It used to be that a 100th birthday was almost a tall tale.
Celebrating 100 years was the kind of thing that a country or a city did, not a person. A well-loved business or a landmark institution might hit that milestone, but the list of people who reached it was short.
It is growing. That is evidenced by the regularity of amazing people with more than a century under their belts who are regularly on the front page in news or feature articles about what they are doing today — such as Ruthie Shuster of Irwin who still works three days a week at McDonald’s — or what they have done before — such as Julia Parsons of Forest Hills who was a codebreaker during World War II.
These super-seniors have seen the world change from a place where women couldn’t vote and movies had no sound to a place where space travel is something billionaires do for fun and computers fit in your pocket. They have qualified for retirement for 35 years — long enough to retire again.
And yet they live in a world that was never built with the expectation that people would live that long. It has impacts on all kinds of aspects of modern life, not the least of which are health care and law.
Those are facts that require more planning. That usually makes people think of financial planning for retirement but that is a very individual goal. Jointly, more attention must be paid to the realities of spending more years on the upper end of the age scale. Our oldest citizens cannot be an afterthought when government is making plans.
The fact that not enough thought is devoted to the growing life expectancy is seen in things like the way both nursing home beds and adequate oversight for nursing homes is in short supply. Big ideas like home health that lets someone spend their end years in place are talked up but not enough manpower or attention is given to how to make it work.
We have drugs that can extend the number of years people have but systems that make them hard to afford. There are ways to let people have their financial security protected with trusts but not enough effort to still help them be part of the decisions made. We revere our seniors, but do the systems we put in place respect or even include them?
The coronavirus pandemic has exposed many of these shortcomings. There were the early hotspots in nursing homes and the subsequent problems of isolation and understaffing. There were issues of access and protection for those at home. All of that and more was not because of the pandemic. It was revealed by it.
The last two years have shown not only how special those 100th birthdays are, but how important it is to cherish the days along the way. So many of the pandemic’s casualties have been among our oldest demographic that it makes it all the more critical to watch out for them proactively going forward.
— The Tribune-Review/TNS
