REFLECTIONS: About Sandwiches
by Teresita Bacani-Oropilla, MD
A
happy executive had looked forward to his retirement. Days of tending to a vegetable garden, with free time to play golf in between, were on his agenda for retirement. No“ must do” meetings and no more travel delays. He could now play with his growing, active, cute grandchildren at will.
A small catch in his plans developed, however. His growing, active, cute little grandson needed to be at daycare preschool and picked up at inconvenient hours as his mother was ripe for delivery of the boy’ s sibling. Guess who was available for the regular, twice a day task? Retired grandpa?!
At a nursing home, like clockwork, a middle-aged lady with a purse and another package in a travel bag appeared at the elevator to the second floor. She had just come from work to help her father who had just been admitted due to a cerebral stroke, after the death of his caretaker wife. His faithful daughter, with a full-time job, has been coming to help restabilize her father.
A physician son retrieves his mother from a distant U. S. state to be cared for in a nearby nursing home after she relapsed and needed specialized care.
In a prosperous country like the great U. S., there is a dearth of people who are free to take care of the individual needs of loved ones.
The American Heritage Dictionary lists one of the definitions of a sandwich as“ to insert one thing tightly between two other things.”
The other more common definition is“ two or more slices of bread with a filling placed between them.”
Which of the two definitions fit us these days? Do we insert taking care of family and loved ones between working and earning money?
Otherwise, however, are we trapped in a system where we have to earn money to pay for care? Have we truly become the sandwich generation?
Have we? Dr. Bacani-Oropilla is a retired pediatrician and psychiatrist.
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