After reading an article on Cilla Black's death, I found several comments which echoed my thoughts.
1 Did she die from the blow to her head after falling due to a stroke, or did she fall and have a stroke as a result. Which was cause and which was effect?
2 Why did she not have live in help?
3 Why did she not have a call system?
I wondered whether she should have had live in help. My late grandmother had a lodger after she was widowed. Ostensibly this was to help pay the rent. But a secondary motive was that she had heart trouble and she and the family wanted somebody there to summon help if she was ill or discover if she died.
Why not an alarm around Cilla's neck? One comment said that you can use these only if you are near a monitoring station. I would have thought somebody could devise a system which simply activates your phone to call your family.
Guilt and Questions
Several people said you should leave the family to grieve and not speculate. But what happens after somebody dies? All your family and aquaintances' first questions are: when did it happen, how did it happen, who was there?
Why do we ask? Sometimes sheer curiosity. A healthy trait.
Most people either consciously or subconsciously seek out questions to health and safety and death as a means of self preservation. How can I prevent this sort of event hitting me and those I love or those whose safety is my responsibility? For many people, responsibility extends to everybody. If I read that somebody has died in a car accident, and I think of a system which could prevent this happening again, I want to tell the world about the solution or ask the world to find one.
Many relatives, close friends, even strangers, start asking questions and seeking answers. I feel it's better to know the facts straight away than be left wondering for the rest of your life. Health and safety devices enable us to reach the age of seventy and stay fit when our grandparents died in their fifties or were bedridden helped by then members of the extended family. All health and safety devices were devised by somebody. Either a family member who experienced a problem and looked for an answer, or a stranger reading about an incident, or a company compiling statistics on causes of death.
I still go over my parents' and uncle's death many times a week, trying to work our the exact causes and what could prevent the same happening again. Many conditions are inherited. If my father had late onset diabetes, maybe I should be altering my diet to preserve my eyesight etc etc.
Many people inherit the family's property and live in it. If granny tripped over a rug, maybe when you inherit her priority or rent it out you should install fitted carpets.
Carpets up the wall in the seventies protected my parents when they fell in the bathroom. I recall my mother phoning me to say my father had fallen in the bath or shower. She was worried that the same might happen to me, living elsewhere.
I keep looking at wet rooms with their hard floors and thinking, nowhere soft to fall. I have brittle bones. I like the old carpeted bathrooms and walls.
I also like soft sided bed bases. I broke a toe falling over. I have hit my toes against objects. Tripped over a floor exercise your toes machine. Look for trip hazards.
Anything hard on the ground and anything not protected could hurt you if you stumble into or fall against it. So I like a towel hanging on a heated towel rail or on a rack in front of a hard radiator (not a towel on a heater which could start a fire).
Commentators say: Don't make the family feel guilty. Don't keep investigating. I would rather prevent it happening again to myself, your family or anybody else.
What would I like to see in place for an elderly relative?
1 An alarm system
One which works anywhere, no maintenance cost, only the cost of buying it in the first place.
2 A twice a day call system.
I always phone my parents at least twice a day. Once early on - to be sure they'd survived the night and were well. I didn't say so. My pretext was I was just telling them my movements for the day. If I went out, morning, afternoon, or evening, I would phone on the pretext of telling them I was back home if they had anything to say. Then I would phone in the evening to tell them what time I was going to bed and to find out what time they were going to bed on the pretext of telling them how late they could call me without disturbing me.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer, author, speaker. If you have time now, read my travel posts and check out my books on Lulu.com . If you don't have time now, make a mental note to do so later in the day or week.
1 Did she die from the blow to her head after falling due to a stroke, or did she fall and have a stroke as a result. Which was cause and which was effect?
2 Why did she not have live in help?
3 Why did she not have a call system?
I wondered whether she should have had live in help. My late grandmother had a lodger after she was widowed. Ostensibly this was to help pay the rent. But a secondary motive was that she had heart trouble and she and the family wanted somebody there to summon help if she was ill or discover if she died.
Why not an alarm around Cilla's neck? One comment said that you can use these only if you are near a monitoring station. I would have thought somebody could devise a system which simply activates your phone to call your family.
Guilt and Questions
Several people said you should leave the family to grieve and not speculate. But what happens after somebody dies? All your family and aquaintances' first questions are: when did it happen, how did it happen, who was there?
Why do we ask? Sometimes sheer curiosity. A healthy trait.
Most people either consciously or subconsciously seek out questions to health and safety and death as a means of self preservation. How can I prevent this sort of event hitting me and those I love or those whose safety is my responsibility? For many people, responsibility extends to everybody. If I read that somebody has died in a car accident, and I think of a system which could prevent this happening again, I want to tell the world about the solution or ask the world to find one.
Many relatives, close friends, even strangers, start asking questions and seeking answers. I feel it's better to know the facts straight away than be left wondering for the rest of your life. Health and safety devices enable us to reach the age of seventy and stay fit when our grandparents died in their fifties or were bedridden helped by then members of the extended family. All health and safety devices were devised by somebody. Either a family member who experienced a problem and looked for an answer, or a stranger reading about an incident, or a company compiling statistics on causes of death.
I still go over my parents' and uncle's death many times a week, trying to work our the exact causes and what could prevent the same happening again. Many conditions are inherited. If my father had late onset diabetes, maybe I should be altering my diet to preserve my eyesight etc etc.
Many people inherit the family's property and live in it. If granny tripped over a rug, maybe when you inherit her priority or rent it out you should install fitted carpets.
Carpets up the wall in the seventies protected my parents when they fell in the bathroom. I recall my mother phoning me to say my father had fallen in the bath or shower. She was worried that the same might happen to me, living elsewhere.
I keep looking at wet rooms with their hard floors and thinking, nowhere soft to fall. I have brittle bones. I like the old carpeted bathrooms and walls.
I also like soft sided bed bases. I broke a toe falling over. I have hit my toes against objects. Tripped over a floor exercise your toes machine. Look for trip hazards.
Anything hard on the ground and anything not protected could hurt you if you stumble into or fall against it. So I like a towel hanging on a heated towel rail or on a rack in front of a hard radiator (not a towel on a heater which could start a fire).
Commentators say: Don't make the family feel guilty. Don't keep investigating. I would rather prevent it happening again to myself, your family or anybody else.
What would I like to see in place for an elderly relative?
1 An alarm system
One which works anywhere, no maintenance cost, only the cost of buying it in the first place.
2 A twice a day call system.
I always phone my parents at least twice a day. Once early on - to be sure they'd survived the night and were well. I didn't say so. My pretext was I was just telling them my movements for the day. If I went out, morning, afternoon, or evening, I would phone on the pretext of telling them I was back home if they had anything to say. Then I would phone in the evening to tell them what time I was going to bed and to find out what time they were going to bed on the pretext of telling them how late they could call me without disturbing me.
Angela Lansbury, travel writer, author, speaker. If you have time now, read my travel posts and check out my books on Lulu.com . If you don't have time now, make a mental note to do so later in the day or week.
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