Some estimates of those dead in France’s August heat wave have risen to ten thousand. Most of these victims of soaring temperatures were apparently old people who were left to their own devices in coping with the suffocating environment. Living alone turned out to be hazardous this summer.

Having spent a week in Paris earlier this summer, I can easily envisage the setting in which many French elders live. Along narrow streets, in old stone buildings that rise several stories, many without elevators, old people often inhabit small apartments. Often these pensioners stay to themselves and lack close attachments to other people in their building.

On occasion, I have talked with such people and have admired the way they find quiet satisfaction in daily life in a huge bustling city to which they feel attached. But I never envisioned disasters coming from the summer temperatures as happened this month.

William Pfaff, a nationally syndicated columnist, has suggested that dying like this was a good way to go. In his view, being overcome by extreme heat produces a death that is comparatively easy. He ends his op-ed with this affirmation: “I say we should be grateful to pneumonia, broken hips, and heat waves that can take us gracefully to where we all must go.”

What he leaves out of account, however, is that most of the people living in Paris and other cities died alone. They had no family members, friends, or neighbors to comfort them as they departed this life. That seems to me among the least desirable ways to die, isolated and cut off from the consoling touch of fellow human beings.

France’s government officials are clearly feeling pangs of guilt. Behind the careful rhetoric, statements from the president and others suggest a belated realization of failure to accept responsibility for the safety of older citizens and others. Few heads have rolled: the equivalent of their Surgeon General has resigned but no one else thus far.

Why did not French officials learn from what happened in Chicago during the summer of 1995.  There an estimated 739 people, most of them elderly, died in a single week in July. They succumbed to heat that registered 106 degrees the first day and between the 90s and low hundreds on succeeding days. Twenty-three hospitals could not accept new patients; ambulance drivers had to travel for miles to find a hospital to admit their passengers.

Studies of the Chicago experience revealed lessons that were available to authorities in big cities everywhere. Parisian officials could have been prepared for the onslaught had they heeded what was learned in Chicago. A book by Eric Klinenberg, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, in particular could have been of great value to French government figures.

The great French heat wave occurred mainly in August, the worst time it could have happened. This month is the time when a great many city dwellers leave town for their annual summer vacation. They clear out en masse leaving many shops and restaurants closed, and reducing the work force in hospitals and other places where help is usually available.

My instinct has been to praise the French for their culture’s insistence on taking time off. But now I have come to realize the drawbacks of having so many people away at the same time. Having only a skeleton force to help at times of emergency can clearly prove harmful to the population.

In addition to reduced emergency workers, there is also the absence of family members, friends, and neighbors. Tante Suzanne finds herself cut off from nieces and nephews when she may need them most. Basking in the Côte d’Azur may be good for the younger people’s mental health, but how about the needs of family members left back home in the stifling heat?

If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a similar human community to support an older person. I would extend the net wider and add that adults of every age need the resources of other people to sustain them in good physical health and mental condition. No doubt, however, we older people have special needs that come with disability and sometimes flagging spirits.

I see the French debacle as a failure, not only of government, but of the whole community. Yes, the government failed in its responsibilities but too many ordinary people did not respond to the needs of their elders. As family members, neighbors, and citizens at large, ces messieurs (et ces dames) failed to see what they could do to help save those who lived near them.

Segregation of any sort has its price. Segregation by age can sometimes deprive older people of life itself, as the French experience shows. We may sometimes wish to be largely left alone but the time comes when being left alone can prove fatal.

One can hope that nothing like this disaster occurs again.  The French have an opportunity to develop a renewed appreciation of how much we, older and younger, need one another.

Richard Griffin