Cruising is Elder Care at Sea
Getting a glimpse of my future
I don’t resist aging. I embrace it. I order senior plates in old-people restaurants. I drive with my blinker on. I play pickleball, talk with other old people at the park, and celebrate colonoscopies. I’m looking forward to the day when maintaining my house becomes too much and I can move to the assisted living facility ten blocks from where I now live. I have a spot reserved.
The one old-person thing I hadn’t done was go on a cruise. And now I have. I write this from my cabin on an Alaska cruise aboard Princess Cruises.
We departed from Seattle. My wife needed a wheelchair to get onto the ship, and, as I waited for the young man who would push her up the gangplank, I witnessed the loading of a Noah’s Ark for the old, the obese, the disabled, and the alcoholic.
My people.
In my pre-retirement career as an elder-law lawyer, I spent a lot of time in long-term care facilities. I visited clients in them, interviewed witnesses in them, and got to know the administrators by their first names. My parents lived the last decade of their lives in a long-term care facility and I probably will too.
Little did I know as I walked up that gangplank for my first cruise that I was to get a glimpse of my future.
