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In my travels to nursing homes I have come to know many memorable people, perhaps none more so than Sean Hanrahan, a poor Irish kid from Southie in Boston.

When I met him, he was shortly to become one of the few humans alive to have had the personal enjoyment of the last two Red Sox baseball championships--1918 and 2004.

On my way to his room at rural Meldon Meadows, the nurse pulled me aside and warned me he was cranky, unfriendly, and in a world of pain. A fit ninety-six, he fell off a ladder while hanging a picture and broke his leg. At that age, a fracture is usually a one-way ticket to institutional confinement. But Sean was determined to get home.

Born in Boston, 1908, he wasn't at the 1918 World Series clincher. He was poor, plus there were only 36,000 seats. "I didn't even hear it on the radio. There was no radio. I heard the newsboys down the street hawking the late-edition extra."

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My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare is a meditation on the intersection of my professional life as a psychologist in nursing homes and my own caregiving to my frail, elderly parents. I work both sides of the street with the personal meeting the professional, the health-care provider as health-care consumer.

In my book, I also move from the anecdotal to the general, and consider these questions.

• - Do our elderly need to be insitutionalized in places that look and feel like junior hospitals-hospital-lite?
• - Why does the government spend $70,000 to keep a patient in a nursing home while declining to spend only $30,000 for an often more appropriate, more home-like assisted living center?

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In 1651, during a brutal civil war and just after Parliament cut off the head of King Charles I, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes called life, "solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Life expectancy was 40.

Fast forward three and a half centuries, and thanks to medical science, life expectancy is 80. Life is longer. Yet is it any less nasty and brutish?

My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures in Old Age and the World of Eldercare  considers that question, and wonders whether the dinner-party host who declined to put cut flowers in water was right when he said, "It only prolongs their agony."

Are the institutions in which we place the frail, elderly anything more than water for cut flowers-only prolonging the agony.

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Ira Rosofsky is our guest blogger during the week of March 16th. If you have any questions for Ira Rosofsky, add a comment to any of his posts.

Here is more information about Nasty, Brutish, and Long:

A coming of old-age story.

In nursing homes across the country, members of the Greatest Generation are living out their last days. No matter how exciting or mundane their lives, they're now occupying a hospital-style room-a public space where you can't lock your door and strangers come and go. Life is a succession of pokes and prods, medications, TV, bingo, and, possibly, talking to Ira Rosofsky.