Senior care job for all

An alert Meals on Wheels driver quite possibly saved the life of an 82-year-old woman last week, while pointing out a growing problem. As our population ages, increasing numbers of elderly people need care, or at least someone to watch out for them.

Last week a new Meals on Wheels driver noticed the meal he had left at the door of a Westwood mobile home on Tuesday was still there when he arrived to deliver Wednesday's meal. He notified the mobile home manager, who called emergency personnel who discovered the woman's husband dead in a chair and the woman frail and nearly incoherent.

The 82-year-old wife was homebound, and depended on her husband for everything. Had the driver decided not to bother or shrugged off the anomaly of a meal left at the door, who knows what might have happened to the wife.

Daily safety checks are part of the purpose of Meals on Wheels, but we doubt that is enough, especially as the Baby Boom generation enters their golden years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2006, the most recent year for which data is available, 6.3 percent of the population in Lorain County is age 75 or older, up from 5.7 percent two years earlier.

Perhaps even more telling is the "old age dependency ratio," a ratio of the population age 65 and older to the population age 18 to 64, multiplied by 100. Included in the census bureau's "burden index" it represents how many senior citizens every 100 non-retirement-age adults support.

In 2004, the old age dependency ratio for Lorain County was 19.8. Two years later that ratio had jumped to 20.4.

Not all of these seniors participate in Meals on Wheels, so it is up to the rest of us to watch out for the well-being of the growing number of senior citizens living near us. They should not have to depend upon the letter carrier or the Meals on Wheels driver to notice something amiss on their once-daily visits to the front door.

In a busy mobile home park like Westwoods, we find it inconceivable no one noticed the noon meal sitting on the front steps in the evening, or even in the morning on the way to work. Any passerby putting forth a little extra effort might have found the woman hours earlier, when she might not have been in such serious condition.

We must all learn to look out for the well-being of the weaker ones in our society. One of these days we will want others to do the same for us.