From the international fronts, in Canada, from the Front Page Sections, translated…
A pair of elderly couple who’d been married for sixty-two-years because of the lack of beds in the same government sponsored nursing home, they’d split up for the past eight months. Their granddaughter a very short while ago took footages of how her grandparents had cried, each and every time they were together, posted it onto social media, this caused the concerns from the world’s other nations. This photo showed how rigid, and lacking the systems of long-term care in the government owned facilities, the local authorities stated, that they will make the arrangements, so the elderly married couple can live together, and that they will be using methods, to solve similar problems in long-term care.
The Vancouver Sun’s reported, that the eighty-three year-old elderly man, every time he’d gone to see his wife, Anita, who was two years younger, would call her, “my little mouse” in German, and, not long after they were reunited, they’d started, crying. Their granddaughter, Ashley said, “Grandpa would always pretended that something got into his eyes, because he didn’t want us to see him as a crybaby, but, he’d lost control and started wailing aloud, making my grandma cry with him too”, Ashely took down footage of her grandparents crying together on the 23rd, wrote, “This, is the saddest photograph I’d ever taken”, posted it onto Facebook, then, the photo went viral on the social media, and it’d made to the international headlines too.
Ashely said, that her grandparents had never been apart for no more than just a couple of days at a time, but as her grandfather was diagnosed with dementia, and after he had a heart failure, he was placed in a transitional nursing home, and her grandmother was put on the waiting list of the nursing homes, so they could live together in the same nursing home. She’d told, that her grandmother was sent to an assisted living place two months ago, in Morgan Heights, that it was half an hour of driving distance from where her grandfather was living; but ever since, her grandfather was placed, on the nursing home’s waiting list, with no beds available to this date.
On the day the photograph was taken, the elderly man was diagnosed with lymphoma, and the family members are still waiting on the doctors to tell them what stage his cancer was in, fearing that the elderly didn’t have that long left. Ashley said, “I fear, that before my grandparents can live together, my grandfather will die, or, that maybe one of them will die of a heartbreak.” She said, that the purpose of her, posting the photograph, was to bring about awareness to the outside world, the lacking in the public nursing home systems in Canada.
As the photo was spread out, on the twenty-fifth, Ashley received a call from the local government, telling her, that her grandfather was on the first to be admitted list already.
And so, this, is still on the lacking of nursing homes abroad, and, this article that made to the front page sections, hopefully, will help better the living arrangements of the elderly couples abroad, and, hopefully, we can borrow from this experience too, to make sure, that nothing like this happens here too.