It’s five years ago today my father died. A month earlier, he had been discharged from hospital (after much squabbling about wheelchairs and social services) to a nursing home, where he seemed just to lean into a fate sealed three years earlier when he fell and suffered a catastrophic brain injury. My mother died more recently. A tough leaving she had of it too, with a degenerative disease that slowly robbed her of autonomy and dignity.
But I’ve noticed something changing in myself since my parents’ deaths. Over the past eight years I became quite the sharp-elbowed advocate, understanding social care and health interfaces, always up for debating what could and could not be supplied on prescription, schooled in the technicalities of continuing healthcare funding assessments, and ready at the end to discuss with doctors ‘patient’s best interests’ and palliative care. I wrote long and slighly laboured blog posts about the iniquities of the funding system and the impossibility of its reform.
Now, not so much. J’en ai marre de ça, as the French would say. I’ve unsubscribed from newsletters about healthcare funding, about my mother’s condition, about social care. Even as I mourn my mother and remember my father, I don’t want to think about these things any more, except to hope that my death is swifter and easier.
But that’s not really good enough, or shouldn’t be. When people get frustrated with local services or the local education system, they become councillors or school governors, or at least post on Mumsnet. But when we see how the health and social care system fails old people – and to be clear, my parents did pretty well compared to many – we want to brush it all under the carpet, born I guess of the odd sense of shame we have about letting others care for elderly relatives, and an apotropaic worry that talking will bring misfortune on ourselves.
Most people most of the time, they don’t need to think about elderly care, and about the disgraceful way it lets down so many old people, and so many highly-motivated and kind care workers. And those who cannot avoid knowing (most of us at some stage in our lives) keep silent or strive to forget. This needs to change if we are to have sensible discussions about the provision of decent care for older people, about who is responsible, about who pays, and about where the limits lie, when more and more things can be survived but not truly lived through.
Richard Brown 