The Inevitable Retirement Home
We all will face it. It will all come way to fast. The inevitable “golden years”, or our “twilight years”, but whatever anyone calls it, it boils down to sagging, wrinkly and dried up old age. There is nothing very golden about it and what is twilight; but closer to heaven? The fact is, we all need to make some plans about our senior years before we get too old and someone else has to do it for us. Old age brings us more medical problems and a slower pace of life. Our lives sometimes need assistance and most of us do not expect our children to take care of us. So what happens when it is finally time to ship gramps off to the retirement home?
Retirement
When we first retire, life is fun and exciting. It’s like starting all over again, except this time you have the money to do the fun things and, if you are lucky enough, with your lifetime partner. These few years are fun and even as you grey together and suffer memory loss together, life takes on a new meaning. Eventually, it becomes too cumbersome to take care of your home alone and the dreaded two words, retirement home, is sounding a little more pleasant. There are two varieties of retirement homes. The nursing home, which really is a very sad place to live, but we should be grateful that they do exist for the elderly, and the assisted living communities. The assisted living retirement homes are by far the better of the two facilities. These types of retirement homes furnish the guest with a small apartment. The tenants are then able to eat in a banquet hall or have trays brought to their room. There are nurses on staff who attend to their needs and therapists to arrange for activities inside and outside of the retirement home. Depending on your income will decide how fancy your assisted living retirement home is.
A nursing home is also a retirement home. Generally, nursing homes are the last places the elderly live. The nursing retirement homes are underpaid and, therefore, understaffed. Few of these nursing homes have good reputations, but some do provide very good care for the elderly. These tenants are really patients and, unfortunately, they spend a lot of their time tied to wheel chairs so they do not fall out. They generally sit in the hallways during the days, so the staff can keep an eye on them. The nursing homes are full of the sick and infirmed elderly and the ones who suffer from dementia and Alzheimer’s. The visitors are few and infrequent at most of these homes. Hopefully, when its time for us to go “out”, it will happen at the assisted living retirement home so we will not have to suffer and exist in the nursing home.