No wonder they call it God's waiting room. Even He seems a little impatient today. Thunder beats a drum solo on the ceilings, black clouds draw a curtain on the light. And in the dining room on this sultry, stormy Sydney afternoon, the residents of an aged care nursing home are enduring the greatest trial life imposes on the old.
Waiting.
The old man pressed into his wheelchair waits for relatives to arrive and break the silence. An elderly Italian lady, her eyes cloudy and confused, waits for an answer to her constant question: dove siamo? Where are we? Some are waiting for the nurse to set up the childrens-style 10-pin bowling competition to break the monotony. Others wait for their blood pressure to be taken, for their medication, for help to visit the bathroom.
But in this room cluttered with wheelchairs, walking frames, pressure bandages and canes, there is no escaping what they are really waiting for. It's just that these days the final wait can be awfully long.
In the next 40 years, Australians receiving aged care services will explode by more than 250 per cent.Credit: Jessica Shapiro
These aged care residents – including one of our relatives who has just entered palliative care – are doing, alongside hundreds of thousands of other Australians, what no other generation in human history has achieved. They are defying nature and the natural order of things, living longer than people ever dared hope. Or, in some cases, should.
We all know modern care, medicine and food has extended the average human lifespan. Scientists believe the first person to make it to 150 is now among the 7.4 billion of us drawing breath right now. They believe it will be feasible by the end of this century for some to live for 200 years. And Google – always ensuring its fingerprints will be all over the future as well as the present – is investing in technologies and businesses investigating the possibility of a lifespan of 500.
But there is a more relevant question to ask than how we can all go on living longer. Most people will tell you they want to make it to a ripe old age. Yet what if that achievement means decades of simply waiting for the end, of being reliant on others for basic human functions, of outliving all those you have loved and known?
Don't expect science to provide answers to questions most of us in modern Australia prefer not to pose. We're not too sure what to do with the old these days as it is. They're becoming a damn nuisance in a society that grows more obsessed with youth and beauty.
We prefer to look away and not see the boredom and fear that accompanies the frailties old age ushers in. But we keep them hanging on – more often tucked away and out of sight – because we hope we, too, will one day receive the same care.
A few days ago Emma Morano turned 117. She's now the verifiable oldest person on the planet. Believed to be the last person born in the 19th century still alive in the 21st, Emma was asked the usual questions we throw up to the elderly, as though the answers might give us, too, a chance to live as long. Three eggs a day – two raw – is her secret. Perhaps a price for a long life many would agree is probably far too high.
Emma still has some time to beat the record set by Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, regarded as the oldest human to have lived – at least as far as records can prove. She made it to 122, no doubt attributable to the fact that she gave up smoking at the age of 117.
Stories like these will no longer be such curiosities in coming years, here or overseas. In the next 40 years Australians receiving aged care services will explode by more than 250 per cent. If you want to see the future, look to Japan.
The Japanese boast the world's highest life expectancy and, partly because of the world's lowest fertility rate, the highest proportion of elderly citizens on the planet (sales of adult diapers outsell those for children). But the pressure of modern life has also seen the disintegration of sansedai kazoku – the centuries-old custom of three-generation households where the income earners care for their children and their parents. Each year thousands of Japanese die alone, their bodies not found for weeks or months. There is now a popular term for something that was rarely known half a century ago. Kodoku-shi, they call it. The solitary death.
Our nursing homes are already over-stretched, our aged care services under-funded. Forget immigration and uncontrolled population growth. Caring for our elderly is our greatest emergency and we need to address it quickly.
Who among us can afford to wait?
Garry Linnell is co-presenter of The Breakfast Show on 2UE Talking Lifestyle.