Connie told us today that she is getting ready to return to work, she can read again, walk to the dining room again, breathe more comfortably again. Her back is healing, she did what she needed to do and walked herself back to health. Today, she and Maria talked about a joint project – Connie would crochet some little fishes from a pattern book and Maria will make a wall hanging or a quilt with them.

They both liked the idea of working together, and it could be a work of love for both of them. This is a very bright spot in the sometimes bleak picture facing the extreme elderly in America, and some of the residents at the Mansion.

Today I admit I got angry at the way the elderly are treated in America. Aside from the struggles of the people in the Mansion, I am heartsick at the rape of the elderly by the medical, political, medical and pharmaceutical systems of the country. I hear about it all the time.

A woman named Emily sent me a message about her mother, typical of the scores of messages I see like that every time I write about the Mansion.

“We can also help (the Mansion and other such facilities) by fighting back against Medicaid cuts,” Emily wrote.”I had to file for Medicaid for my mother when she needed skilled nursing care at $8000 a month. Most nursing homes are more – we are lucky to have a Church based home that is not for profit. My mother worked for 30 years as a teacher saved for retirement but could not have imagined the cost of care when dementia took her memory. She passed peacefully two weeks ago after receiving loving care at her facility. We were luckier than most.”

This is the story of Connie and so many people in the Mansion, hard-working, taxpaying people who worked all their lives, and did as they were told and saved for their retirements and saw their security and savings wiped away in moments by a chronic illness or a stroke or cancer. They are not deadbeats and parasites sucking off the system, they are you and me and our mothers and fathers.

Emily was correct, there are much harder stories than hers to be told in any nursing home or assisted care facility all over the country. She went through a kind of Hell with her mother, and considers herself lucky. And she is right. I don’t wish to be political in this work, there are enough people screaming at one another in America, but the story of this vulnerable and ordinary people does need to be told, and that’s why I started working with Red at the Mansion.

Connie asks me not to write about most of her struggles, and I honor her wishes, of course.

She has worked all of her life, and like almost everyone at the Mansion, and Emily’s mother,  she never imagined that her savings would be washed away so quickly by the skyrocketing costs of getting old and sick in America. She couldn’t bear to see her sons give up their lives for her, so she chose to go into the Mansion and leave her world behind.

It seems a shell game to me, the trusting people who put their money in IRA’s and retirement plans, only to find it is virtually worthless against a tidal wave of corporate and political greed.

While the politicians argue about how much care they can take away from the sick and the elderly, no one is actually doing anything to stop the root problem – the runaway selfishness of corporate America, especially the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals, who have, according to many credible reports, practically purchased the U.S. Congress and blocked any serious effort at reform.

Who will speak up for these good people hidden away in nursing homes and assisted care if we don’t? They are where most of us will be, and soon enough. Very few people are wealthy enough to withstand the profit-obsessed corporations who have turned our very lives into lucrative profit centers. We can’t afford to buy soap for the elderly in their need, but we can sure give billions and billions of dollars to  doctors for procedures that can’t work and are thoughtless to mega-corporations who charge thousands of dollars for things that cost pennies.

Those of us who live outside of the system score small victories. We buy air conditioners, picnic tables, books and puzzles, soap and shampoo, send letters and cookies and flowers and pretty pictures of our dogs and cats, and pay for the Mansion cat to be spayed and innoculated. We do what we can do, and that is actually quite a lot. We bring what light we can bring to the darkness.

I hope Maria and Connie do their fiber project together. It will be a substantial victory against a cruel and broken system.