How we treat the elderly makes you think, doesn’t it?

There was a banking advertisement many years ago that ended off with the line: “Makes you think, doesn’t it?”

I can’t even recall the name of the institution, but it was the question that stuck, because it’s sticky and it can be added as an afterthought to so many experiences that we often write off as irrelevant or, not our rodeo, and we do it way too often.

Sometimes it’s a lesson, other times a call to action, literally or via metaphor.

Former judge loses everything

I recently visited a home set up for social grant recipients on the South Coast, a place where seniors are forgotten, the closet that kids put mama and papa in while they get on with their lives.

It was heartbreaking.

One of the inmates – because they are prisoners – was a former high court judge. When I met him he was sitting on his bed staring at the ceiling.

An hour later, he was staring at his phone as if he was expecting a message that never came, because 60 minutes after that, he was still doing the same thing.

Staring, hoping and in his eyes it was easy to read the absolute pain that he was going through, and the Groundhog Day-like disappointment he experiences every day – because, according to the matron in charge, this is what he does every day.

He waits. And he mourns.

Who would have ever thought that a high court judge would end up depending on less than R3 000 in South African social security agency grants every month, that his home would be a single bed in a halfway house for people like him.

That the clothes on his back would be from donations and the meals he eats a far cry from the life that he knew, once.

The judge’s back story reads like a horror film, because that is what it is. He had a stroke and while he can communicate fine and get around, albeit with a little aid, there’s nothing wrong with the man.

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Children take advantage of their father’s condition

The faulty part comes in the way his own children swindled his retirement nest egg out of his hands, and then dumped the poor soul in a home to fend for himself.

He’s been a drifter, from one home to another, and hope for a sunny retirement has become stressing about where his next meal will come from.

When he had the stroke, his well-heeled Johannesburg northern suburbs offspring had him sign over power of attorney to his finances, sign over his large home in a leafy Joburg suburb and every other possession in his name.

This was ostensibly to take care of him, but with a backhand of turpitude. It wasn’t long before greed must have got the better of his kids.

They colonised his home with their families, they drive his luxury German car and draw on the nest egg that he had saved throughout his career.

The ink was not dry on the legalese when his own flesh and blood booted him out.

Unlike many grandparents who have framed pictures of family and grandkids on bedside tables, the judge doesn’t, partly because there is no bedside table.

It’s an image, a moment in time that has stayed with me for weeks now. A once powerful man waiting to hear from his family, like Waiting for Godot. It’s just never comes his way.

Everything we take for granted, everything he once had, gone in an instant. It’s a story of a person whose career revolved around justice but he spends his sunset years in the dusk of injustice.

It makes you think, doesn’t it?

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