Sarah Holland-Batt

And I also was aware that I wasn't hearing that perspective in the media very much.

I think aged care residents are isolated.

They live alone.

They're segregated from the community in many ways.

And they're not really able to speak up for themselves.

So I began by speaking up for dad, but in the end, it has sort of become a bit of a larger crusade of advocacy for people who don't really have a voice in policy or in public life.

I think that fundamentally, while people have sympathy when they hear these terrible stories coming out of aged care,

I don't know a single person who hears those kinds of horror stories and has total indifference to them.

But I think fundamentally, we don't believe it could happen to us.

And this is a really persistent kind of belief that I hear.

I mean, I've talked to a lot of people about this over a number of years now.

And there is a kind of point where you ask them, well, what would you like it to be?

Where people actually just cannot credit the idea

that one day they themselves will become old and that one day they themselves may lose that power of agency that, you know, you and I enjoy and may be reliant on others, perhaps even incapacitated for help and care and that the system could fail them.

I mean, it's a very, very frightening thought.

It's a dystopian kind of thought, but it is a reality.

And so I got to thinking about what produces that kind of thinking because it is really prevalent today.

even among really well-educated, incredibly empathic, imaginative people, this kind of notion that somehow they will be exempt from the aged care system endures.

So that was the sort of starting point of the essay.

And I started looking really at philosophy first to look at the way in which we encounter death and the way we think about death.