INSIDE OUR NURSING HOMES: IN A SPECIAL REPORT, RESIDENTS LOCKED AWAY HAVE THEIR VOICES HEARD
THE laugh of it is that despite all this, we can still talk about “older people” as if they are ‘other’. As if they are a type, a species, some of them vulnerable, some of them defiantly not. But all of them old. As if being old is what defines them. You’d swear they were never young.
You’d swear we were never going to be old. You’d swear they were beamed down from space as older people.
They were grouped and commoditised over the past few months. They were all too often portrayed as a problem to be dealt with. Their presence in the homes of their children and grandchildren in Italy led, we were told, to the horrific playing out of Covid there. Indeed, their very oldness was a problem. Italy’s older population, we heard, meant more deaths, worse plague. As if their audacity for living was getting its comeuppance, as if their daring to age so much, and among their families, loved and useful and with agency, was punished.
But then, the rest of the world discovered that warehousing older people together didn’t fool the virus either. It just made it easier to knock them down like dominoes.
But in another way, what has happened in the last two months has been beautiful and revelatory. We are all thinking a lot about the elders, about how the people who should be the heart of our society have too often been banished to the periphery, to darkness at the edge of town.
No one allows a family member to go and live in a care home unless they think it is the best option for them. And those who work in care homes do amazing work to give a home to people who are, initially at least, strangers to them. But equally, what good is an extended life if we do not do our best to imbue it with meaning and purpose? People have different needs and abilities for sure, but what good is a life if you are not, when appropriate, treated like an individual, and allowed to make choices — choices about what you do each day and when you do it, and what you eat and who you hang around with?
We have realised more than ever in recent weeks that we revere our elders, that they are at the centre of our lives. And not just as the childminders who hold it all together for some families. We revere their strength and wisdom and experience and fearlessness and the unflappable sense of humour that you get when you don’t give as much of a damn anymore.
And tomorrow we can go to the garden centre, and a farmers’ market, and meet three other people in a neutral space. But the question people keep asking is, ‘When can we hug our granny?’
Which is shorthand for, when can we see them, check in with them, bask in them, moan to them about our problems in a way we can’t to anyone else.
And most of all, with those hugs we will tell them that we may not have realised how much we love them and need them, and that they are at the centre of our world, not warehoused on the edge of it, waiting to die.