able to look after themselves. I’m ashamed to admit, my first thought was that we would simply put them in a seniors home.

Only after seeing the shock and horror in my sisters’ reactions did I concede perhaps there were more compassionate options, such as our taking them in to live with us.

That’s what my adolescent thought processes were back then, and perhaps they would have stayed that way if I hadn’t been exposed to more positive alternatives, from Pope John Paul’s teaching on the culture of life, to the witness of adults who sacrificed to care for their elderly parents, just as their parents had sacrificed for them.

Around the time of our family discussion, John Paul II released Familiaris Consortio, his apostolic exhortation on the 1980 Synod of Bishops on the Christian Family. In it, he noted the synod’s mention of “the right of the elderly to a worthy life and a worthy death.”

The current pandemic has shone a spotlight on our indifference toward the elderly, and it’s been around much longer than COVID-19.

Every year, thousands of elderly Canadians die from seasonal flu and pneumonia. For this carnage to have gone on so long without a public response is shameful.

With 80 per cent of Canadian COVID-19 deaths occurring in long-term care homes, it’s obvious something is horribly wrong. The Canadian military confirmed the problem with their horrific reports on what they discovered while assisting. While we’ve seen heart-breaking news stories of the elderly separated from their children, unreported are the stories of seniors who were wasting away in residences long before the pandemic.

Long-term seniors care can be the appropriate decision when adults are incapable of looking after their parents’ needs. But if there’s any lesson to be learned from the pandemic, it’s the fact we’ve been taking the easy way out when it comes to our parents’ generation, and it’s been a recipe for disaster.

It starts at the top, where governments have been taking shortcuts when it comes to the elderly. The federal government has been promising a national palliative care framework for years.

Meanwhile, the B.C. government’s End of Life Care Action Plan hasn’t been updated since 2013, long before the NDP government was elected and before assisted suicide was legalized in Canada.

Accurate information on the number of British Columbians receiving palliative care is hard to come by, but a 2018 report from the Canadian Institute for Health Information said only six per cent of Canadians residents in long-term care and 15 per cent of those living at home received palliative care in their last year of life.

B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix has had nearly three years to work on making palliative care a priority. Yet the only announcements I’m aware of are $40,000 in 2017 for improved access to hospice palliative care in Cranbrook and Kimberley, and 15 new hospice and palliative care beds for Jubilee Hospital in Victoria last year.

Meanwhile, Dix has had plenty to say about the Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, where he is withdrawing government funding because the hospice won’t allow its residents to be euthanized onsite.

Also taking the easy way out are supporters of assisted suicide trying to prevent the hospice from putting its principles of palliative care first. 

Rather than defend the one facility where a senior doesn’t have to worry about pressure to die from loved ones or staff, protesters who were never previously interested in the hospice are now trying to intimidate it into submitting to their politics.

The local newspaper that has been covering the story has also decided to take the easy way out, with biased coverage cheering the crowd (“Big rally for Delta Hospice gets some good news”) and supporting a court ruling against the hospice (“Hospice court decision a ‘victory for Delta’”).

Pope John Paul II noted the elderly are particularly prone to “the phenomenon of social and cultural exclusion,” and said some cultures “set the elderly aside in unacceptable ways. This causes acute suffering to them and spiritually impoverishes many families.”

As an alternative, he cited cultures that have “a unique veneration and great love for the elderly: far from being outcasts from the family or merely tolerated as a useless burden, they continue to be present and to take an active and responsible part in family life … above all they carry out the important mission of being a witness to the past and a source of wisdom for the young and for the future.”

We need to choose the latter. It’s not the easy way, but it’s the right way.

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Twitter: @paulschratz