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Owing to the country's new Constitution, however, the responsibility of funding public poorhouses passed from church to state. Some states solved the problem simply by boarding their elderly in private homes in order to save the expense of building and maintaining a facility. Tennessee auctioned off its paupers to farmers looking for cheap labor. New Jersey law forbade the emancipation of slaves over the age of 40 for fear the state would have to support them in their declining years.

Caring for old people—which many of Christianity Today's readers are or will soon be doing-will be one of the major challenges to the nation in the next decade. We now live longer, albeit with many diseases and disabilities we never survived to experience before. Babies born in 2000 can now expect to live to the age of 73-23 more years than the 1910 crop of babies.

A 2002 study by the research agency Zogby International measured the differences in expectations between parents 65 and older still living in their homes and their adult children. About half of the children believed their parents would want to live with them as they aged. But two-thirds of the parents did not want to live with their children.

Almost all the children expected to personally care for their parents' daily needs at some point. But how realistic is this? Relatively few adult children, Christian or otherwise, now live near their parents. Also, in most middle-aged marriages, both people work outside the home. Their children may be in daycare or school during the day, but no one is home to look after an aging, infirm parent.

In "The Death of the Hired Man," Robert Frost defines home as "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." But no longer. In fact, if you went there, chances are you'd find nobody home.

Most of my mother's fellow nursing home residents would call themselves Christian, as would a majority of their children. Some local churches hold regular services or Bible studies at Fair Acres. But few churches in this country actually own or operate nursing homes. Those few generally cater to retired clergy, and their cost puts them beyond the reach of many members.

For 91 percent of American retirees, their Social Security check is their major source of income, hardly enough to cover nursing home costs. Indeed, if you're over 75 and live alone, chances are better than 50-50 that you live on less than $10,000 a year. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that 68 percent of all nursing home beds are paid for by Medicaid, with Medicare picking up another 8 percent.

When the Zogby poll asked about the cost of long-term care, only a third of the parents thought they would need their children's financial help. More of the children-44 percent-expected to shoulder some of those expenses.

But another look at the numbers opens a new problem more urgent than who pays the nursing home bill. I was shocked to learn that 46 percent of nursing home residents have no living children, and more than half have no close living relative.

Once a citizen of the nursing home nation, you no longer operate on a money economy. At Fair Acres the rich are those who can get to the dining room under their own steam, use the toilet by themselves, and can still speak and be understood. My mother arrived there with little of that capital.

Nevertheless, her fellow residents envied her wealth of daily family visits. My father never flagged in his faithfulness. During the five years my mother lived at Fair Acres, he missed spending mornings with her only about a dozen times, most during illnesses of his own. I relieved him in the afternoon. My mother's cousin also visited her twice a week, and a busy sister-in-law often came on Thursdays.

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September 2004, Vol. 48, No. 9