Mind The Gap

I'm baffled by something. To be fair, I'm baffled by many things, but this one thing in particular really ruffles my feathers. Have you noticed the overly euphemistic titles for assisted living and senior residential facilities? What is wrong with people??

Last week, I was running along Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles and I noticed Sunny Hills Assisted Living and Memory Care. It reminded me of all the gated housing communities I grew up around in Carmel, Indiana. There was Windemere, Bridleborne, Bramblewood, and Summer Lakes. I think it's a fair assumption to say that the creators of such uniform neighborhoods were trying to create a sense of prestige, and truth be told, it didn't bother me all that much. It was just a name. A name that described where a bunch of happy families lived together and nothing ever seemed to transpire except the pedestrian life of domesticity.

But when I think about these assisted living communities and the way their founders concoct these saccharine and counterfeit names, it really gets under my skin. Odds are the person who came up with something like Sunny Hills has absolutely no concept of what it is like to be an elderly person or even the prudence to imagine the winter of his or her own life--because if they did, they wouldn't feel the need to sugar coat the name of their last likely place of residency with some bullshit label like Sunny Hills.

These names are condescending to say the least. In fact, I just sat at my computer and thought of overly frothy phrases and added the words 'assisted living' to them and then I Googled it. All of them--including, but not limited to Sunset Assisted Living, Happy Home Assisted Living, and Orchard Lake Assisted Living, came back as actual facilities. If it's that easy to come up with a mind-numbingly insensitive name for a retirement institution, shouldn't it be that easy to come up with a respectful one? I don't know if I've ever witnessed such silent patronization and blatant agism in the byline of places that are, in theory, entirely there to make maturation a dignified part of life.

It should be noted that I am not carping about this because I think it is false advertising or that I think growing old is somehow horrific and that the people that name and run these places should be ashamed for shedding some light on the situation. In fact, I would argue that my complaints are founded in a completely different opinion. I find these names obnoxious and insensitive because I think that overselling the facility with a joyful sounding name only perpetuates the idea in this country that the later part of life is something to dread and to ignore until it's absolutely relevant because it becomes your current life.

It's these misnomers that stealthily lead us all to believe that elderly people will eventually be isolated from the rest of us, that they are, in some way or another, too much of a burden and out of step with the fast paced lives that the rest of us live. In actuality, if we, especially as young people, would recognize that we are all headed in the same direction, then perhaps we'd think more about the common bond, than the generation gap.

I find it very comical that a bunch of people establishing these facilities with the theme of a sunny disposition and the farsighted life in the horizon are the very same individuals with a shockingly diminutive amount of foresight.