28.8.24
Walking into mum’s Aged Care facility makes me sad.
All around me old people are languishing. I reach the main common area where blank faces throw a ballon to each other and a nearby screen pipes out karaoke tunes for the thousandth time.
There is little warmth or personal connection.
These are the ‘use-by-date’ people, abandoned ships in the night. Some are crying, others try to escape home. Most are numb, emotionless, awake but asleep, their drawn faces gazing into nothingness.
It never ceases to amaze me that family members seldom visit and some residents don’t have visitors at all. One lady boasts she has many children, ten I think, but in the entire 2 years I’ve been visiting mum, I have never caught a glimpse of a family member. Another poor lady loads her walker with a pile of clothes. She tells me she’s ‘going home, and hopefully remembers the way’. She has waited for her son to visit since I first met her. Once she gave me her son’s number and begged me to call him. I tried, but no-one answered. Recently I was surprised to see her sitting with a younger man. Maybe he was her son, and he hadn’t forgotten her after all.
Another time a daughter was visiting her father, but I overheard her say that it was so depressing being here that she might not come back. I did see her visit again.
Tom Jones’s 'Delilah' is now blaring from the TV screen. It wakes me up, if no-one else, and I start to dance. I move towards one poor soul contorted in her wheel chair, my silly dancing makes her giggle.
I think the carers sense that they could enhance an oldie’s life by spending 5 minutes having a friendly chat with them. But they are overworked, stressed and don't have time to ask a resident about their life, what they loved, what they remember... These poor ones are hungry for human contact, like babies in an orphanage in Romania.
But there is a head nurse that knows the magic trick, and often invites an agitated resident or two into the staff room. She gives them her attention, chats with them and calms them down. This scene is a delight to witness.
How are our dear parents — so old and vulnerable— blotted out so easily? I’m not religious but that verse in the Bible "“Do not cast me off in my old age;" rings true for me.
Our world has become so clever with all its advancements, and yet, along the way we’ve lost something precious: how to love and care for those, our closest, who once so tenderly loved and cared for us.
This topic takes me back to when I was a young girl and Mum often dragged me along to visit her elderly friends. Her devotion puzzled me. When I asked her why she bothers, she explained: “It is important for me to visit these old ones because I always secretly hoped that my own ‘Mummy’* is still alive somewhere in the world and that some kind person is caring for her in the same way I am caring for others.”
*Mum's 'Mummy' Cecila perished in the gas chambers of Auschwitz in 1944. Mum still wears the ring that her mother pulled off her finger and thrust in her hand before Mengele sent her mother to the left, to her death, and mum to the right.
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