Home and the Elderly

Part One

For many elderly persons, the home is not just a couple of sets of walls – the home can be a site that represents independence, holds special memories, and provides a sense of security and comfort. As they age, attachment to the relations socially embedded within their home grows. Valentine (2001) notes that people often treat their homes differently throughout the course of their lives due to the amount of time that is spent within it: a place imbued with years and years of time, memories, and possessions will most likely have a strong sense of place attachment. Their home, not just any material home, becomes a specific place that embodies them throughout the rest of their lives. Kellet and Moore (2003) call such a process “home-making.” Home-making is then what separates the material part of the home from the personally and emotionally constructed home.  Giving up such a place then becomes intrinsically tied to a loss to their identity.  Identity and home, for many elderly people, can often then be considered as one in the same.

            After reviewing several online magazine articles, advertisements, a movie, and newspaper articles, I have found that there are different ways of thinking about the home for elderly people in our society

1. The private home is a site of independence.

This point is first because it is articulated in nearly every “cultural” artifact that I encountered. For example, the first artifact that I found was an NPR article with the headline “At 88, a Chance to be Independent Again.” It was about certain legislature that was being passed involving funding that would go towards in-home care for the elderly. In our society, we relate the private sphere with words like “freedom” and “independence” so much to the point that without ownership, a dwelling without it is hard to classify as a home.  From the opposite end of the spectrum, Kellet and Moore (2003) found that some refer to this type of ownership is part of the meaning behind “home” and without it, people lack security.

There are entire businesses that sell gadgets to improve the ability for elderly people to live away from the nursing home.  Agingcare.com (2013) sells everything from toilet raisers to television remotes so the elderly can improve their living situation.  All of these items are intertwined with freedom and independence in the home. 

2. It’s not necessarily about losing material possessions in the home, it’s about who is taking the responsibilities associated with the home away.

For many elderly people the thought of not being able to use the accessories of the home is discomforting.  However, I think that its not really about losing the possessions; its more about losing the power to use them and to whom.  This is why Home Helpers (2013), a business that provides the elderly with home health care professionals, claims to “keep the home as he/she does” and “help them use their home.”

In the movie Requiem for a Dream, one of the main characters repeatedly steals his elderly mothers’ appliances and sells them.  Despite the fact that she is in horrible health, the mother continues to buy her appliances back from the pawn shop.  Several times throughout the movie, the son also tries to put her in “a home.” The mother abhorrently rejects the suggestion each time. Not only is she attached to her specific things, but she is less bothered by her son stealing her microwave than she is by thought of having someone take care of her or going to a nursing home. For her, the home is much more than a wooden structure; it is a place that supports all of her daily activities that define her as a human being.

           

3. There are really very few positive things about nursing homes.

Okay, that statement may be a bit of a stretch. I’m sure that there are positive things about nursing homes, I just did not find very many instances during my brief search. Neglect, for example, often occurs in nursing homes because most are for-profit institutions.  A CBS (2009) article had some comments that compared the care that for-profit nursing homes provide to be worse than within prisons. This article even cited some instances where the elderly have been left to sit in their own feces for hours. According to the Huffington Post (2011), two nursing home workers were arrested in 2011 for coating seven dementia patients with Vaseline.  This cruel “joke” was intended to make the patients “slippery for the next workers.”

Nursing home patients also feel a general loss of control and self esteem. Because of this, one electronic magazine titled Home and Family (2010) insists that the transition into the nursing home requires a great deal of comfort from that of the family. Taking away a persons routine can be demoralizing, and they suggest that this can be overcome by creating new ones for the nursing home patient or else self esteem loss is inevitable.

            Besides basic human rights violations and self esteem issues, I feel that some nursing homes can be compared homeless shelters: these institutions create an identity for those who use them.  Just as Kellet and Moore (2003) found that shelters create an identity for some users, nursing homes also allow for an undesired identity to be bestowed upon the elderly.  Nursing homes are seen as a last resort and a sign of complete loss over a situation. Just as both of my grandparents loath the idea of it, I think that most elderly people do as well. Substituting a meaningless material home for that of the meaningfully constructed “home” (Valentine 2001) thereby constitutes as a loss in the game of life.  The identity that comes with being a “nursing home patient” can cause a loss in self esteem for the elderly, somewhat to that of the shelter user.  Because of this, I think that nursing homes share similarities to that of a homeless shelter.

4. It’s hard to picture Grandma and Grandpa without their home.

The material home is embedded with so much meaning that elderly family members are difficult to imagine without it.  Throughout our childhoods we have been bombarded with popular images depicting grandparents and their home.  Take, for instance, the classic children’s song “Over the hill and Through the Wood.” All of the lyrics relate warm, fuzzy feelings to that of the idea of grandma’s “home.”  Grandmother’s house is not just a place; it is a pleasant place that makes people feel secure.  Of course, this is a popularized notion (Just as Valentine points out, the home can be made up of other types of meaning), but it is what’s engrained within the minds of most when they picture an ideal scene involving the elderly and the home.  Just typing in the word "elderly" in a Google image search will elicit photos of elderly persons in some type of a home.

Part Two:

 The concept of the home for the Elderly is deeply interwoven with memories, feelings of independence, and is a form of self-identification.  However, many elderly persons do not get to pass their entire lives in their primary residence due to health or financial reasons.  As I found through my document analysis, this seemingly normal life occurrence changes much more than just the four walls that previously surrounded them.  The transition from the emotionally-embedded home that allowed personal freedom to assisted living care requires large amounts of effort and thought. Because of this, I chose to design my ad campaign around this seemingly normal phenomenon.