Mario Fabian 1948 – 2020 🖤
I met Mario about 3 years ago at a nursing home in Miami Beach, a place that I had started visiting with my daughter on a regular basis and where I had the privilege of meeting many amazing people that became our family. Coincidentally Mario’s birthday was on January 27th, the same as my daughter’s Penélope so that itself made him very special to us and one of our favorite ones.
We invited Mario to our home a few times and made special dinners for him, but most of the time we would go to the nursing home to visit him and other “residents” and spent many afternoons talking and laughing in the lobby or playing dominoes in the cafeteria.
But unlike Mario who had no family to look after him and nowhere else to go, there were other residents who were put there by their own relatives like their children and grandchildren and who would only come visit them a few times a year on birthdays and holidays. Me and my little Penélope would bake them cakes, bring them gifts and homemade food that they loved and enjoyed. As many times the food that was served to them was repetitive and inedible.
During these 3 years I’ve learned how the whole health care system worked and how these many times sick, abandoned and helpless people were nothing but pawns to a very lucrative business that was granted by Medicare $3000 per bed every month. In exchange Medicare will keep all of the patient’s social security retirement money and would only give them $100 a month for personal expenses.
Yet, they live in horrible conditions by being forced to sleep in old mattresses that are not more than two inches thick and in shared rooms (sometimes 4 beds per room) with other patients who many times have to wait hours to have their adult diapers changed, making it impossible for the other patients in the room to even be able to breath.
They are rarely allowed to go outside and never taken to a park or for a walk and the way they get treated by the staff is many times cruel and inhumane. But what would hurt me the most is the way they were treated by their own families who would get angry and yell at them simply because they would call them on the phone wanting to talk to them or to ask them when they will come to see them.
So in conclusion.. After having spent their whole lives working, paying taxes and taking care of their children and family they are later left with nothing, abandoned and with no hope of ever making it out of that place alive. It’s not surprising to me that the system would turn its back on it’s own people but what I would never understand is how we can go and abandon and forget about our own parents. And assuming that they were the worst parents in the world, what ever happened to God’s 4th commandment written in the bible that everybody claims to live by? “Honour thy father and thy mother”.
R.I.P. Mario. We shall see each other very soon. You are now one with God and God is love. ❤✨
May 4, 2020, 7:57 PM