Chaos breeds Conflict

A recent report in the New York times says : ' My sister Beth just a few weeks ago fell in her apartment and lay on the floor for 30 hours before her son came and found her. She had a heart attack during her time on the floor so she could not get up to use the phone to call for help. She was not wearing an alarm button nor did she have a mobile phone in her cardigan pocket.' Just her bad luck?  How many stories like this one?  Old elephants walk into the forest to die alone, perhaps to spare their relatives the witnessing. Is Beth's story the human version, alone in her apartment, cut off from relatives and the life outside her door?  We know of examples of old people who die in their houses and lie undiscovered for months or even years. The elephant in the room: The extended family model where the generations live together is foreign to Western Societies, so we have alienation, aloneness, atomised families and the austerity politics that reduce social services. Our soc...

Getting on the escalator going up is ok, but going down is not.  Old eyes search for something easily visible that appears to be level and substantial, and disappearing steps don't cut it. Wide painted lines on pavements and floors can be deceptive.  Do they signal a step, a hollow, a decline, a change of level?  There's always  the fear of a misstep.  It's about failing depth perception, or balance, or both. The step that wasn't there, the grab for a support that missed, the crunch on the way down, the sudden impact of a hard surface. The fractured this or that, the ambulance, the hospital, the rehab, the lost confidence. Falls are the leading cause of injury-related death in the over 65 age group - and the numbers have doubled in the last decade. Well of course, the population is ageing isn't it? The other fear is losing independence, causing many of the old refusing to wear an alarm pendant. ' They just don't want to accept that they are in mortal danger ...