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This exciting, compelling documentary in the form of a novel tells what life is like in homes for the aged. It is written with humor and love by two skillful writers based on their professional experience. The drama of two fictitious homes and fictitious characters (composites of real people) successfully carries the reader from the very first day on, when the family has decided “the time has come.”
Slowly but inevitably these “castaways” discover themselves trapped; discover that they have surrendered more than their bank books, their assets, all their possessions. Unsuspectingly they have surrendered their freedom, their values, their dignity, in short, their identity. From once being fathers, mothers, breadwinners, heads of families, they become non-persons, no longer needed, wards of an institution, with the loss of everything that makes life meaningful to all of us.
How can this attrition, called “psychic shrinkage,” take place? Therein lies the nub of the book. With humor as well as a passionate cry for justice, the authors direct their camera on a close-up of directors and staff of social workers, therapists, doctors, all puppets of a bureaucracy that regards old age itself as pathology, rather than a normal phase, where despite physical decline, man's involvement in the stream of life is still essential.
The authors describe how the needs of the residents are subordinated to the director's ambitious program to use the