There is a distinct, heavy silence that accompanies a late-night phone call. For adult children of aging parents, it is the one we all quietly dread. A sudden fall on the stairs, an acute medical event, or a rapid, unexpected decline in health that changes everything in the blink of an eye.

In my work in senior living, I see the aftermath of these midnight calls every single week. Families arrive at our community doors at Franciscan Village in Lemont exhausted, overwhelmed and under immense pressure. They are caught in a compulsion mindset — a state of mind in which life’s circumstances have taken the steering wheel, forcing a major life transition under the distress of an immediate emergency.

When a senior living decision is born out of compulsion, it is stripped of its potential to bring peace. Instead, it becomes a transactional race against time, a clinical checkbox to solve a crisis.

True quality of life, however, requires room to breathe. To experience the fullness of our later chapters, we must push back........

© The Korea Times