Response-Ability Our Elders

Our Elders

Chris and I have a delightful habit on mornings when the weather is good, which it is most of the time.  We take our first cup of coffee out on the back patio and sit surrounded by flowers and birds and the amazing Arizona sky.  Most mornings it takes us an hour or more to drink that first cup (thermal mugs) because we tend to slip into a meditative state for a while.  Yesterday was one of those long mornings.  We were still sitting out back, in our jammies and coffee in hand when an elderly gentleman I will call Ron walked in our front door, through the house, and came out to the patio.  We had never seen him before.  We engaged him in conversation.  He knew his name but not much else.
We asked to see his wallet and it had some cards in it.  Two of them were employee ID cards, one from Allied Signal and one from Honeywell.  Another was a 1996 insurance card for a 1996 Cadillac.  Seems he did well in his working years. He said he was somewhere in his 90’s, probably 95, which would be my father’s age if he were still alive.  Dad also worked at Allied Signal and Honeywell at about the same time as Ron.  Bit of a chill from that one.  There was one card in his wallet with a local phone number, which I called while Chris called the police.  The phone number belonged to his sister and the police had a missing persons report on a man fitting Ron’s description.
The two officers who came within minutes were very gentle with Ron and asked his permission to take him home.  They stayed and chatted a few minutes to make sure Ron wasn’t frightened of them, then drove him home.  Turns out Ron lives on the block just behind our house and had wandered away and didn’t know how to get back.  Our front door was probably the only one unlocked in the neighborhood and I’m glad it was.
This got me thinking about our society and its potential direction for the future.  In China, Japan, some European countries and among most indigenous people the elderly are revered and cared for.  Their wisdom is sought, respected and often heeded.  Here, we stuff them away out of sight.  Now some want to take away the pittance of the social safety net called Social Security and Medicare, even though the money for that safety net came out of their own wages for years.  No wonder many societies consider us barbarians.  In the matter of care of our elders, we are.  I pray we learn and grow enough to rise above this.