[017] "A Place for Those Who Raised Us"
CAREGIVERS v4: On the lessons of multigenerational living, and one poet's uncontainable litany of gratitude: "Praise the rain; it brings more rain."
Hello, Tired Ones,
Another week, another sign of life, another reason that showing up’s still worth it.
In my work as a writer and designer for culture change, I come across important stories about progress that’s actually working for people. That refuse the false choice: sweet indulgence, or the bitter pill.
Stories that help us to remember: before there was bureaucratic care, or self-care, there was simply, well, care.
So come on in, sit down. For the next few minutes at least, there’s no rush. The week is young, after all.
January’s care workers: Community caregivers
“Praise the rain, the seagull dive/ The curl of plant, the raven talk —”
Sourcing notes: photo via Michael Weidner on Unsplash, with caption by this week’s poet, Joy Harjo.
—
This newsletter began as an effort to centre creative local solutions within a news landscape that focuses on systemic failure. Both stories are vital; only one is chronically lacking in coverage.
Finding meaningful stories of community-based eldercare took some digging; meanwhile, stories of collapsing long-term care has been ubiquitous. But no less important. Among the torrent of bad news on eldercare, one take stood out for me – which I will touch on below. For present purposes, the title says it all: Migrant workers are the present and future of low-carbon care work, written by organizer Maya Menezes in Briarpatch magazine.
Things are rough out there. If you’ve been appreciating your time here so far, please consider sharing with one friend. With three months of weekly releases under my belt, I’m also interested in exploring partnerships with like-minded writers and organizers. Reach out and say hi!
A song, for pairing
"Tezeta" [Nostalgia] by Mulatu Astatke, from the compilation album New York - Addis - London: The Story of Ethio Jazz 1965-1975 (2009).
The founder of Ethiopia’s jazz scene spent his twenties in England and New York before returning home to develop his country’s distinct modern tradition. In Tezeta, a wafting saxophone dips and ambles alongside a hypnotic piano melody that doubles back on itself like an afternoon nap, dreaming of warm company. Listen to more.
Sourcing notes: via The Guardian.
A healthy idea, to chew on
A Place for Those Who Raised Us, by Furqan Mohamed for The Local, an online magazine focused on urban health in Toronto. November 23, 2020.
On the contributions of elders in one woman’s family, and the challenge they make to Western ideas of ‘immediate family':
In many immigrant families, elders are the pillars of the household. With COVID-19 revealing flaws in the way we treat seniors, what can society learn from how different cultures value aging?
For as long as I can remember, the elders in my life have always been present and involved. As a child, whenever I came home from school I’d find my living room packed with older folks, some related to me, others I called “grandma” or “grandpa” out of respect. […]
Ayeeyo is the Somali word for grandmother. Ayeeyo Barliin is my father’s mother, and she and my grandfather (Awoowe) are two of the elders that have been in my life the longest. She cooked, cleaned, did our hair, and sat in the front row at my eighth-grade graduation. A stern and deeply religious woman, she was also responsible for keeping the young, Canadian-born kids in the family connected to our roots. […]
Ayeeyo Barliin wasn’t the only older person in our lives. My Ayeeyo Qabuul, my maternal grandmother, was a more reserved person, but even in her shyness, I understood that what happened in the home centred around her. Ayeeyo Qabuul’s sister, Mama Hasna, lived with us when I was a little girl. At bedtime, she would wait on the edge of my bed with lotions and oils warmed up by her hands. She was a guardian, friend and co-conspirator all in one—someone who waited outside for the ice-cream truck for me, like a soldier on watch.
Now, for their own safety, Ayeeyo Barliin and the “grandmas” and “grandpas” that frequented my living room are isolated in their homes. I miss them, and their absence has made me more aware of the contrast between my family’s understanding of age and the way we often think of the elderly here in the west.
My mother has lineage from Yemen, but was born and raised in Somalia, like my father. In both Arab and East African traditions, age is something to be celebrated and heralded. The elders I grew up with were responsible for taking care of children, passing down lessons and advice. The older you are, the more seniority, expertise, and wisdom you have—the more needed you are in a community.
In the western imagination, growing old signals the end of something. To age means to wind down, to retreat from life. During the pandemic, this attitude towards aging has been exposed as unsustainable. We’ve seen people dismiss COVID-19 as something that “only” affects the elderly; our long-term care system is falling apart as we speak, acting more like warehouses than places for older members of society to call home. At a time when COVID-19 has forced us to re-examine so much of how we live, there is something to be learned from the way so many immigrant families treat the idea of age and the importance of including elders in everyday life.
Changing our collective understanding of what it means to get older means changing what it means to age “successfully.” The classic tale of a fulfilled life is to work, settle down, have 2.5 kids, and then retire to a life of leisure. But for many families, including mine, the “Canadian dream” is not so linear. And the idea that one reaches a point in their life where they are “finished” working is not universal either. When my father brought his sister and her children over from Somalia, Ayeeyo Barliin raised my cousin until he could join his mother here in Canada. But her role in child-rearing didn’t stop when her family was reunited, as she proceeded to be an engaged part of her grandchildren’s lives. The idea that aging leads to an all-around decrease in one’s ability to contribute to society is challenged over and over by elders who continue to do valuable work, both paid and unpaid. […]
The stories my mother and father share about their childhood tell me so much about the way they understand family. Raising children, and other socially productive acts are not individual or private tasks, as they are often understood to be in this country. Who is considered “immediate family,” and thus who is ultimately capable and responsible for work like child-rearing and housekeeping, is different from the traditional western conception. […]
How can we do a better job of honouring elders, and their contributions to our lives, especially when we can’t be around them?
If Ayeeyo Barliin were able to be here with me, in her usual spot on my gold and brown living room couch, she’d beckon me to her side and say, “Aamus, taas way ka badan tahay madaxaaga.”
“Hush, now. That is too much for your head alone.”
A good practice, to save for later
A Place for Those Who Raised Us—Hush Now, That Is Too Much for Your Head Alone.
While the media is increasingly recognizing the dangers of profit-driven care homes, the narratives around what to do about it are missing a vital point: Whether private or public, almost no one considers them to be ‘homes’ at all. Douglas Cartan prefers to call them ‘facilities.’ He’s an advocate from the patient advocacy group Seniors for Social Action Ontario, who argue that no one ever really wanted the institutional model to begin with. Speaking on the Long Term Care Chronicles podcast, he points to a recent study commissioned by Home Care Ontario, suggesting that 92% of Ontarians prefer to stay in their home or apartment as they age. But if people want to stay in a home of their own, what they lack is any systematic supports to do so.
Seniors for Social Action and other family advocacy groups like the Family Councils Collaborative Alliance have been saying for years that other models of care exist for helping people age at home. As I shared last week, there is already a context for facilitated planning tools that help families find supports for people with even the most complex care needs. Douglas Cartan paints a picture of what that could look like for elder care:
People could get quite inventive about [living in community]. As people think and plan for their future getting older… you can get into shared living models, supported living, small homes, direct funding, robust home care. All of this conspires to create an alternative to the institutional model which we’ve just… grown up with. And part of the problem is, it’s become culturally normative to pass people on to the institution. […] So someone’ll say, My grandmother needs a nursing home. In fact, nobody needs a nursing home. What you need is a good place to live. And then you could ask somebody, well, how many options could you consider about a good place to live? Okay, let’s put nursing home up there – but what else? People can break through this mental prison that’s been created for us because we’ve only had certain responses to look at. We really do have to do our planning.
I do think it would be very helpful for some families to have access to somebody – maybe it’s from the healthcare system – somebody trained to help people think differently about how to support their vulnerable family member. […] What is possible for us here? What resources are at our disposal? What can we access from the government system? What about our community, our neighbours and friends, or other family members? Could we think about this in an entirely different way? And if we do that, I have enormous faith in citizens to come up with creative ways of doing what’s right for people.
Sourcing notes: Douglas Cartan, via the Long Term Care Chronicles podcast.
As it happens, alternative models for long-term care are cheaper—a lot cheaper. Huffington Post Canada did an extensive review of some of the options. In it, they cited a study by Canada’s independent health information agency, showing that care in a nursing home costs about $200 per resident per day – not including the upwards of $212,000 it costs to build the infrastructure for beds in the first place. Homecare costs, in contrast, average about half that, or $103 per day.
While health policy think-tanks like Ryerson’s National Institute on Ageing and other healthcare players do have a role in changing senior care, it’s important to realize that their focus is actually quite narrow. By addressing the coordination of technology and expertise that goes into medicalized care, they’re underplaying the vital role of non-medical supports – which address what doctors call activities of daily living. Meanwhile, the perspectives of seniors, families, and care workers are too often reduced to window dressing – even though it’s their lives that are most at stake.
Until reform comes, there are fortunately resources that help families develop systems of care that put their loved ones in control – like the large library maintained by Inclusion Press covered last week. And other agencies like ConnectABILITY have systemized that approach within Ontario’s framework of disability support programs, under the guise of “person-directed planning.”
Despite the holes in our system, it seems that the most important barrier to making progress on senior-centred care is the mindset we bring to it. So I want to echo what many organizers are saying about the political importance of our imagination, as individuals as well as communities and collectives. This is a sentiment I heard most recently in a Briarpatch piece by Maya Menezes, an organizer and campaigner for climate justice. In it, she makes a strong case that migrant care work is a central pillar of the low-carbon economy that we need to fortify. She closes with a quote from Syed Hussan, who reflected on what it takes to organize for a borderless world in an article for the same magazine in 2019. To revolutionize our economic system, he suggests, we need to imagine a new culture into being, one that reclaims our own relationship with work:
It is through the practice of non-capitalist work that we can imagine a world that does not always require migrants [or] the poor to be exploited in labour. [...] We need to intentionally produce a common people’s culture beyond carcerality, surveillance, and disposability – a common culture that expands imagination, counters atomization, transforms gender relations, and rejects scarcity. [...]
The work of first becoming aware of, and then removing the blockages in our imaginations has to happen in multiple avenues of our lives at once. We must all listen, study, struggle, work, build culture, create common identity together.
It is possible; it is certain. Freedom is coming.
Sourcing notes: Unbordering by Syed Hussan.
—
“A place for those who raised us.”
A poem, to cleanse the palate
"Praise the Rain" by Joy Harjo, from her book Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015).
It begins:
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk —
Praise the hurt, the house slack
The stand of trees, the dignity —
On one poet’s uncontainable litany of gratitude, and the water that washes us through it:
Praise the dark, the moon cradle
The sky fall, the bear sleep —
Praise the mist, the warrior name
The earth eclipse, the fired leap —
Praise the backwards, upward sky
The baby cry, the spirit food —
Praise canoe, the fish rush
The hole for frog, the upside-down —
Praise the day, the cloud cup
The mind flat, forget it all —Praise crazy. Praise sad.
Praise the path on which we’re led.
Praise the roads on earth and water.
Praise the eater and the eaten.
Praise beginnings; praise the end.
Praise the song and praise the singer.Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Praise the rain; it brings more rain.
Something sweet, for the road
And now, a very happy baby—making her escape from the institution of daycare.
That's all for this week.
Remember: Drink when you're thirsty, nap when you can.
Kind regards,
Chris Connolly
Manager, Personalized Care
(Acting Director, Standardized Care)
Humane Resources Division
The Dept. of Emotional Labour