While Being Mortal (Atul Gawande) helped us understand disease and death, and Successful Aging (Daniel J. Levitin) showed us older years can be a time of joy and resilience, Happily Ever Older reveals how the right living arrangements can create a vibrancy that defies age or ability.
Reporter Moira Welsh has spent years investigating retirement homes and long-term care facilities and wants to tell the dangerous stories. Not the accounts of falls or bedsores or overmedication, but of seniors living with purpose and energy and love. Stories that could change the status quo.
Welsh takes readers across North America and into Europe on a whirlwind tour of facilities with novel approaches to community living, including a day program in a fake town out of the 1950s, a residence where seniors school their student roommates in beer pong, and an aging-in-place community in a forest where everyone seems to have a pet or a garden or both. The COVID-19 pandemic cruelly showed us that social isolation is debilitating, and Welsh tells stories of elders living with friendship, new and old, in their later years.
Happily Ever Older is a warm, inspiring blueprint for change, proof that instead of warehousing seniors, we can create a future with strong social connections and a reason to go on living. Happily Ever Older takes readers inside nursing and retirement homes and shows novel approaches to community living. Investigative journalist Moira Welsh provides a blueprint for change and proof for industry leaders and governments that good care for seniors is attainable and necessary.
Moira Welsh is an investigative journalist with the Toronto Star, Moira has co-authored investigations that have won three National Newspaper Awards and a Michener Award for Public Service Journalism. She was a finalist for the Justicia Award for Legal Reporting and the Canadian Hillman Prize. She started as a breaking news reporter and soon joined the investigative team where she has written on social justice, the environment, and the lives of people living in seniors' homes. Moira lives in Toronto, Ontario, with her family.
I write this in the middle of a pandemic.
There is much that we don't know. Scientists are racing to create a vaccine. Immunity from a second round of COVID-19 is unclear. The virus's timeline in our lives remains a mystery, although public health officials say it could last a few years. Here is what we do know.
When COVID-19 landed in North America, we had already witnessed its death march through seniors' homes in Italy, Spain and France, killing thousands - retired teachers, accountants, electricians and bakers. The parents and grandparents of Europe.
We knew that elders, winners in the lottery of long life, were vulnerable.
When the virus arrived, in cities large and small, nursing-home deaths surged and soon, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles became COVID-19 hotbeds. In Ontario and Quebec, infections decimated long-term care, but not before a young geriatrician tweeted a warning: seniors' homes will blow up like a tinderbox.
Dr. Samir Sinha was right. So were countless others, from aarp, the influential advocacy organization for older adults, to the Registered Nurses' Association of Ontario, all telling governments to focus on COVID-19 in nursing and retirement homes. Give all staff masks, test everyone, not just those with symptoms because, as we soon learned, the telltale signs in older people were as innocuous as an upset stomach or nothing at all. The virus used stealth.
Those were the infection control actions, but the bigger crisis, the spark to the tinder that Dr. Sinha cited on Twitter, was the system that controls seniors' homes. For decades, long-term care has operated on a tight budget, draining the life pleasure of the people who reside within while devaluing the work of staff, forcing many to work in two or three locations just to make a living.
