A few of you might be familiar with the picture above. For those who are not, I'll explain. Fred was a man that lived in my Grandma's community, who had quite a fondness for the ladies. To him, every encounter we had was our first, but he never forgot one thing, he liked redheads. One day, while having lunch with my Grams, he gestured for me to come over to him and gave me this slip of paper. I playfully stuck it in my bra strap and told him I would see him later. Whenever we would pass in the hall, he would always try to get me to come up to his room, by enticing me with his two cats. My Grandma said he really loved those cats and talked about them often.
Recently, Fred's antics had become more than what the community was willing to put up with. He started grabbing the waitresses, pinching their butts and things of the sort. The community decided to evict him. He stayed with family until he found a new place.
Here is the news she gave me today. Apparently, while he was in between living situations, his family decided to take his two cats to the pound. A few days ago, he went to pick his cats up. He was told by the staff that the cats had been euthanized. He became so distraught, he had a heart attack right there and passed away.
This story breaks my heart. Not for the obvious reasons, but for the reasons leading up to these events. I'm shocked at the way the elderly are treated by their own family, by their own children. They are discarded and they are a burden. If it doesn't matter to the family, it doesn't matter. They take their possessions and toss them out, figuring they won't know the difference anyway. That with time, these people have lost any sense of attachment or emotion to what is theirs and they are too stupid to know the difference if it's gone. If anything the attachment and the emotion has only grown stronger, because that is all they have left. To think of these two cats, that kept Fred company day in and day out, were just disregarded by his family. Not just the fact that these were animals, but they were companions and were thrown by the wayside with all the other unwanted companions. They had no right making a decision on what to do with someone else's possessions. I wonder how important those cats are to the family now? I wonder how they feel, now that they realize, that he did know the difference.
Take care of the people that took care of you. Treat them like you would want to be treated and respect what's important to them, in the same way you would to be respected. It isn't easy, it can be a burden, but remember we were once, for them, not easy and I'm sure at times, a burden. Lucky for us, that they didn't do what we do to them now.
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