Emma Beddington (Opinion, 13 October) is right about the many frightening prospects of ageing, but she did not mention the one prospect people of my age (76) speak about together with horror most often: “having to go into a home”, or “being put into a home” by one’s children.
For many women of my age, home making was the priority, and not something to be liberated from, but a delightful and endlessly varied job. But we end up precisely without the one thing that has been most important throughout life, and is most important to happy old age, and that is home – not a home – and we become instead just grist to the mill of a profit making institution.
What are the things about being in a home, apart from the overall horror of radical loss, that we discuss? We think of the underpaid care workers who replace the warmth of love of family the ease and familiarity, the privacy, and all that is unsaid, but known. We think of being put in dubiously smelling armchairs for hours, perhaps in front of a TV showing programmes we would rather die than watch EastEnders, for instance. A home is something that cannot be bought, only given.
Guardian