Quotes & Sayings About Assisted Living

assisted living isn't really built for the sake of older people so much as for the sake of their children. — Atul Gawande

As different as Emily Dickinson's parents' life in America seems from that of Sitaram Gawande's in India, both relied on systems that shared the advantage of easily resolving the question of care for the elderly. There was no need to save up for a spot in a nursing home or arrange for meals-on-wheels. It was understood that parents would just keep living in their home, assisted by one or more of the children they'd raised. In contemporary societies, by contrast, old age and infirmity have gone from being a shared, multigenerational responsibility to a more or less private state - something experienced largely alone or with the aid of doctors and institutions. How did this happen? How did we go from Sitaram Gawande's life to Alice Hobson's? — Atul Gawande

The closest thing Nick had seen to a high-powered lawyer in Melnik was eighty-five-year-old George Wesley, who handed out legal advice from his wheelchair in the assisted-living wing of Melnik Manor. — Mary Nealy

Harvard was a lovely assisted-living facility from which I'd emerged, like my classmates, stupider and more confident. — Avi Steinberg

For us, it was never about death. It was about life. Knowing that there was a way out, and that his suffering was not going to become unendurable, was the one thing that allowed Mr. Peterson to go on living, much longer than he would have otherwise wanted. It was the weeks leading up to our pact that were shrouded in darkness and despair; after its inception, life became a meaningful prospect once more. — Gavin Extence

John McCain said that Barack Obama is already measuring the drapes in the White House. That's what he said. I understand Sarah Palin is already driving McCain around to look at assisted living facilities. — Jay Leno

There is a difference between needy and helpless. While doling out free benefits to the needy is condemnable, the helpless must be assisted to get their lives back on track. No one should be living in fear or under oppressive conditions. — Sumit Agarwal

It was frustratingly common that children were no sooner gone from the nest and established in their own homes ... than they began to infantilize their own parents and wish them dead, or at least in assisted living. — Helen Simonson

They provided assisted living, but no one seemed to think it was their job to actually assist him with living — Atul Gawande

For the past thirty-nine years since I had graduated from college, I had called my parents on Sundays. They had expected and looked forward to the ritual. After Dad died, I still called Mom on Sundays. Most of the time I dreaded the call because she had become more and more insular and was full of complaints about the assisted living facility, the other residents, her health, everything. She had become narrow in her interests in life, more negative, more critical, and unhappier. I was reminded of something I had heard from a psychologist about what happens as we age. He said we become more of who we are, not less. Our energy to fight back the negative attributes we all possess is not as strong as we get older. So we can become more cantankerous, more irritable. I also remembered what my father had often said: "There but for the grace of God go I." That Sunday I placed the — Janis Heaphy Durham

Assisted living most often became a mere layover on the way from independent living to a nursing home. It became part of the now widespread idea of a "continuum of care," which sounds perfectly nice and logical but manages to perpetuate conditions that treat the elderly like preschool children. Concern about safety and lawsuits increasingly limited what people could have in their assisted living apartments, mandated what activities they were expected to participate in, and defined ever more stringent move-out conditions that would trigger "discharge" to a nursing facility. The language of medicine, with its priorities of safety and survival, was taking over, again. Wilson pointed out angrily that even children are permitted to take more risks than the elderly. They at least get to have swings and jungle gyms. — Atul Gawande

There are all sorts of losses people suffer - from the small to the large. You can lose your keys, your glasses, your virginity. You can lose your head, you can lose your heart, you can lose your mind. You can relinquish your home to move into assisted living, or have a child move overseas, or see a spouse vanish into dementia. Loss is more than just death, and grief is the gray shape-shifter of emotion. — Jodi Picoult

In my seventies, I exercised to stay ambulatory. In my eighties, I exercise to avoid assisted living. — Dick Van Dyke

This simple but profound service - to grasp a fading man's need for everyday comforts, for companionship, for help achieving his modest aims - is the thing that is still so devastatingly lacking more than a century later. It was what Alice Hobson needed but could not find. And it was what Lou Sanders's daughter, through four increasingly exhausting years, discovered she could no longer give all by herself. But with the concept of assisted living, Keren Brown Wilson had managed to embed that vital help in a home. — Atul Gawande

Butterfly, I need you to get this," he interrupted me firmly. "I've been in love with you since high school. I'll be in love with you when you walk down the aisle to me, push out our first kid, our second, our third, cry when they go off to college, nag at them to give you grandbabies, and sit next to me on our couch in our pad in assisted living. I got that. I got my family. I got my brothers. I'm healed. You do not have to go off keyin' my dad's car. I'm good. Stop tryin' to make me that way. You already got me there. — Kristen Ashley