"Al tashlichayni b’et ziknah": Cast me not away when I am old.

We recite this mantra in shul. For years, it had only a faint echo of meaning for me. My parents and relatives aging and dying, my own image in the mirror slowly changing – these were natural events, but surely they had nothing to do with getting old.

To whom are we speaking when we ask that we not be forgotten in our old age? For years, I thought it was addressed to God, but now I think it is addressed to the society around us.

To society I will eventually become a “bed.” I’d say over my dead body, but that is where it will lead.

Here is a phrase my children hate: when I was growing up (groan), my two widowed grandmothers lived with us. One was demented by stroke. In addition to her full-time job, my mother looked after her, along with my help as a reluctant teen. The other was not so frail, but still not a well woman. We never thought of doing anything else than having them live with us.

At my recent 50th reunion with Peace Corps pals, we realized that we have arrived at the stage where young women give us seats on buses, no one asks for identification when we get seniors’ passes at the movies, and no one questions our discounts on seniors’ Thursdays at Shoppers.

What care can we, and boomers hot on our heels, expect? Governments have created, or helped to create, a jungle of services for the elderly – most of which are good, none sufficient, and each one living in its own little silo

By 2021, one-quarter of our population will be over the age of 65. Surely the Jewish community’s demographic will not be far behind. While many of us still live independent, healthy lives, older seniors are already feeling the need of more – and better co-ordinated – services than are currently available.

Today, a family who has one or two elders in need of outside support – besides what the family can provide – has to manage a cacophony of agencies. There is no central place where all the various offerings can be co-ordinated. As a result, you get a few hours a day or week of home care from the government, supplemented with what you can afford privately, and the family picks up the rest. Few are able to fund 24-hour care for parents or siblings who need it.

And there will only be more of us who, when they reach the wards of a hospital, become “beds.” Or, even worse, “bed-blockers.”

Government services are not keeping up, or are sporadically administered and poorly co-ordinated. The Jewish community currently tries to provide, but it’s daunting for any agency.

I talked with a community worker about the issue. “What we need,” she told me, “given the unco-ordinated service menu among government and private home-care agencies, is someone to navigate a senior through the forest.” A ship captain for the aged.

In the Globe and Mail on Sept. 16, Andre Picard wrote in support of home care: “Only four per cent of health-care spending goes into home care… If we want to encourage people to live in the community [read not in a hospital bed], we have to build senior-friendly cities with better public transit, affordable housing, grocery stores that deliver… If we don’t provide adequate and affordable home care, a lot of people are going to end up in institutions, at much greater financial and emotional cost.”

Of course, home-based elder care is only one part of the issue. Canada is spending billions on “homeland security” and ISIS. How about just one of those billions being put into a national plan for elder care? How are we – the larger community and the Jewish organized community – allocating resources to provide the same enthusiastic support of our elders?