Well, what else coulda happened? What if she fell down a flight of stairs and didn’t have her phone with her? What if she suddenly got ill (as may have happened)?
Sure, everyone is able to make their own choices. But some choices are better than others. I hope (if they had had the ability to foresee it) the way in which they ( and their dog - who did not have a choice) died was worth whatever benefit they perceived from their previous choices. I’m not blaming them when I express my opinion that they chose poorly.
First off, I don’t see any reason to “blame” anyone about this. A couple of wealthy folk decided to live a certain way, with horrible - and not unforseeable - results. They made their choices instead of any number of imaginable alternatives - as simple as exchanging text with someone on a regular basis. Or some alarm system where they punch in a code daily.
Same way I’m not blaming them, nor am I really understanding the outpouring of sympathy for a situation largely - if not entirely - of their making. No, I would not want anyone to die that way. But wealthy persons making poor decisions and attaining unpleasant results? Too bad, so sad.
Thinking they should have had daily maid service is fucking bizarre.
My parents have never once had anyone clean their home. It’s not some rare thing to not use maids.
Where I live now, I do have someone who comes to clean my apartment (at my roommate’s decision, if it were up to me I’d just do it myself) and she only comes once every two weeks.
And, frankly, that made them probably no different from the large majority of older adults (and, adults in general, for that matter). Many probably have no contingency plans for such emergencies, and many who care for spouses or parents who are aging may be just fine at taking care of them on “normal” days, but have not ever thought about a “plan B” if something unforeseen happens, and/or are more overwhelmed by the care needed than they are able to admit to themselves (as has been noted upthread).
My parents are elderly (dad is 91, mom is 84), and they both have health issues. They are stubborn as hell (as we all are), and actively, angrily resist suggestions from my sister and me, along the lines of, “always make sure you have your cell phone with you, and turned on, in case something happens,” or “we should remodel the bathroom, and get rid of the bathtub, because trying to step over the side of it is a fall hazard.”
We at the SDMB (and I am not singling you out here, @Dinsdale) are really good at backseat-driver comments like “any intelligent person clearly would have already done X,” and “how could they possibly not have planned for Y?” We’re very good at providing extremely logical advice, and not recognizing (or caring) that, frequently, people who are too close to a situation (e.g., the spouse of someone with progressive dementia) aren’t able to make that level of dispassionate, rational decision-making and preparation.
There’s been 864 cases of hantavirus in the last 30 years in America. That statistically means you’re not going to get it, you should not worry about it, and you should absolutely tolerate that “risk”.
If the wife was in average health, one level of caretaker is fine and I’d think pretty normal. It’s just a freak thing that happened that the caretaker/wife got a super freaky and deadly virus.
For Hackman, going 95 years in good health, living at home, and having your death confined to a single week is not that bad. It’s tragic for me to think about him being alone and whatnot, but I’d also sign up for that all day. There’s so many worse, painful, and much longer ways to go.
I tend to agree with this. To put it in engineering terms, she was a “single point of failure.” Ideally there should have been a fail-safe plan in place in the event she becomes incapacitated at home.
And what is your, or my, or any other poster in this thread’s “fail-safe plan in place in the event she becomes incapacitated at home”? And what about incapacitated when not at home?
I know you said ideally; my point is not to pick on / bicker with you as such. It’s more to reinforce @kenobi_65’s point that thorough planning is difficult to think through, and even more difficult to set up, much less to execute every day without exception.
Ideally we’d all do a lot of things. Including flossing 3x/day and having already bought a funeral plot. But noooo, that is not the way of humans in bulk. Some yes; most no, or only a little bit sporadically.
Exactly. How many of you have an up-to-date will? A designated decision-maker for medical decisions? Documented advance directives for medical decisions? Even a formalized agreement with someone that “if you don’t hear from me in X days, check in, and/or send help” that has been suggested?
Well, right now I’ve got a spouse who is in pretty decent health. So I stumble down the stairs and knock myself unconscious while she is out, eventually she’ll come home and find me. Once in a great while she or I will take a trip without the other. In such instances, we have each other’s contact info, and generally text each other at least once daily. And, when we are away from each other, we are not hiking the wilderness unaccompanied.
If I become more decrepit than I am - or if I were the sole caregiver for someone, I hope I would make other plans.
A person in their mid-60s living in a somewhat secluded area who is the sole caregiver of an Alzheimer sufferer in his mid-90s ought to be expected take different precautions that persons situated otherwise.
My parents died without wills. My FIL left a fucked up estate. Ought I NOT opine as to the lack of wisdom and foresight reflected in such choices - if for no reason other than to act differently myself?
My MIL drank and smoked herself into poor health and took way too long to die of dementia. She chose as her PoA a daughter who was poorly suited, and made the end more painful for everyone than it needed to be. So I definitely plan on offing myself - or having my spouse/kids off me before I get to that point.
There is a benefit to be had from honestly assessing the wisdom of various persons’ choices. Instead of just saying, “Boo hoo. It couldn’t have been helped!”
But there was no indication that she was in poor health. She died of a rare disease that no one could have predicted she’d catch. It’s a sad tragedy and you know what they say about hindsight.
I crate two of my dogs whenever I leave the house, and I always make sure the latches barely catch. If they really want or need to, they can break out.
That would be a heavy burden to lay on any person.
My belief they shoulda/coulda/woulda had help coming in, is just that, “my belief”
Doesn’t mean I judge them because they didn’t.
I was just wondering why.
I never said that. But, what is true is that most people are, honestly, just not good at advanced planning for unforeseen (though possibly predicable) events, and, has been discussed many times on the board, most people are absolutely awful at assessing risk levels.
Are this tragic story, and the stories of your parents’ and in-laws lack of financial planning, cautionary tales that we should take to heart? Sure.
But there are people in this thread who have taken a holier-than-thou stance on this case, and essentially accused Arakawa of negligently causing Hackman’s death, due to an assumed lack of foresight and planning on her part. From a purely logical, dispassionate standpoint, there might be a kernel of truth to that, but the reality is that very few of us would have been better-prepared if things had very suddenly gone to shit in our lives, as it apparently did in theirs.
I have gotten beyond expecting anything but mental sloth from anyone else when confronting tough questions about unpleasant situations. I want to hold myself to a higher standard. I’ve given up on holding anyone else to much of any standard at all.
The thing is, we don’t know how impaired Hackman was or wasn’t at the time Arakawa died. As I’ve noted: death of a spouse can result in a sort of grief that is incapacitating for anyone. Not everyone falls into that state, but the older a person is, if they have co-morbidities, etc. are all factors.
It may be that Hackman was impaired but still able to shower and dress himself, get a snack, pour himself a glass of water, etc. Able enough to be left alone for a couple hours, whatever.
Then his wife dies and he falls apart. Maybe loses the will to live and just stop caring about himself. He may have been ABLE to summon help but lacked the will to do so. Or maybe was afraid to do so because that would be admitting Something Terrible Had Happened. Maybe he feared being removed from his home and never seeing it again.
We can’t know his mental state at the time.
About the only thing publicly known is that in their final months the couple had withdrawn from public more and more. Well, that, too, can be a bad sign but again our society has some privacy hang-ups that might lead people to avoid calling someone up just to say “Hey, haven’t seen you in a while - I just wanted to be sure everything is OK. It is? OK, have a nice day”.
That’s nice.
When my husband was dying and I sought help I was told we qualified for NOTHING. Nada. Can’t afford home health care? Ask your family. Don’t have family? Sucks to be you, I guess.
So… do YOU have a written power of attorney? Health care directive? Will? Someone who can pay your bills if you’re incapacitated, water the plants, feed the dog? If you do then you are truly remarkable because most people don’t even have that much planned. I agree that a caregiver SHOULD do all that but the truth is very few of them do. It’s very hard to think about oneself being incapacitated or dead, which makes it hard to do that planning.
I don’t think so. That’s a good point, though - until there is such a legal process then it’s up to the family involved.
^ This.
You don’t have to be wealthy to set up such systems. Yet very few people do. Even if you do the system may not work as intended - see my prior post about trying to get people to check up on me during covid and having one person I THOUGHT was responsible and reliable enough to do that completely fail me. Until the system is tested you just don’t know.
The choices they make are the choices MOST people in our society make, though. If they failed to do something typical that would be one thing, but what they did was VERY typical for an aging couple, with or without money.
Contingency plans can be elaborate or they can sometimes be quite simple. I don’t want to be judgmental here, but a simple medical alert device like this might have saved everyone. Even if Gene’s wife had been unable to press the emergency call button, most of these devices will automatically place a call if they detect that the person has fallen.
At another level there are home care services that include nursing care, personal care, dietician services, and any necessary medical equipment, and in some places it’s even all free. When my mother had home care, between the different services someone was by just about every day.
I’m sure there are lots of other options I haven’t thought of or just don’t know about, but living without any of it just seems plain dangerous under those conditions. If hantavirus hadn’t killed his wife, lots of other things could have.
Sure, and maybe they didn’t have those. Maybe they didn’t think that they needed any of those, until it was too late.
Again, if they didn’t, that simply makes them no different from most of us, and the only reason that she’s being piled on here is that their deaths are global news, because she had a famous husband, whose work many of us loved.
Few of us are constantly assessing and reassessing our circumstances in terms of engineering for resiliency against black swan events, or even spending much energy considering such events.
Personal preference is that I’d rather not. I don’t have a disaster go bag. I don’t always make sure my car is fully charged or tank full. I don’t worry about someone breaking in my house at night trying to kill me. I don’t wear a medical alert bracelet. I could of course consider every extremely low probability event and plan accordingly. Living my life like that would not be me living “ideally”.
I’m not piling on. I’m just pointing out, with a certain sadness, that a medical alert pendant that costs $30 a month might have saved both of them, and their dog, too. But I totally get your point. It can be hard without outside influence to make those kinds of decisions.
Yes, clearly we can say that money for simple remediations was not beyond their means. At the same time, if they are even aging celebrity not-so-wealthy-anymore, their life history also brings with it a certain amount of hubris that “troubles don’t get to people like us.”
So they might well have above average means to remediate their risks, yet below average awareness / desire to remediate those same risks. Leaving them functionally no differently disposed than the rest of us ordinary schlubs.
