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WE ELDERS ARE STILL HERE!!!
For many elders, the so-called “comfort of home” is not comfort at all.
It is isolation. It is neglect.
It is quiet suffering hidden behind closed doors across Canada.
Elder neglect and abuse are not rare accidents or unfortunate exceptions—they are a widespread, normalized crisis. Most of this harm happens in an elder’s own home, often inflicted by the very people entrusted with their care. When love, compassion, respect, proper nutrition, hygiene, medical care, and basic human connection are minimized or all together withheld,
what remains is not aging with dignity—it is survival under slow, sanctioned abandonment.
Let’s be clear: this is not just a failure of families. It is a failure of communities, institutions, and a culture that has decided elders are expendable once they stop being economically useful.
Most elder neglect or abuse does not leave bruises.
It leaves hunger. Loneliness. Unwashed bodies. Untreated illness. Days without human contact.
It leaves elders questioning their own worth while society looks away and calls it “aging.”
Let’s say what we’re not supposed to say: Canada is failing its elders. Families fail. Systems fail. Communities fail. And a culture obsessed with youth, productivity, and convenience looks the other way while elders disappear quietly,so no one has to feel uncomfortable.
I am an elder now. Officially a senior citizen. And I have seen the look—the dismissive glance, the quiet impatience, the unspoken message that my time, my voice, and my presence matter less, if at all. I have learned that if an elder expresses anger, frustration, or resistance,
they are quickly branded “difficult,” “confused,” or “unstable.”
Silence is expected. Compliance is rewarded. Anything else is pathologized.
This project is a deliberate act of confrontation: a solo gold-prospecting expedition into the remote wilderness of northern Labrador, planned and executed by an elder. Not as a stunt. Not for nostalgia. But as a direct challenge to the lie that aging equals weakness, irrelevance, or decline.
While elders are increasingly treated as burdens to be managed—or problems to be hidden away—this expedition exposes a harder truth: many older adults still possess strength, resilience, competence, judgment,and grit that far exceeds what society expects or values.
And yes, it is also a challenge to younger generations who dismiss elders while remaining comfortably dependent, disengaged, and unwilling to take responsibility beyond their own convenience.
That comparison may be uncomfortable—but discomfort is long overdue.
If an elder can plan, organize, and survive an extreme solo expedition in one of the harshest environments in the country, then the narrative that elders are helpless collapses.
What collapses with it is every excuse used to justify neglect, abuse, and abandonment.
This expedition is not about ego. It is about refusal.
Refusal to disappear quietly !
Refusal to accept neglect as normal !
Refusal to allow abuse to remain invisible !
We Elders are not obsolete. We Elders are not disposable. And we Elders are certainly not done.
