When Elders Become Invisible

Thankfully, nothing dramatic has happened to my parents, but lately, I have found myself thinking more about their aging.

It is the ordinary things that have captured my attention. Both walk slower now. Sometimes, I see my Dad shuffle, but he insists I am imagining that.

The stories repeated more often than before.

For most of my life, my parents occupied a permanent place in my imagination. They were simply there—steady, capable, and somehow immune to the passage of time.

Alas, age has a way of gently insisting on reality, and reality is this: My parents are getting older.

I live on a different continent than the people who raised me, and this is not a unique situation.

There is a particular complexity that comes with loving aging parents from thousands of miles away. You learn to pay attention differently. You wonder…

• Hmm, did I hear a slight hesitation in our phone call?

• Did a message go unanswered?

• Was there a change in routine?

• Are they forgetting too frequently?

You find yourself wondering about things that never crossed your mind twenty years ago: Are they safe? Who is helping them? Who can they trust? Are they being taken advantage of?

My siblings and I have had versions of these conversations more frequently in recent years. That is not because we are fearful people, or helicopter children. No, it is because we are realistic people.

The truth is that aging introduces vulnerabilities that many of us are reluctant to discuss: Financial, emotional, social and physical vulnerability.

The parent who once protected you may eventually depend on others for protection. That realization is profoundly unsettling.

On this World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, I find myself thinking about elder abuse differently than I once did.

When most people hear the phrase, they imagine extreme situations: Physical harm, some sort of financial exploitation, or even neglect. All those things matter, but I increasingly believe that abuse often begins much earlier.

It begins with invisibility.

• It begins when elders become disconnected from the relationships, systems, and communities that help protect them.

• When dependence increases but support does not.

• It begins when families become geographically fragmented while care systems remain geographically fixed.

And it raises an uncomfortable question: Are our global systems prepared for the world we have created?

Millions of people now live far from their parents. Migration has created extraordinary opportunities. It has also created new caregiving realities. Children in Atlanta worry about parents in Lagos. Families in London worry about elders in Accra. Professionals in Toronto worry about parents in Nairobi.

The emotional experience is increasingly global. The care infrastructure is not.

Much of our elder care architecture remains reactive. We respond after isolation appears. After exploitation occurs, after cognitive decline progresses, and after crisis emerges.

Something to ponder: what would it look like to build systems designed around prevention rather than response?

This is one of the questions that has increasingly shaped my thinking through the lens of Return Theory.

Now imagine that cultural memory functions as a form of infrastructure, but not as a substitute for healthcare, because relationships, identity, belonging, and continuity help create conditions that support wellbeing long before crisis occurs.

When I think about elder abuse prevention, I increasingly wonder whether the answer begins upstream. Not with investigations or interventions, but with connection.

Connection to family, community, purpose, intergenerational relationships and to identity.

In many ways, the modalities of return can be understood as protective factors:

• Narrative return keeps stories flowing between generations.

• Intergenerational return prevents elders from becoming socially invisible.

• Communal return reinforces networks of care and accountability.

• Spatial return maintains connection to places that hold meaning.

• Ritual return creates predictable moments of gathering and recognition.

None of these eliminate risk. But they may reduce the conditions in which vulnerability flourishes.

The longer I work in health systems, the more convinced I become that prevention often looks less dramatic than intervention. It looks like relationships, trust, belonging and I must stress this – prevention can look like people remaining visible to one another.

This is where the UGWU framework intersects with elder wellbeing.

One of the dragons within the UGWU Leadership framework is the Dragon of Severed Roots.

The Dragon of Severed Roots appears whenever people, communities, or institutions become disconnected from the relationships and wisdom that sustain them. It whispers that older generations no longer matter. That experience is obsolete, and that progress requires forgetting.

The dragon is dangerous because it rarely arrives as hostility. It arrives as indifference, and indifference can be just as destructive.

The UGWU leader chooses a different path. The UGWU leader returns:

• Returns to listening.

• Returns to relationship.

• Returns to memory.

• Returns to the people who helped make their journey possible.

As I think about my own parents, I realize that elder abuse awareness is about PROTECTION, but not simply about protecting older adults.

It is about protecting continuity. Protecting memory. Protecting relationship. Protecting the invisible threads that connect generations, because elders carry something irreplaceable, that is not merely knowledge or experience.

They carry context. Perspective. Memory.

When elders become invisible, communities lose far more than individuals. They lose part of themselves.

Perhaps the question World Elder Abuse Awareness Day asks all of us is not simply: How do we protect elders?

But: How do we build families, communities, and systems in which elders never become invisible in the first place?