Money can buy anything these days. It can even buy a visitor for your mother in a nursing home. Yep, the aged-care consultants, agents and brokers will not only find you an aged-care place but they will also organise on-going visits to your family member or friend - for a fee! One wonders how it has come this.

On the other hand, we are all very mobile and very busy in this modern world and, if one lives far way, it is certainly hard to provide the important back-up support for a person in residential care. This columnist would be the first to agree that any support (even paid) is probably better than none. Nevertheless, we have come a long way since the days when the last years, months, weeks of life were generally spent in the family home.

In today’s world, ageing, dying and death are largely excluded from mainstream life as very old and dying people are usually segregated in hospitals and nursing homes. And the sad reality is that, in spite of the communal setting, it can be awfully lonely in those ensuite motel-like aged-care rooms. Social interactions are minimal and participating in the life of the home difficult – even for the most resourceful older person.

The common experience of 'social death', or the end of any significant social existence, is not often recognised – and barely at all by our aged-care planners and health bureaucrats. It occurs, when we cease to be an active agent in other people’s lives, even though our actual biological death has not yet occurred. American psycho-geriatrician Robert Butler summed it up perfectly in his book Why Survive? – probably the most widely read expose of ageism in modern times. 'At best', he writes, 'the living old are treated as if they are half dead.'

It is hard for any of us to really identify with those at the end of life as it is a journey that we have not yet undertaken. How to imagine one’s own active, young or middle-aged body becoming tired, clumsy and stiff with arthritis? How to understand the ways in which one's memory might become clouded and confused? But perhaps we could try a little harder.

Is it possible to value and respect the end-of-life experience? Here’s my wish list:

1. Bring ageing, dying and death out from under the carpet into mainstream life. Acknowledge and accept the loss of vigour and the various infirmities associated with ageing as part of our human experience - not as a misfortune to be denied.
2. Refuse to accept the current negative attitude, promulgated by some politicians and economists, that there is a looming crisis of bothersome old people draining all the community resources. This leads to a pervasive, ageist dehumanizing ‘them and us’ attitude.
3. Discourage the propensity of media outlets to portray old age as either a negative, decaying experience or as something that, with will power, we can perhaps avoid by showing pictures of older people skydiving, abseiling or engaging in extreme activities. This has elements of a freak show.
4. Encourage community responsibility for the care of people at the end of life. Do not leave this important task to the vagaries of market forces. Nor is caring for frail older people simply a responsibility to be shouldered by individuals and families without the backing of well-considered and supportive aged-care policies and practices.
5. Use the principles above to develop an aged-care system which properly supports and protects vulnerable older people and assists families to care for their loved ones in a way that gives dignity to us all.

I’d love to know your wish list.