Looking Old Age in the Eye

What does elder care look like?

my grandpa and my daughter reading together

Today I want to share a piece with you that coincided perfectly with my read of Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. In it, Courtney Martin writes about caring for her father, who suffers from dementia. She points out that in our modern world, no one wants to look death in the eye, and therefore not only might we neglect our elderly relatives and neighbors, we don’t even have any idea what elderly life is like from media. Caring for a parent with dementia, while something that many Americans have to do, is not something that most of us have ever seen even a depiction of.

Courtney writes, “Case in point: when you read the word tantrum, my guess is you immediately have a vivid picture of a kid losing their shit in a grocery store aisle, right? What about when you read the word sundowning? For some of you, that might conjure up a vivid picture of something you’ve weathered or hear stories from a friend about, but can you name a movie, book, or other touchstone of our culture that depicts it? Me neither.”

I, for one, had no idea what sundowning was, and I was enlightened by reading about it here. While I personally have not had experience with dementia in my family, I am very familiar with children caring for their aging parents, since my parents do so for my grandfather. Since I live close by, I have a better idea than most my age about that kind of care work. It, like so many other good things, is both a blessing and a burden. It is mostly invisible work, and yet it is no less important because of that. The relationships that my grandpa has been able to have with my children because of his living with my parents a mere half-hour away are so precious to me. They have gotten to know each other and have gotten acquainted or reacquainted with the quirks of young age and old age. My girls run in to say hello to him whenever we arrive, and they run in to give him hugs goodbye on our way out. They have learned to speak up so he can hear them and to watch what they leave on the floor so that it won’t be in the way of walking. And they love to look at family pictures with him in his room, or read a book with him, or even just come in and chat.

All of this is possible because of the care work of my parents, and by not turning a blind eye towards the fuller, braver story of the last years of life. We could use more depictions of it in our culture. I think my recent read of Mrs. Palfrey At The Claremont does some of that, albeit not with dementia care. There aren’t many stories of old men and women in the last days of their life, but these are stories worth telling as well. “These—the drives, the pain, the pearl—are what I want to see more vividly and frequently depicted as part of our public imagination. We need that accompaniment, that preparation, that catharsis — not just my family, but all the families, all the little girls handing their grandfathers mints and all the grown sons singing in the dark of the car. We need our beginnings reflected, sure, but also our long, drawn out ends. That would be the fuller, braver story for all of us.”

Read the whole article here:

The fuller, braver story