I was learning about copywriting, or writing marketing copy (which is the same thing), and he said that you shouldn’t start with the title of an article. That always made so much sense to me, I always feel restrained to make my writing fit the title that I have given it, before I even started to write.

Amazing, isn’t it? That something so simple that we were taught as young children in grade school, actually is so wrong. Then I had another thought, I know how many people say that we always learn the wrong things in grade school, when we look at things now as adults. When are children however, the world is so exciting, and if we don’t have the structure to learn, we might learn the wrong lessons!

Especially when we are learning through experience alone, we become biased and think that this has to be the right way, because it’s the only way that we have been exposed to. This has really opened my eyes, and it’s not that I never knew this simple, but tremendously effective lesson before, it’s just something that I continuously have to remind myself.

My grandmother had passed away, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t ask myself “what could I have done differently?“. I am a huge fan of “House, M.D.”, and I think about my grandmother and how she always complained that things hurt, and she had dementia, that presented with hallucinations, I think it was due to years of over medicating. I always knew of her as my grandmother, she took care of us and her family. I never knew of her life before I was born. Until today my grandfather came over and talked to me a bit and spent a little time explaining things to me, about my grandmother and also Sadhguru.

My grandmother worked hard, she was one of the most educated out of her female siblings (the boys were the only one who were encouraged to go to school where they lived), she had a few jobs, and after one set back, where she wasn’t picked for a promotion at work, she quit work and stayed home to raise her kids, despite the employer begging her to come back and work. My grandmother would take 2 buses to work the night shift at a company, along airport road, from where we live thats quite a journey. She left there after two weeks to go and work for Singer, the sewing machine company. The specifics of the events are a bit fuzzy, but my grandmother was a hard worker, more than I ever realized.

When she was going through her illness, I offered to give her help, help get her to talk with other people, maybe learn to read braille (because she had lost her eyesight as well), but the answer was always no. Even when I talked to my relatives, it was always “no, they won’t do that”. I don’t know why, yet I didn’t push anymore. Part of me thinks that I should have pushed harder, there were other ways to live with the debilitating disease that she had, and we can alleviate some of the stress on not only her, but the person who stood by her and didn’t give her up to a nursing home, my grandfather. My mother works at a nursing home, but when I saw the reports that came out during COVID, it’s clear to me that the west treats their elderly like garbage. The only way that someone would have taken care of my grandmother the way that my grandfather, and my aunts and uncles did, would have to be in another country, or go stay at the nursing home that my mother works at.

I don’t know if you guys are just unaware, but nursing homes in Canada, particularly Ontario and Quebec, are largely garbage. There were some info graphics on nursing homes which I had shared when I wrote the article on the care which the nursing homes give our elders here in Canada and the US, so I won’t show redundant, likely outdated information. Things need to change, with everyone.