Cohousing-L Mailing List: Terminal Condition - Designing for our final days

[Thomas Lofft (tlofft]

I commend this article to every community's consideration.
 
http://www.residentialarchitect.com/architects/terminal-condition_o.aspx?dfpzone=home&utm_source=newsletter&utm_content=jump&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=RABU_040214&day=2014-04-02
In the U.S., more than 10,000 people turn 65 every day, and the senior citizen 
population, now over 40 million, will more than double in the next four 
decades. Life expectancy also continues to increase in the U.S., as it has each 
decade for the last century. These two trends have all sorts of 
implications—economic, social, political, and urban.
 
One thing remains unchanged, however—the cultural anathema of death. Even 40 
years after psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s groundbreaking book On Death 
and Dying, we still struggle with the inevitability of our own mortality, or a 
loved-one’s death, when all medical solutions have been exhausted. Design, 
however, can be useful in this difficult period of both certainty and 
uncertainty about the end.
 
Tom Lofft
Liberty Village, MD