Corbet on nursing homes: Embedded

From Tim Gilmer, the current editor of New Mobility magazine:

Exciting news: a well-known magazine that claims to have the "world's largest circulation" is publishing a story written by New Mobility's late editor, Barry Corbet. Two years after he died peacefully in his home on Lookout Mountain Road, surrounded by family and friends, Barry will have his final say on the disability community's most vital issue. He will carry a familiar motif of ours to the masses -- "our homes, not nursing homes" -- and he will do it as he always did, with well-chosen words and images, deft analysis, and a heart made for understanding sometimes-contradictory human behavior.

Here's the article in the AARP's magazine. It's a must-read.

A tease:

I pulled every string to avoid going to a nursing home after surgery. I wanted to go to a rehabilitation facility. But eventually we all get to a point where our strings aren’t enough. Most people with longtime disabilities are terrified of nursing homes. Many of the young disabled arrive on one-way tickets and spend years or decades attempting to make beginnings amid people occupied with endings. Nursing homes are environments of isolation and disempowerment. They dictate when to get up, when to go to bed, when and what to eat, when to take showers and who will help, and when and if to leave.

The disability-rights movement resists. “Our homes,” we chant, “not nursing homes.” But living with a disability at home takes nerve, know-how, and resources: resources the movement is trying to build but that aren’t yet adequate for most. But too many of us languish in nursing homes until the desire to live in the outside world evaporates. We become lifers, sometimes unable even to get out of bed. It’s not going to happen to me, I tell myself. I’m too well informed. Too proactive.

And:

For 35 years riding a wheelchair has been a distinguishing mark of my identity. In the group photos the wheelchair is what makes me easy to spot. Not here. Here my persona is preempted by all these stupendously old women—there are very few men in the long-term care sections—who create gridlock in the dining room and accidentally lock wheels passing one another in the halls. Practically everyone’s in a wheelchair, but I’m the only one not new to wheels.

Wheelchairs are engines of liberation to me. They enable me to go where I want, when I want. This place reminds me why nondisabled people think they are tragic. In the custodial sections residents are propped up and seat-belted in their chairs, left with nothing to do but the impossible task of getting comfortable on old, unupholstered bones. Their heads hang down and they wait, their chairs no more than movable restraints.