A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency. Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money. Young women in Canada in my grandmothers’ era had little choice but to attach themselves to a man for economic survival. I see that truth in my 17-year-old Romanian grandmother’s sad eyes in her wedding-day photo, married off rather scandalously to a Chinese man in Moose Jaw, Sask. while the rest of her family hived off to Alberta with one less mouth to feed. I feel it in my heart for my 27-year-old grandmother, leaving children and home country behind to travel to Canada for a better future with a man married to her sister just months before, only to be abruptly paired with her after sister and babe died in childbirth.  I’m overwhelmed by it as I learn the tragic story of my third grandmother, whose intellectual disability left her like a lamb to the wolves. It’s still tough to be a woman, bu...

Major rent increases coming for people in B.C. residential care It isn’t often that a landlord can quietly order up a 30 per cent rent increase for more than 2,000 people without anybody making a public fuss about it. But maybe that’s what happens when your tenants are elderly, frail seniors living in B.C.’s long-term care facilities. As of Jan. 31, “rents” will go up for most of the 26,000 people living in government-subsidized residential-care facilities, in some cases jumping as much as $672 a month. That barely a word of it has made it into the major B.C. media says one of two things: Either the people in residential care think it’s a fair deal and aren’t complaining; or the reality hasn’t sunk in yet. I guess we’ll know soon enough which one it is. The rent increase is far beyond what any private landlord could dream of imposing on an existing tenant. The allowable rent increase for B.C. landlords in 2009 was 3.7 per cent. Alas, residential-care facilities aren’t governed by the s...

Stereotypes getting in way of good care for seniors This is a column about my mom, and the crazy things that can happen when you take ill at 83. My mother is a retired nurse who has done everything right in terms of looking after her health all these years. Despite mobility challenges since being hit by a car in a crosswalk seven years ago, she’s still very much a “tough old broad,” as a friend once described her. But as our family has now come to see, in the eyes of our depersonalized and harried health-care system, she’s just Old Person No. 347,050 on a very long list. And from what she’s been hearing from her friends, that’s just how it is once you cross some invisible line into old age. She has no chronic health conditions. She isn’t on any long-term medication. Up until two months ago, she was travelling, cooking dinner for one friend or another virtually every night she was home, and was an active, engaged community volunteer. Then we went on a family holiday to Tofino in June. ...