How We (Fail to) Care for the Aged

**Kusha Navadar** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Kusha Navadar filling in for Brian today.
What does it mean to live a life with dignity as an older person in the United States? Writer Lucy Schiller's grandmother died of COVID in 2021 in her mid-90s. Schiller noticed that people almost seem to treat her grandmother's death as less significant, simply because she was old, as if old age made the loss expected or acceptable. That struck her as wrong, and it's one of the things that led her to look into what it's like to grow old in the United States, which of course involves navigating the wider business of elder care. Around that same time, Schiller spent a stretch living in her other grandmother's home as her caretaker.
She reflects on this period of her life and on that question about growing old in a new book. It's called Aging Out, An Exploration of Caregiving, Community, and How Americans Grow Old. And Lucy Schiller joins us now to talk about it. Lucy, hi, welcome to the show.

**Lucy Schiller** (1:11)
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

**Kusha Navadar** (1:12)
Pleasure to have you here. And listeners, we can take some phone calls. Are you taking care of an aging relative? What's it like if you're over 65 yourself? How are you navigating the system as you get older? And if you work in elder care in a nursing home, as a home health aid, or anywhere in that world, we want to hear from you to help Lucy Schiller keep reporting this story. We're at 212-433-WNYC.
That's 212-433-9692.
You can call us, you can text us. Looking forward to hearing from you. Okay, Lucy, let's dive in. Why'd you want to write this book?

**Lucy Schiller** (1:47)
Oh, boy. Well, I think you summed it up pretty well. You know, I spent this kind of, this seems to me totally new period of months helping care for one of my grandmothers in a home. We had actually just taken her out of her assisted living facility at the very beginning of COVID, because it seemed like, you know, all of a sudden COVID was kind of ripping these types of places. And it was really one of the first times that I had such a level of exposure to just my grandmother's or older person's kind of daily life. What goes into, you know, being in her case in her early 90s? What types of care she needs? What her kind of emotional landscape at that moment in time was like?
How tired she was? I think how exhausting old age can be for a lot of people. And I really had a lot of my assumptions about being older changed just by the fact of being in such close proximity to her.
And then, you know, about a year or a year and a half later, when I was living elsewhere, my other grandmother died alone of COVID in a fairly awful way. And it was one of many deaths that I was reading about, you know, among older people in this country of COVID. And I just felt like, you know, even though there was, of course, relentless news coverage of the fact that we were in a pandemic, the way in which I think socially, we were talking about the deaths of these older people from the virus, there was an underlayer to it, I felt anyway, of, you know, this is just the kind of natural extension of their older age, the fact that they're dying sometimes in these really awful or solitary or both ways. And so I just felt provoked, you know, I felt like there's this whole aspect of human experience that I didn't really know that much about. And all of a sudden I am kind of overcome with it. And I want to understand it better. And so from there I kind of went into, you know, what are the kind of bureaucracies and entanglements and structures around and underpinning older age?

**Kusha Navadar** (4:03)
Listeners, we can take some phone calls. Are you taking care of an aging relative? What's that like? And if you're over 65 yourself, how are you navigating the system as you get older? If you work in elder care, we'd love to hear from you too. That could be a nursing home as a home health aid or anywhere in that world. Give us a call, send us a text. We're at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692.
Lucy, we've got calls coming in already, so let's just turn to the phones. Craig in Morganville, New Jersey. Hi, Craig. Welcome to the show.

**Craig** (4:41)
How are you doing, guys? My parents were lucky to be part of the most expensive exclusive club on the planet. They got to be cared for in their own home, die in their own home, and in their sleep. It is so expensive. It is insane.