Over the past few
years I’ve come to view the stairs in my house as a problem.
Growing up in North
Queensland, stairs are a fact of life.
Except for a couple of years when I lived in a ground-floor unit, I’ve
lived in high-set homes all my life.
In the last few years,
however, I’ve been seriously questioning the logic of any house design that
renders the living areas accessible only by stairs.
It’s all well and good
if you are young and fit and mobile and can bound up those stairs with vim and
vigour… but the older you get, the more potential those stairs have to make getting
in and out of your own home a problem.
My grandmother spent
the last few years of her life virtually house-bound because the stairs became
more and more of an obstacle for her. By
the time it got to the stage that we had to install a chair lift to get her up
and down the stairs, getting out of her own house had become an event in
itself.
Not only did she only
leave the house when the occasion was worth the exertion – she almost never
spent time in her own gardens because the effort it took to get to the lift
(which was installed at the front of her house) and get around to the back yard
was simply too much for her.
Without those stairs,
she could have just walked out her back door and spent time surrounded by trees
and things. Or, if she wanted to go out,
she could have just walked out the front door and saved her energy for getting
in and out of the car.
I honestly believe she
would have had a better life if she had moved to a low-set house (with few or
no stairs) in her sixties.
In her sixties, she was
still young and spritely enough that a move would have been something she could
tackle with energy and enthusiasm. In
her late 70s, she was stubborn and grumpy and her health was shattered from
50-odd years of heavy smoking. She was
entrenched and determined to die in her own home (which didn’t happen) and
resistant to any suggestion of moving – even though, in hindsight, that house
was seriously bad for her quality of life.
For the past year or
so, we’ve been watching my old dog struggle with the stairs in this house. She slept downstairs and spent most of the
day there, but when we were home she loved nothing better than to come up
stairs and be near us – in the living space where we spent most of our time.
We’d been wondering
what we would do when she could no longer make it up and down the stairs. After all, you can’t install a chair lift for
a dog – but being left downstairs would have made her miserable. Additionally, she’d been very unstable on her
feet, coming up and down the stairs. Yet
we had to make her go downstairs on a regular basis to pee, or go out for a
walk, or go to bed... We were honestly wondering
if she would fall down the stairs and break her neck before she got to the
point where she couldn’t make it up or down the stairs at all.
Well, a couple of
weeks ago she tumbled down the stairs and did herself some serious harm. So serious, we had to put her down.
I know – deep in my
soul, I know – that her quality of life and her length of life would have been
vastly improved if we didn’t live in a house where the living areas were only
accessible by stairs. And I’m at the
point where I know (deep in my soul, I know) that I could say the same for my
grandmother.
It really brought home
to me the fact that smart people don’t grow old (and don’t let their loved ones
grow old) with what amounts to a feature of an obstacle course built into their
own home.
When you are young
enough to climb stairs or walk up hills without a problem, you don’t care about
this sort of thing. Heck, you could
enter via rope ladder and exit via fireman’s pole, if that’s what you wanted to
do. But the minute you find yourself
regularly getting to the top of your stairs (or steep driveway) and feeling a
bit worn out by the experience, it’s time to move on.
My mother is in her
sixties. She’s still young enough and
spritely enough to tackle a move with energy and enthusiasm – and she has
arthritis in her hips and knees and regularly notices the effort it takes to
get up and down the stairs. Because I
love her, I’m going to keep pestering her until she sells up and moves to a
more practical house.
This house has been in
the family for almost 50 years and I love it, but I’m not going to let it
swallow up the lives of anyone else I love.
It’s time to go.
If someone you love is
living in a house with stairs (or any other obstacles), do what you can to push
them out before they get stuck there.
They’ll never notice how much better they have it, but you will be
giving them better quality of life in their later years.
