I've been listening to Mark Boyle's The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology. Perhaps you've heard his name before, since he's known as ‘the moneyless man.’ I'm inspired to see the way he's evolved from a naive idealist to someone who has discovered ways to live his values in a world where that's incredibly difficult. Rather than burning out and giving up when he hit a wall, he found ways to let those experiences soften him and keep moving forward. Each wall he finds a way past leaves him as dedicated as ever to the cause and a wiser man.
A line in the book caught my attention, because I know it's technically incorrect. He recalls discovering that in America people have a thing called nursing homes, where they dump their elderly parents so they can move ahead in their careers. He is horrified and can't imagine anyone doing that in Ireland. Only now there are nursing homes in Ireland, too. It's a sign of the way money has warped our values.
So, we know that this is factually wrong. Nearly any time someone tells me that there are no nursing homes in this place or everyone gets dumped in nursing homes in another place, it doesn't stand up to even the most cursory fact checking.
The thing is, Boyle is not trying to lie to anyone. He's compulsively honest. He's recalling this anecdote because it feels true. Someone told him and he discussed it with a friend and then shared it in the book because it resonated with him. He's sharing his experience of the world, not writing a government report. Boyle can't look up accurate figures or timelines online, since he doesn't use electricity. While I'm pretty sure everyone else who's said something similar about nursing homes does use things that would allow them easy access to the official statistics, they have no reason to look for it because there's nothing in their experience to make them question it.
Nursing homes are not a new phenomena in Ireland. As former English colonies, the US and Ireland inherited proto nursing homes just like we inherited English Common Law. I haven't been to any nursing homes in Ireland. Still, I'd be surprised if there is more of a difference between nursing homes in the US and Ireland as there are among nursing homes within the US. A quick search suggests both countries have roughly 4% of their elderly in nursing homes. A report on long-term care in Ireland has the same stock photo that plagues nursing home brochures in the US and Canada.
What struck me about what Boyle said is the way other people put their parents in nursing homes. People who aren't like him, people who do not share his values. The people he's worked so hard to distance himself from as he lived for a year without money and continues to live off the land as much as he is able. It's not just Boyle who talks like this, suggesting that nursing homes are for other people's parents. You can say that someone put their parents in a nursing home because they were too busy with their career and everyone will nod along. It is quietly understood that no one who loved their parents would put them in a nursing home. Thus, no one who shares their values, no one with good values who respects their elders and cares about their family, would put their parents in a nursing home.
The unspoken assumption hovers that they put their parents in a nursing home and then walked away. To put someone in a nursing home is framed as an act of abandonment and that framing makes sense to us; it doesn't need to be explained. Other types of care outside the family home are framed in dramatically different ways.
One of the stories my dad tells is how one day he was driving home from work and a story came on the radio about cultural isolation. They talked about the trauma caused by cultural isolation and then listed off examples of situations that cause it: being a prisoner of war, the death of a child or spouse, being an exchange student...My sister was an exchange student in Germany that year. She'd been trying not to cry during her rare calls home, expensive international calls made with calling cards. The organization said this was normal and put limits on how often she was allowed to talk to family and friends back home. No one was allowed to visit her for six months. That day my dad raced home and booked a flight to visit her the first day he was allowed to.
No one accused my parents of abandoning my sister when they shipped her off to stay with strangers in another country, a country where she didn't speak the language or know anyone. I suspect that my parents were far more excited about the opportunity to study abroad than my sister was. They knew she was living with a family that was taking care of her. She was a high school student, probably already capable of taking care of herself because she's always been mature for her age. The organization arranging it had rules in place in order to help exchange students integrate into their host culture. My sister was not traumatized by her year abroad, even if it was a challenge.
The barest facts of leaving home are the same: the person is provided for. The family remains involved. There are certain things the family is required to do and others which they are prevented from doing. There was an experience my parents wanted my sister to have that they could not give her at home, so they sent her to live somewhere else. Just like they did when they sent her to live in a dorm for college, even though her university was commuting distance from the house we grew up in. Just like they did when they sent her off to sleep-away camp, even though my mom was a teacher who was home from work all summer.
I don't know anyone who has dumped someone in a nursing home because their parents were interfering with their career aspirations. I know people who put someone in a nursing home in order to provide them with the care they require. I know people who put someone in a nursing home because they were not physically capable or financially capable of providing care at home any longer, after many years of doing so. I know people who put someone in a nursing home because they couldn't keep that person safe at home. I know people who put someone in a nursing home in order to allow themselves and their children to be safe at home. Even the people whose ‘loved one’ in a nursing home had abused them and abandoned them did not wash their hands of them. They did everything they could, which was sometimes a lot and sometimes very little. It was something. It was what they could sustain.
Boyle knows how to take an impossible situation and find a way to live his values. That means talking into the cell phone that's handed to him by someone trying to do him a favor, even though he has sworn off using electricity. It means going from a vegan animal rights activist to fishing and hunting. It means selling the books he’s written about his quest to live outside the monetary system. His way home has meant living far from his parents. It means only communicating with them through rare letters because he will not call them or email them or accept a ride home, no matter how much he longs to hear his mother's voice. It means seeing them rarely, since his farm requires constant tending, and cycling a long distance over days. His parents say they understand. They know he loves them. And it’s clear he does.
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