By Janice Turner (THE TIMES, 01/04/06):
VISITING AN OLD people’s home is a horrible experience. Even a well-run, expensive one, where corridors only smell faintly of wee, the attendants are solicitous and residents are encouraged to finish dinner before it’s swept into the bin. Even the homes where the elderly are not rough-housed, drugged into docility or just left to stare at the telly ten hours a day are scary and depressing. Even the fancy ones seem to stick the frail 90-year-old Times-crossword solver among the gurgling, rocking dementia patients. Because they’re all the same, old people. They’re all, well . . . they’re just old. What more is there to say?
I know one thing about my old age: I don’t want to end up in one of those joints. Do you? No? Well, what are we going to do about it?
Some say you can judge a society by how it treats its children. But everyone loves a kiddy. Children are our future, our human potential, our workforce in waiting. You can watch the little cuties progress day by day. What’s not to like about children?.
The very old are our past, have limited potential, aren’t worth courting politically, being frozen in 50-year-old voting patterns. They aren’t “sexy” in any sense of that overused word (so keep ’em in mixed-sex wards, they don’t have sex, they won’t care). They are crap consumers, in an age when, increasingly, to participate in society means to consume. Moreover, the elderly don’t get better. They go on getting slightly worse, every single year. And then they die.
No, it is how we treat the old that is the measure of our humanity. And largely we fail because we regard them as a homogenous grey mass. We rarely look into an old woman’s eyes and see the girl, lover, mother, colleague; someone with a history and personality. We are indignant when the elderly have minds of their own, as when some remaining Great War veterans, perhaps not seeing themselves as mere historical mascots, this week declined the offer of a state funeral.
We fail because there is some chip in the human brain that refuses to see the old as our future selves. But now, as the costs are being calculated for the baby-boom generation’s long, slow decline, this denial must end. Sir Derek Wanless’s report this week, which suggests the old receive a basic level of free care regardless of income, is a welcome advance. But the old should be given that sum of money and allowed to spend it on their lifestyle of choice.
As a self-centred, individualistic baby-boomer I may trust the State to wipe my bum in old age, but I don’t trust it to choose nice curtains. It may be economic to corral oldsters into institutions where they can be cared for en masse: I’m sure Romanian orphanages are very efficient too. But maybe I won’t just want to keep possession of my home (as Sir Derek proposes) but to live in it too — aided by comely young helpers — since old folk who remain at home are (what a surprise!) happier, healthier and survive longer.
Or at least I’d rather live in an institution that won’t freak out my grandkids. In France nursing homes and nurseries are often in the same building. The elderly feel useful and wanted as they teach and comfort the young: children get a more patient playmate than a busy parent. One of my husband’s relatives relieved the sadness of widowhood by, aged 80, running a playgroup. Meanwhile, in Finland, a new project encourages old folk to use traditional children’s play equipment. Swinging and climbing not only improves their balance and physical strength but at the playgrounds they also get to see children. The old and very young were meant for each other: it is what evolution intended.
While, mostly, I am not the biggest proponent of an unfettered free market, in America — where everyone expects to provide for his own dotage — at least you can live your final years as you darn well like. Driving through Arizona last year, we passed many signs outside shops or diners saying “Welcome Snowbirds” the name given to elderly nomads in motorhomes who flock to the desert during winter. I watched them pump iron in a gym, enjoy the seniors’ lunch specials or barbecue outside their RVs. There looked plenty worse ways to end your days.
America is also full of “retirement communities” with golf courses, health spas and a frantic social scene, where the elderly are encouraged to be independent but can rely upon greater assistance as their health declines. In mere middle age, the notion of living among only creaking bones and failing minds seems creepy. But if your children never call, the Government has written you off and the working world treats you with patronising disdain, why not leave it all behind and burn your kids’ inheritance on Mai Tais and bridge?
So how do you want to live when you’re old? It’s time to think now before you’re too weak and marginalised to change things. And to save for it too, because the £30 billion that Sir Derek Wanless estimates it will cost to care for geriatric baby-boomers only covers the bum-wiping basics. And don’t you want the boutique hotel care plan, not the Butlins?.