In these dreams of ourselves a little further into the future, we are fine. We are still ourselves. But our thoughts on death are truncated and atrophied. We stop at simple and fantastic scenarios: dying quietly while we sleep, accessing voluntary euthanasia, living the last few years together with a group of friends in a kind of commune where we share the costs of caregivers. Some of us dream of overcoming old age completely through cryogenics or charging our brains into the cloud. Thus, when we think of older people, and especially elderly care residents, or older people with dementia or other physical or cognitive weaknesses, they belong to a separate group, a group we believe we never belong to.
To have a macro view, it is also not surprising that these casual language dismissals of older people and their value to our society are especially acute in a country like Australia: a nation that hosts the world’s oldest continuous culture that it dates back tens of thousands of years. , but whose dominant culture suffers from great historical amnesia and a reluctance to take into account the histories, legacies, and lives of First Nations peoples. White Australia, with its relentless insistence on youth and the ahistorical claim that we are ‘young and free’, has little cultural leeway for the contributions of older people.
We are not designing a care system for the elderly in which we are willing to introduce ourselves, because we do not recognize that we will never end up there.
Sarah Holland-Batt, author of The Jaguar
Our cultural denial of death also confirms many of our failures in caring for the elderly: the absence of public pressure for change, industrial-scale political apathy, and relatively silent media coverage of caring for the elderly. great. Until recently, none of the major parties had seen the attention of the elderly as a “vote winner” – something that changed markedly in the recent federal election, where Labor made it a centerpiece of their campaign. – and journalists and commentators often say that caring for the elderly “is not a sexy subject”.
Widespread apathy about caring for the elderly has undoubtedly allowed neglect to thrive. But it often also means that we do not apply enough imagination and ambition to the problem of care reform for the elderly. There are revolutionary overseas examples of senior care facilities placed with college students or daycares, which allow residents to stay connected with their communities. These changes radically alter what it means to go to care for the elderly, but we do not demand them in Australia. We are not designing a care system for the elderly in which we are willing to introduce ourselves, because we do not recognize that we will never end up there.
But after seeing my father in his 20-year career with Parkinson’s, dementia, and care for the elderly, I came up with my own thesis. Not only do we have a duty to look at and contemplate aging, caring for the elderly, and death, but there is power in that gaze, and in fact it is not more through that gaze that we can live fully, aware of all the weight and meaning of life and its inevitable end.
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When you see someone you love decline over time, it can seem like an ordeal. Observe the changes and mourn them. When my father declined, I noticed the loss of his brilliance, his sense of humor, his intellect, the shared jokes, and the references we made. I saw how his interest in his dazzling and diverse hobbies — classical music, playing with cars, programming computers, playing the piano, the harmonica, reading — went out of reach.
I cried when he found himself confined to a wheelchair, then when his voice weakened, when it was hard for him to eat. Sometimes I would sit with him and realize I was hallucinating a reality I don’t share. Initially, I was bothered by my role as a witness to these indignities. It felt like a burden to have to watch these things happen over time.
But as the years went by, seeing how my father got into old age and dementia changed me. I came to understand that while living in the past, mourning a person who had not been there for a long time, my father was still living in the present, before me, still capable of joy and sorrow, anguish and calm.
Over time, my father gave me the gift of a great perspective that might have taken me a lifetime to achieve: the understanding that if aging and death happened to him, this would happen to everyone and it would happen to me. to me. . The week it took my father to die in the hospital, I felt this even more acutely: his death was his last lesson.
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In the small room at the Costa Daurada hospital where my father died, I found that my mind oscillated between focusing on the immediate world: the simulated orange bushes full of ladybugs in the outside courtyard. my father’s room, the sounds of children playing cricket in the oval next to the hospital, and the big border, the end of the body, the end of the mind, that my father faced. Psychologists call this ontological confrontation: the acute and immediate awareness of our mortality, the sting of our fantasies, and denial. The clearest and most revealing understanding I came to in those days was that death is not an extraordinary event, but an absolutely ordinary one, present everywhere, a force that no human denial can stop.
While our psyche is prepared to reject information that threatens us and reminds us of our own mortality, there is power in trying, even if it is uncomfortable: the power to help shape what kind of old age we will have. , the power to remodel our old ones. care system and how we care for our elders, and to help change how our collective culture will see us when we grow up.
This is a condensed version of Sarah Holland-Batt’s Curiosity Lecture at the 2022 Sydney Writers Festival, “Our Denial of Aging”.
Sarah Holland-Batt is the author of The Jaguar (UQP) now out.
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