THE OLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

Senior citizen: The old and the beautiful

InpaperMagzine
November 21, 2010

By Rabia Ahmed

To care for a helpless person is a full time job, even if one is able to employ paid help. After all, a maid also needs constant supervision and time off, so every so often, one has to step in and do everything such as wash, clean, feed, lift, turn, support, medicate and reassure the patient along with managing all the other responsibilities of life.

It is important, therefore, that the primary care giver take as good care of himself/herself as of the patient. If the primary care giver falls ill as a result of her duties, what is to become of both the carer and the patient?

Our society has many admirable qualities, but pragmatism is not one of them. I remarked to a friend, a lovely person, looking after a parent, that I wished we in Pakistan had a system of ‘Respite Care’. I explained that this is an arrangement whereby a carer who has no one else to share her responsibilities, such as another sibling at hand, could take a much needed rest by placing the patient in trained care for a short while. This may be for just a day, a weekend, or even a week or two. Arrangements such as these are an integral part of healthcare in societies that care.

Predictably, the reaction from my friend was a horrified ‘You’re saying that I should place my mother in a Home?’

Well yes, I was. When needed.

Why does the concept of a ‘Home’ scare us so much? It is because we have heard too many stories of the selfishness of children in western societies, who, we believe, place their parents in Homes and forget about them, leaving the hapless parents to dwindle and die of neglect and depression.

So let us look at the issue here, if possible without an emotional blurring of facts. To start with, let me say that I believe that people are best cared for by those they love and who love and care for them in return. Yet, for many reasons, there are exceptions, temporary or permanent.

Yes there are many cases of neglect in the West. However, the majority of children there are just as caring as the best of us here. The parents of both are looked after with love, and every concern for their comfort and happiness.

Having a parent live with us does not automatically mean that the parent is loved and cared for. Let us recollect the innumerable instances to the contrary, within our own circle, of children who are careless and thoughtless of their parents’ comfort.

And what of those people who have no children, in fact or in effect? For every group of our acquaintance there will be some who never married, three or four couples with no children, several with just one child on whom the entire burden of care devolves, and several more with all their children living in other countries, making them, for the purposes of this discussion, no different from couples without any children.

What of these people? Where do they live when they are old if no care is provided? Those of us granted a longer life reach old age, with its attendant problems. We may be blessed and have our children around us.

If we are further blessed, our children will not only love and care for us, but will be able to afford to do so. To relegate the fate of a large section of society to all these ‘maybes’ is a huge gamble.

Aged care by no means takes away the responsibility children bear for their parents, if children there are.
It exists as an aid both for the carers, and those cared for. Aged care also should not mean a depressing institutional life. If well organised, old age can be a beautiful time, in its own way, and organised care can remove the guilt from both the parents’ and the child’s mind, and make old age enjoyable and restful.

There are several levels to aged care. There are retirement communities which are a group of residential units just like the homes you and I live in, where people may live when they reach retirement age. At this stage people are still independent, but find it harder than they once did to handle things such as paying bills, arranging for home help, driving and so on. In such places, these things are taken care of by employees at a central office. People who live here lead a normal life with less stress.

A higher level of care can be incorporated when needed, with the provision of trained carers, as well as facilities such as cooked food, ramps, rails, alarms… and Respite Care.

Every human being is entitled to a dignified old age, where he or she is taken care of in a cheerful, caring environment, at home, or elsewhere. Sadly, in Pakistan the huge gulf between the rich and the poor is so much part of our background that we do not bat an eyelid at the appalling living conditions of an impoverished elderly person, yet the label ‘old people’s home’ for ourselves makes members of our socio-economic ‘class’ blanche and shudder, and immediately point fingers at the West, something we are very good at doing.

A huge section of our society is likely to be left without support in the near future, not just as a result of normal circumstances but because we of this generation of older adults that have taken such pains to send our children away from us. Aged care is not the product of a selfish society. On the contrary, it is a sign of a society that cares enough for its members to leave less to chance and fate.