Because it is almost always true, on its face — a facility with a nurse and a flat floor and an emergency cord is, in the narrow sense, safer than an old house with a creaking stair.

But safer asks only one question, the question of the body, and treats it as the only question, and a person is not only a body.

Enid would have been safer in that facility and she would also have been finished, because you cannot separate a person from the fifty years of her life soaked into the walls of a house and call the separation care just because the new place has grab bars.

The things that made Enid’s life worth living — Albert’s chair, Albert’s kitchen, the pear tree, the neighbors, the biscuit recipe passed hand to hand, the whole accumulated meaning of a place a family had been built in — none of those come standard in a room that is safer. We have gotten very good, as a culture, at keeping old bodies safe and very bad at asking whether the safe body still contains a life the person would recognize as theirs.