Decisions, Decisions

   Over the past week or so the process began, that of moving my wife's mother out of her apartment (with three sets of stairs) to an independent apartment facility with scheduled meals and elevators.  It was a move she did not want to make, her feeling of security and routine firmly etched into her mind even if my wife and I viewed it differently.  This was not an easy decision for us to make yet is one that many have to undertake, that of switching roles and becoming the parent instead of the child.  For some, this means taking away the car keys or taking charge of their banking affairs, decisions that are usually made by family members.  But imagine knocking on your parent's door and discovering that they are gone, as in all the furniture moved and them physically gone, an empty house all within a day and with no notification.  This is just one of the convoluted legal processes where a court guardianship enters the picture and overrides the wishes of the family, at least here in the U.S...an emergency ex-parte  petition.  An it apparently happens all the time...

    In a depressing article in The New Yorker, one elderly couple (in an "active" adult community) hears a knock on the door, is told to gather their things and within 15 minutes, is escorted out of their home with what few things they can gather.  Their home and possessions are quickly sold, much of it done before their puzzled daughter can discover what happened or where they've been sent.  The hands of the police and even the nursing home are tied due to the court order (when she does eventually find them she asks if she can just give her mother a hug to let her know that all will be okay..she is told that is she doesn't leave that she will be handcuffed and arrested).  And who exactly had this power to evict them?  Says the article about the incident in Las Vegas: In Nevada, as in many states, anyone can become a guardian by taking a course, as long as he or she has not been convicted of a felony or recently declared bankruptcy.  In this particular case, the woman who became a court "guardian" for many elderly people lived a rather lavish lifestyle, going from doctor to doctor until she got one to sign papers declaring the couple incompetent to care for themselves (she is currently standing trial but as you'll read, she represents just the tip of the iceberg): Elizabeth Brickfield, a Las Vegas lawyer who has worked in guardianship law for twenty years, said that about fifteen years ago, as the state’s elderly population swelled, “all these private guardians started arriving, and the docket exploded.  The court became a factory.”  Pamela Teaster, the director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech and one of the few scholars in the country who study guardianship, told me that, though most guardians assume their duties for good reasons, the guardianship system is “a morass, a total mess.”  She said, “It is unconscionable that we don’t have any data, when you think about the vast power given to a guardian. It is one of society’s most drastic interventions.”

    And where did all of this originate?  Guardianship derives from the state’s parens patriae power, its duty to act as a parent for those considered too vulnerable to care for themselves. “The King shall have the custody of the lands of natural fools, taking the profits of them without waste or destruction, and shall find them their necessaries,” reads the English statute De Prerogative Regis, from 1324.  The law was imported to the colonies --guardianship is still controlled by state, not federal, law-- and has remained largely intact for the past eight hundred years.  It establishes a relationship between ward and guardian that is rooted in trust. Wait...a law based on the King, as in King George III?  In the United States?

   Often one has to question how this can be so, that people are able to troll for legal loopholes to bilk people out of their savings.  Scams can and often do happen in the most dire times such as after an emergency (only now are states passing tougher laws against fraudulent contractors who appear in droves after a disaster such as a hurricane or a flood) or in a state of confusion as pictured in senior communities (in the case of the article, the woman standing trial had social workers and people in medical facilities referring her to possible patients)...or in some cases, funeral homes.  These are emotional times when our thinking is blurred or too rushed to make a thought-out decision.  But not always; add to these the latest attack by hackers now occurring in grade and middle schools, the reason being that credit accounts can be created with the students information years before they reach adulthood, much to the surprise of the students who find their credit destroyed once they graduate (in some case, a Bitcoin ransom in asked for, which follows a pattern that hit hospitals* throughout several countries).

    In a piece in Discover there was the issue of how our brains make decisions, less so on our morality or values (again, a rather complex issue) but rather our rational vs. impulsive decision making.  For quick decisions (say coming upon a person choking and whether you should help), the brain is believed to rely on: ...The basal ganglia, which helps strengthen the speed of circuit formation, and the sensory cortex are major players.  In the sensory cortex, groups of neurons develop patterns of firing that are re-established more easily with repeated exposure to stimuli.  This is key to those split-second decisions, made under pressure.  But for more rational decisions (say whether you should move or not move your mother), another part of the brain pops into action: The prefrontal cortex, which is the seat of the brain’s executive function, and the hippocampus --crucial to memory storage and recollection-- work together as the foundation of explicit, rule-based decision-making.  So is this a the process of good and evil?  Being satisfied and wanting more?  Having a conscience and not having one (at least in the eyes of the general public)?  And where does regret enter the picture (crimes of passion) or second guessing (did I make the right decision)?

   In a TED Talk, futurist Ari Wallach talks about our short term thinking, his definition basically meaning our lifetimes: I love the philosophers: Plato, Socrates, Habermas, Heidegger.  I was raised on them.  But they all did one thing that didn't actually seem like a big deal until I really started kind of looking into this.  And they all took, as a unit of measure for their entire reality of what it meant to be virtuous and good, the single lifespan, from birth to death.   But here's a problem with these issues: they stack up on top of us, because the only way we know how to do something good in the world is if we do it between our birth and our death.  That's what we're programmed to do...When was the last time you asked yourself: To what end?  And when you asked yourself that, how far out did you go?  Because long isn't long enough anymore.  Three, five years doesn't cut it.  It's 30, 40, 50, 100 years.  In Homer's epic, "The Odyssey," Odysseus had the answer to his "what end."  It was Ithaca.  It was this bold vision of what he wanted -- to return to Penelope.  And I can tell you, because of the work that I'm doing, but also you know it intuitively -- we have lost our Ithaca...it's important that we remember, the future, we treat it like a noun.  It's not.  It's a verb.  It requires action.  It requires us to push into it.  It's not this thing that washes over us.  It's something that we actually have total control over.  But in a short-term society, we end up feeling like we don't.  We feel like we're trapped.  We can push through that...it all begins really with yourself asking this question: What is your longpath?  But I ask you, when you ask yourself that now or tonight or behind a steering wheel or in the boardroom or the situation room: push past the longpath, quick, oh, what's my longpath the next three years or five years?  Try and push past your own life if you can because it makes you do things a little bit bigger than you thought were possible.
 
    So my wife's mother, did we make the right decision?  Short term we recognize that it's a confusing time for her, our justification being that the increased social interaction will prove valuable and expand her outlook and happiness; but that is our viewpoint.  And perhaps for those court guardians doing good and those taking advantage, their own justifications bring them peace of mind.  Who knows what part of our brain lights up to justify our decisions, easy or hard.  Perhaps it all boils down to words from the Dali Lama which appeared in National Geographic Traveler.  Wrote writer Costas Christ: “For a happy life, physical well-being is important, but true wellness must include a happy mind,” the Dalai Lama told me.  He advised that when we focus too much on problems “we can make it worse” and if we always think about what is wrong, “it appears unbearable.”  By maintaining a wider perspective, “we create a lot of room to keep hope and enthusiasm.  For real happiness, a warm heart is more important than a brilliant mind.  Remember that your best, most reliable friend is your own intelligence and your own warmheartedness."


*Often the entrance hackers use to enter the hospital records are through the "simplest" of devices such as oxygen or heart monitors, all of which are hooked up to their operating systems, much as your home security cameras and televisions relay information to your smartphones or distant pads...this is leading many manufacturers to try and jump ahead of hackers, introducing such products as the ORWL.