"Zombies" In Nursing Homes

For a long time we have struggled, or refused, to care for older people and even younger people with disabilities in any way other than placing them in nursing homes. These facilities are held to standards of care, that much is true. But the incentive often runs toward doing the bare minimum, just enough to keep the reimbursement checks coming.

A friend of mine was admitted to one of these homes not long ago, and I went to see him several times. What stayed with me after those visits were the residents who seemed to have gone somewhere else entirely. They reminded me of what I used to call "zombies," a word I had reserved up to that point for the catatonic schizophrenics I had encountered years earlier.

These residents were cared for in the surface ways. Clean clothes, hair combed neatly. Yet they sat without speaking and without moving, parked in a chair or a wheelchair. Come mealtime, someone would roll them up to the table. As long as a woman or a man stayed like that, quiet and still, no one had any trouble with them.

They had slipped into the ranks of people nobody thinks about anymore. The staff could set them down in any spot and there they would remain, asking for nothing, making no fuss. Call it the living dead if you want. Whatever word fits, it looked to me like these people had surrendered, and the people paid to look after them had quietly agreed to see them the same way.

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