The changes we experience with adolescence have important consequences for our relationships. When that time of life comes, normally, we feel the need to break with parents. This rupture takes place in different areas: psychological, aesthetic, ethical and, of course, physical. When in adolescence our body has changed radically, we find it strange, we hide the changes of our parents as well. Most parents also change their physical relationship with their children from that age onwards. In adolescence, we want to be with our seniors, with the people who are in our same situation. We started sewing all the threads we've released with our parents with our new comrades. Physical relationships are also established, and it is at this time that sexual choice is practiced.

In the future, if we are parents, our most important relationships are in the couple and in the children. Moving away from our youth peers and moving away from our parents. However, it's very common that as children get achicharrated, our parents need help. By surprise, all of a sudden, we have to touch our parents' bodies, clean them, worship them ... We do not know how we will respond before it happens, we realize that we are naturally able to adapt to the new situation. We also realize that from those difficult moments we can live wonderful moments, because mutual care is one of the greatest creators of our minds, perhaps the greatest. But, as I wrote in the previous article, in our society the passages of life are not lived as before. The movement of time gives us a lot of fear, we have become “always young” and “Piter Pan”. Because of the new social characteristics that I mentioned in the previous text, on many occasions, the dependence of the elderly hooks us out of play and annoys us.

Nursing homes

In Western societies, where life expectancy is so great, in recent years we have concentrated our elderly in nursing homes. In the new family, couple and people relationships, the elderly have no place and there is a need to share responsibility with public institutions. However, the view of those who act in our institutions is different. The care of the elderly is expensive and they want to “cut” those expenses. The solution found was the privatization of this public service.

Currently, in most Western European countries, the management rate of nursing homes has been very high in the hands of multinationals. Precarization is the only way to reduce the care of people in situations of dependence. These multinationals have worsened the working conditions, reduced the quality of food, increased the ratios... For them, the old are only a source of income, one of the many investments they make on the stock market.

And the virus arrived.

This system already presented some cracks, as in the privatization of a public service it never “saves”. The decline in the quality of service and the economic benefit that the multinationals want to bring out will always be more expensive for someone, not only in money, but also in social consequences. Families of the elderly who are in nursing homes pay about 3,000 euros a month for a shared room. Those who have savings are left without a half-year salary; those who enter without money are paid through public money. Therefore, as in the casino, “banking always wins”, that is, the multinationals.

The virus has highlighted the shortcomings of this system. Nursing homes are not hospitals. In people who are in nursing homes there is everything: people with low chronic disease, who have been left without family, who do not want/cannot care for families... a large case series, but have not been trained as hospitals, although they offer several health services. Thus, when the virus has approached us, the managers of these centers, in which economic management is the axis, have not responded adequately. Because the priority is the reduction of expenditure and because such situations are not foreseen. In some places, good action has been taken, in others, despite the fact that workers have done their best for themselves, the scarcity of resources has left a door open to the disease. As is well known, 60% of deaths in many areas have been users of nursing homes.

Radically change the model

There has been an urgent need. This privatised service has not been able to respond properly and will not be able to respond to the challenges it faces. It is a structural problem, this service has to be republished. Reducing ratios, improving the conditions and training of workers, guaranteeing the quality of the service. Without the scrutiny and rigorous management of public institutions, our elders will soon suffer a new crisis.

However, the need for a deeper change has been highlighted. We cannot exclude our old people from our lives. Without the old we will not understand each other, without the old we are not behaving properly. Obviously, these former family models will not come back (fortunately, for sure). But when it comes to organizing our communities, the regeneration of intergenerational communal areas is in our hands. Instead of concentrating the elderly with their seniors in the residences, we need to work on other models so that the elderly can continue to live with other seniors. We have the most logical solution when we live all generations together. Ancient cultures knew it and we have forgotten it. We have to play different roles in the different stages of life: caregiver, protector, care, protected, companion, supported... The fact that all of this happens in common spaces is beneficial for everyone, as individuals and as collectives. Just as we as a group responded to the challenges we had in the past, we must also respond to the new challenges that lie ahead.

A virus has brought us the crudity of reality, a raw, sweet and painful reality that has never changed on the other side of the wall. In Western societies, a virus has confirmed to us that the immortality we dreamed of is impossible, that Peter Pan is also aging, that we live from those who work in precariousness, that the castle of cards can be torn down by a windstorm. It may have happened in time, and perhaps we are in time to fundamentally change our social system.