Mrs. N won't be with us much longer. Her daughter gave us the heads up just before Christmas about her mom's limited funds. This means one thing: a Medicaid bed in a nursing home. Mrs. N. is a lovely woman. She is our resident poet, writing poems about other residents who are especially kind and helpful to her. She has made an amazing recovery from her fall - the one that brought her to us. It was a long road from dependence on others in a wheelchair to walking independently on her walker to and from the dining room. She has a private room - 360 square feet with a kitchenette, a private bathroom with a walk-in shower, picture windows overlooking a wooded area, and all her own furnishings.

I suppose it's good that we have such things as Medicaid beds as a safety net. It's just that the system is so troubled and only serves individuals who have next to nothing in income - and we haven't begun to talk about the quality of life - or lack of - in a nursing home. Mrs. N will now have a shared room with a curtain between herself and her roommate. She'll have a hospital bed and a shared bathroom. She may or may not have a shower in the room. Regardless, she'll be told which day is her shower day and what time. She'll make virtually no decisions about her own daily care. She'll probably have her meals in her room because the dining room will offer no social experience on the level she wishes to have, resulting in a big loss off human contact compared to her assisted living community.

I felt a sense of grief and resignation, I guess, as her daughter was explaining her own sense of loss and grief. She wished she could open up a kind of senior care center in her own home as she currently cares for her mother-in-law. She wished she was qualified to care for her own mother's needs. She went on to say how outraged she felt that our government has poured money into failing financial institutions, while cutting funds to Medicare and Medicaid - to the seniors who took care of us and kept us safe, as she put it.

You could say her mom is lucky to qualify at all vs. disqualify for having too much income and not enough for assisted living, as many individuals find themselves in this situation. And while this is a hard situation to resolve, we cannot be satisfied with an environment with no life-giving qualities beyond a roof, a hospital bed, a curtain, and a tray of food. No one there, from the administrator on down, is working towards anything other than compliance and keeping out of trouble, i.e., not getting any deficiencies on their next visit from licensing. I'm talking about every nursing home. Not just the one she is going to. No one knows yet, which one she is going to.

I just hope she will still write her poetry.