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Absolutely no reacts. Leadership team, please post this to The Bistro. Moderators, consider introducing this article and my commentary to your groups.

This was so incredibly hard for me to read.

But I read every word.

My mother, despite my parents intentions to bring her home from the hospital, is back in the nursing home that gave are the virus.

I’m not angry at the nursing home, one of the better ones in San Diego County.

But the dynamics detailed in this article I am sure are also true for the nursing home where my mother is right now, still with covid-19, still not allowed to see her family, telephone calls are intermittent, and the chances are high that she will die alone in that facility.

But I cling to the fact that my mother is one of the lucky ones.

Her care is good there, but some of the things that are detailed in this article are also true.

Even with a higher minimum wage in California, direct contact nursing staff who are usually nursing aides, still make close to Poverty Level wages, which they offset by working in other nursing homes, or in home health.

If they were paid a fair wage, they would not be forced to make these sorts choices.

Add to that the lack of oversight, and Mom’s luck continues.

If she were in a bad nursing home there would be painfully little recourse.

As the article states, because of the trend in staying in place in the home, nursing home residents are usually sicker older and poorer.

My mother is two out of those three oh, and is particularly vulnerable.

I am doing my best to be philosophical about all of this; this was a shity time for mother to deteriorate and have the strokes that she had over the summer, it was doubly bad that because they placed her on dialysis that it was necessary for her to be in a nursing home in order to have that treatment fully three times a week.

The odds are high I will never see my mother face-to-face again.

And I am doing my utmost to try to process and come to terms with that.

What I can do and what I will do is to become an activist on behalf of not only my mother but also other nursing home residents.

Yes, it adds to an already full plate.

But I see it as an imperative.

We will have an entire generation of older Americans dying alone and sick, with their caregivers in head-to-toe protective gear so that sometimes you can’t even see their faces, an entire generation of children and grandchildren who will live with the pain that their parents and grandparents perished in ways unimaginable this time of year ago.

The article makes some really good suggestions to the Biden Administration as to how to make what is a bad situation at least marginally better, and to hold nursing homes and the corporations and hedge funds that own them more accountable than they currently are.

That’s a start. But it’s not nearly enough, and our task, might ask, is to do our best by them.

The article also reminded me of the appalling assertions of some, even some in the healthcare field itself, that the deaths in nursing homes in among older Americans was something of a blessing.

I mean after all they were going to die anyway, right?

I don’t think anyone would say that now, now that we know just how horrible deaths from the virus actually are, and how, for some, there is no such thing as a full recovery.

But the disturbing attitude that there were and are cohorts of people considered expendable still exists for some Talking Heads and policymakers.

If you’re old, if you’re poor, if you’re already sick, if you are black or brown, or, God help us, a combination of the above, yeah, it sucks, but better these vulnerable populations than Real Americans with value, right?

This needs to be fought with the same vigor and rigor as we fight white supremacy and the patriarchy.

We can do no less for this population Who Bore us and who held their grandchildren.

We owe them our absolute best.

Pre or post mortem.

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