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Terms
Assisted living is a type of residential facility that serves elderly and disabled people who are unable to live fully independently. One of assisted living’s originators, Keren Brown Wilson, wanted to create a place where people could live with assistance but also maintain their autonomy. She wanted them to live in their own apartments with control over food, temperatures, and who comes into their home and when. Due to Wilson’s first facility’s success in 1983, she expanded to 184 residences by 2000. However, other people began to pick up on the idea, and assisted living gradually expanded so much that the essentially became a stop on the way to a nursing home, rather than an alternative to it.
Assisted Living Quotes in Being Mortal
The Being Mortal quotes below are all either spoken by Assisted Living or refer to Assisted Living. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4
Quotes
Taking care of a debilitated, elderly person in our medicalized era is an overwhelming combination of the technological and the custodial. […] The burdens for today’s caregiver have actually increased from what they would have been a century ago. Shelley had become a round-the-clock concierge/chauffeur/schedule manager/medication-and-technology troubleshooter, in addition to cook/maid/attendant, not to mention income earner. Last-minute cancellations by health aides and changes in medical appointments played havoc with her performance at work, and everything played havoc with her emotions at home. Just to take an overnight trip with her family, she had to hire someone to stay with Lou, and even then a crisis would scuttle the plans. One time, she went on a Caribbean vacation with her husband and kids but had to return after just three days. Lou needed her.
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Chapter 8
Quotes
Certainly, suffering at the end of life is sometimes unavoidable and unbearable, and helping people end their misery may be necessary. Given the opportunity I would support laws to provide these kinds of prescriptions to people. About half don’t even use their prescription. They are reassured just to know they have this control if they need it. But we damage entire societies if we let providing this capability divert us from improving the lives of the ill. Assisted living is far harder than assisted death, but its possibilities are far greater, as well.
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Assisted Living Term Timeline in Being Mortal
The timeline below shows where the term Assisted Living appears in Being Mortal. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...retirement community for people over 75, and when they needed to, they could upgrade to assisted living .
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Chapter 4
Shelley and Lou look for an assisted living facility, which many believe is an intermediate stop between independent living and life in a...
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...goals. This is what Keren Brown Wilson also wanted to help people do in her assisted living facility.
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Around 1990, due to Wilson’s success, assisted living facilities became the fastest-growing form of senior housing in the country. By 2000, Wilson expanded...
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Shelley finds an affordable assisted living facility for Lou just before his 92nd birthday. He is depressed to go, but he...
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...Tuesday so he can maintain some of the life he enjoyed. Gawande asks Wilson why assisted living often falls short. Wilson says that it’s often easier and less aggravating for staff to...
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...metrics for a facility’s success other than health and safety—none deal with resident satisfaction. And assisted living is often geared towards the children’s wants, not the parents. Places tout their computer labs,...
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Lou lives in the assisted living home for a year, but one day at a cribbage night after drinking, he passes...
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Chapter 6
...to discuss end-of-life wishes. It became routine for all patients in hospitals, nursing homes, or assisted living facilities to be asked four questions about severe medical interventions to keep people alive (e.g.,...
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