By Randall Smith

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Now for today's column...

As anyone who has cared for the elderly can tell you, you don't want to be old and poor in this country. You probably wouldn't want to be old and poor in a lot of places, but the cost of being old in this country is off the charts. The price for barely decent eldercare can range (conservatively) from 5,000 to 12,000 dollars per month. I'm not sure how many elderly people can afford 70,000 to 144,000 dollars per year for rent and food - and that's rent for a modest unfurnished one-bedroom apartment and food made in an institutional kitchen. But I do know that you don't want to see the living conditions for those who can't afford that much.

This is injury on top of the insult done to the elderly since the "youth revolution" of the 1960s. The elderly are no longer respected, as we are bidden to do by the Scriptures; rather being old is increasingly treated like having leprosy. We put old people in institutions the way they used to ship lepers off to leper colonies - "for their own good." They're too slow; they get in the way; and they have nothing "new" and "exciting" to offer a culture obsessed with what is "new" and "exciting." The wisdom that comes with age and experience is "old hat," and no one wears hats anymore.

Ask any friend who has had the challenge of dealing with an elderly parent how they solved the problems, and they will tell you they didn't. Person after person makes the same sad report: It's terrible. And terrifying, because someday, it will be us.

Years ago, author Gilbert Meilaender wrote a thoughtful article provocatively titled "I Want to Burden My Loved Ones." This, he knew, would run contrary to the common sentiment: "I don't want to be a burden." There are few things more burdensome when dealing with an elderly person who needs help than their insistence that they don't want to be a burden. This stubborn insistence on keeping others at a distance just makes everything a thousand times more difficult. Insisting you don't want to be a burden when you clearly need help is one of the most burdensome things a person can do.

Meilaender writes:

Is this not in large measure what it means to belong to a family: to burden each other - and to find, almost miraculously, that others are willing, even happy, to carry such burdens? Families would not have the significance they do for us if they did not, in fact, give us a claim upon each other. At least in this sphere of life we do not come together as autonomous individuals freely contracting with each other. We simply find ourselves thrown together and asked to share the burdens of life while learning to care for each other.

Insisting on not being a burden, writes Meilaender, is often a "last-ditch attempt to bypass the interdependence of human life, by which we simply do and should constitute a burden to those who love us." Love involves burden. There is no way of loving and being loved without it. That's one lesson of the Cross.

To my mind, the best document to come out of the USCCB, "Faithful for Life: A Moral Reflection," comments on the Parable of the Good Samaritan: "We are all journeying down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and this story haunts us, for it flatly contradicts the strong persuasion so widely held today that our loyalties and our obligations are owed only to those of our choice. On the contrary, we owe fidelity to those we choose and, beyond them, to others we do n...