How Aging Well is Harder Now
Cremations are among the cremation services offered in Solvay, NY. However, before you die and need cremation services, you may find that there’s a new reality for older Americans that prevents them from aging well.
At one time, in the United States and in the rest of the world, people were born, lived, and died without much medical intervention. This rhythm of birth, life, and death was natural, and older people who lived a long time did so, for the most part, with decent health and with a multigenerational support system that ensured they were well cared for all the way through the end of their lives.
However, as the Industrial and then Technological Revolutions swept through the 20th century, this natural rhythm of human existence experienced an upheaval that totally changed the nature of birth, the nature of life, and the nature of death.
The societal shift of these two revolutions – which included two world wars (World War I from 1914 to 1918 and World War II from 1939 [when Germany invaded Poland] to 1945) – was cataclysmic.
For the most part, families no longer stayed together in the towns where they were born and grew up. Once the young and younger started moving away for better jobs and wages or a college education that would get them a good-paying job, they never came back home.
Older relatives were left with no support system as they aged. Their busy children or grandchildren couldn’t sacrifice their careers or their time to give them care, so the nursing home and assisted living facility flourished as the nation’s elderly were moved there for care.
At the same time, medical research moved leaps and bounds in finding medications and procedures that could manage or improve physiological conditions, such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and joint degeneration, so that people could live longer lives.
But there was a cost to both the elder care housing and elder life-prolonging advances in medicine. The sheer amount of medications and medical care needed to prolong life meant that most of older people’s time was spent taking pills and going to doctor’s appointments, instead of spending their golden years fulfilling their dreams of what they would do when they retired.
When death finally came, after all possible ways to prevent it had been exhausted, older Americans, for the most part, died away from their homes and family. As a result, death became, to many the United States, something foreign, something to be feared, and something to avoid at any cost.
Medical research has continued to advance to meet this pervasive avoidance of death, and people are living even longer, believing that they can outrun death. Even in death, however, some people cling so tightly to the idea of being alive that they spend a small fortune for practices like cryogenics.
Cryogenics is a process that flash freezes a body at extremely cold temperatures immediately after death, before tissue damage and death progresses, with the hope – yet unproven – that when medical research finds a cure for the diseases that these people died of, their bodies can be revived to receive the cure and they can continue on with life as usual.
Aging well is hard because we’ve made it hard. We should make it easier for those we love and for ourselves by embracing the natural rhythms we abandoned in the last century.
If you’d like to know more about cremation services in Solvay, NY, our compassionate and experienced team at Bagozzi Twins Funeral Home, Inc. is here to help. You can visit us at our funeral home at 2601 Milton Ave., Solvay, NY 13209, or you can call us today at (315) 468-2431.
