Tessa McWatt and her mother.Courtesy the author/Supplied
Tessa McWatt’s latest book is The Snag: A Mother, A Forest, and Wild Grief.
It was time: My siblings and I had tracked my mother’s dementia and determined she could no longer live in the house where she’d lived alone for 30 years. We moved her to my sister’s home, where she became part of an extended family of comings and goings, Christmas parties, trips to the cottage, grocery shopping and daily chores. But when it became clear she needed more care than the situation allowed, we moved her to a care home.
When I first visited her there, entering the foyer with so many of the residents sitting around a television in their wheelchairs or asleep on the couches, my heart sank. Everyone was old. I knew that the traditional intergenerational system – like I was raised in, with children, parents and grandchildren all in one home, where an array of young and old relatives visited for feasts and dancing – was an idealized one that relied on hidden labour by women like my aunt, who was a full-time caregiver. But I thought we could be doing better, collectively.
Yet this care home is keeping my mother safe. The staff are friendly, caring, efficient; they seem to love my mother. In some ways she is thriving, but where are all the young people?
Care homes are a crucial part of how our society is structured, with the frenzy of work that keeps us too busy to keep elders at home. But capitalism does not care about intergenerational exchange. It discards what is old and unproductive. It requires everything to break and be disposable, so that we will buy it, again and again.
In contrast, the most important trees in a forest are dead or dying.
Immersing myself in forests over the last three years has brought me to understand how profoundly important decay is to life. Death has talents; it can teach us. It is the only event, besides birth, that we all experience.
To know how to die is to know how to live.
A snag is a rotting tree whose trunk is spotted with moss and fine hairs of lichen that defy ruin. Despite a snag’s inevitable death, its usefulness to wildlife is about to peak. Dead wood provides homes for insects and fungi. Those insects are food for birds, bats and other little animals, and these creatures shelter in the tree’s hollows. They in turn are food for larger mammals and birds of prey. Dead, decaying trees are integral to a wood’s biodiversity and are the greatest resource in a forest.
If snags are removed from a forest, the whole system is impoverished. The health of seedlings, saplings and mature trees depends on keeping the snags where they lie. Snags are also responsible for the most important communication in the forest. Old trees whisper to younger ones by emitting chemical signals. They are the key sources of fungal connections that regenerate seedlings. They send warning signs, help others through sickness, pass on wisdom for survival. In any forest in the world, old and new are in a dance of biodiversity so delicate to be nearly imperceptible.
Every visit to my mother brings me contentment and a lesson in growing old, gems of existential wisdom that only she can offer. The abundance our elderly still have to offer is bounded only by systems, and the time is ripe in Canada for reinvention.
Statistics Canada predicts that the number of people over 85 will rise rapidly between 2031 and 2050 as the baby boomers enter this stage of life. The population aged 85 and over will increase from roughly 900,000 currently, to between 3.3 million and 4.3 million by 2073. The strain on our health care systems will be unprecedented.
Other strains, for young people, put a reconsideration of care into a different, no less urgent, light.
The cost of living in cities like Toronto, for university students, for example, is exorbitant. They are expected to budget thousands of dollars a month for living expenses, with rent the biggest outlay. The financial pressure, requiring them to work, full-time in some cases, disrupts their studies and well-being, and increases debt and long-term stress. These students face well-documented mental-health struggles.
As a professor, I know firsthand the pressures universities face to provide mental-health support, career and practical life skills, in addition to the subject specific knowledge they are founded on. We are cobbling together a patchwork of care solutions without a vision.
The World Health Organization definition of health is “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Can we claim we are a healthy society? That our elders and youth enjoy such health? True care might be formed of consistent attention to all aspects of this definition.
Communities like House of Generations in Denmark and Humanitas in Holland, along with new initiatives in Great Britain and Canada, are reimagining intergenerational life.
The care home of the future would benefit from systems of interconnectedness, like those in forests that have been documented by scientists like Susanne Simard in her book The Mother Tree. The consistent attention of snags, mature trees, saplings and seedlings to one another for mutual health might be exactly the model we need.
With this consistent attention in scope, I see further possible shapes:
Co-housing with purposeful design: private and shared spaces with elderly residents in private apartments, while young people (care professionals, students, artists, those on low incomes) have small affordable units. The shared spaces might be kitchens, gardens, libraries, and lounges, to encourage interaction.
Exchange-based living: Young residents pay reduced rent in exchange for companionship, caregiving, or running community activities. Medical students, PSWs in training, students – all could offer tech support, music, art, workshops, discussions on the things they are learning, while elders offer wisdom and life experience.
I will get old, if I’m lucky. I want stories and lifelong learning, integrated spaces that incorporate nature, art, health. All in one building, with care fuelling its core, like a furnace.
Intergenerational spaces normalize mortality, honour the aging journey alongside the vibrancy of youth. Snags act as “nurse logs” for new seedlings, a place for them to grow. When a tree dies, knowledge of light, wind and living communities is lost. But the forest continually creates small openings for new growth through the snag’s decay. The next forest emerges, integrating new knowledge, new relationships.
Interdependence is a sustaining principle of any system. Out of it could burgeon a living village of connection, purpose, and mutual growth: a human forest. Communities becoming a place with room for all of us, and all of us in the room.
I imagine what a forest dreams: fungi, worms, beetles, frogs, bacteria, rodents. Snakes. Birds. So many birds. In the dream the forest is fat and green, brown with thickets, yellow with slime, red with blood and berries. The forest teems with species and variety.
I too dream: about a community like a forest. Young and old, their roles formed by mutual care. The passing along of wisdom, the reigniting of hope and play. The biodiversity necessary to thrive.
After all, we are nature too.