A FERRIS wheel ride captures my feeling about senior citizens. Rising above a quiet ascent atop the city lights. As the wheel turned higher, the world below became smaller and softer. Streets looked gentler from above. People became tiny moving shadows. And for a brief moment suspended in the air, I understood how life itself moves in circles — slowly lifting us upward before gently bringing us down again.
Growing old in the Philippines feels very much like that for many of our elderly.
There was a time when they stood at the very top of life’s wheel. Strong. Needed. Busy. Fathers carrying entire households on exhausted backs. Mothers stretching one pot of food to feed six mouths. Grandparents sacrificing dreams quietly so younger generations could chase theirs.
Then the wheel turns.
The hands that once bathed children begin trembling while buttoning shirts. The feet that walked miles for work now hesitate at staircases. The voices that once commanded dining tables soften into silence.
And somewhere along the way, many elderly Filipinos begin to feel invisible.
Not because they stopped loving.
But because the world became too fast around them.
There are elderly people in this country left alone in hospital wards after discharge because no family member returns. There are lolos sleeping on monobloc chairs outside convenience stores. There are lolas spending entire afternoons staring through windows waiting for children working abroad to call.
The loneliness of old age is not loud.
It is quiet.
And perhaps that is what makes it painful.
We Filipinos take pride in our close family ties. And truly, many families still care for their elders with remarkable tenderness and sacrifice. But modern life has changed the shape of survival. Smaller homes. Harder economies. Overseas work. Exhaustion. Distance.
Love remains.
But caregiving has become heavier.
That is why Senate Bill 20 filed by Sen. Robinhood “Robin” Padilla — proposing nursing homes for senior citizens in every city and province — deserves serious national conversation. Not as places where families abandon responsibility, but as spaces where dignity, health care, companionship and humane care can still exist for elderly Filipinos who are neglected, homeless, abandoned, or simply without support.
A nursing home should never feel like a waiting room for death.
It should feel like a country remembering the people who built it.
Because old age is not weakness.
It is evidence of survival.
Every wrinkle carries history. Martial law. Floods. Inflation. Hunger. Revolutions. Funeral processions. Sleepless nights. Quiet sacrifices no monument will ever fully honor.
And yet many of our elderly now spend evenings alone with television static and dim electric fans for company.
There is something deeply heartbreaking about that.
A nation reveals its character not by how it treats the successful, but by how gently it treats those who have already given everything they had.
Perhaps someday all of us will ride that same ferris wheel toward its quieter side. The climb slower. The body softer. The world below moving faster than we can follow.
And when our turn comes, I hope the Philippines has become the kind of nation that does not discard its elderly once the ride slows down.
I hope our lolos and lolas are met with warm meals, patient nurses, shaded gardens, safe rooms, familiar songs, soft prayers, and people willing to sit beside them long enough to hear stories they may have already told many times before.
Because if we are fortunate enough to grow old, we will one day become the elderly people we are neglecting today.