An amazing retirement home utopia from my mother

July 30, 2023. I had tried to sleep on my half-centimeter thick yoga mat in Borsum. However, in the middle of the night, I switched to Lauri's bed due to the pain all over my body, as she was at a techno party.

After that night, during breakfast with Mom, I felt stiff as a board. When I told my mom that I no longer had a table and chair, she simply couldn't believe it. She thought I had gone crazy. But once I listed all the benefits, her skepticism subsided, and she accepted my decision. She also told me about an exciting project she was participating in, where she could win three thousand euros. It was about collecting ideas for the future of caregiving. How should caregiving look in the future?

Fascinated, she told me about her utopia: involving nursing home residents in daily tasks, whether it's unloading the dishwasher, watering plants, or making coffee, to keep them fit and relieve the caregivers. Taking them on trips into nature, introducing healthy vegetarian or vegan diets, and letting the residents vote on the next breakfast, instead of offering white bread with jam for the past twenty years. Reducing food waste. Using alternative products to avoid more waste. Creating more competition between caregivers on different floors to reward the most diligent ones with higher bonuses. Also, saving energy by not unnecessarily turning up the heating, for example.

Mom's enthusiasm was contagious. I felt that my stories from my life had inspired her. I was very pleased with her ambition to implement in caregiving what I wished for the whole society.

"Mom, if you implement this, the elderly won't need caregiving anymore," I joked.

At noon, we visited Masha and Tobi in Hildesheim, where Masha had made a homemade, vegan blueberry cake. When Lauri heard about it, she came to join us on her motorcycle without hesitation.

Masha and Tobi had been rarely in Borsum lately because of Julien. When he drank too much alcohol, he became violent. They noticed a bruise on Mom's upper arm and set a condition that they would only accept Julien if he sought professional help and got his alcohol problem under control. But Mom defended him vehemently. He was only like that when he was drinking with his friends, who were a bad influence on him.

After the cake, we played mini-golf. But Tobi had to leave us after two courses, as he wanted to visit his sister Sandy in the hospital. Sandy, whose heart had failed due to too much potassium in her blood, was fortunately doing better. During treatment, her trachea was injured, leading to pneumonia, so she had to stay in the hospital. We continued to play mini-golf without Tobi.