I've started volunteering at a Dementia centre. It is a group where people with dementia can come and socialise and relax with sufferers similar to them. My job as a volunteer is to sit with the attenders and chat and look through books with them, listen to music from the past, and eat dinner and have lots of tea and biscuits in between. I was slightly nervous at first, but I settled in extremely quickly.
Everyone is very friendly and sociable and it must be good to be in a patient and caring and upbeat environment for them.
All of the attenders are really lovely. They are all of the older generation, some are nearing ninety and I think a few are in their nineties!
I think when you become "the older generation" you tend to lose your identity. You become a "granny" or an "old person" or a "senior citizen" and you overlook them as people. I mean society in general, not you personally. But if you are overlooked when you are older, it makes society that we live in seem quite superficial.
I was going to use the example that : many of these people will have had a first day of school, the first day of their jobs and a last day of working. Cried in bed and had labour contractions, gone dancing, and made sandcastles with their brothers and sisters.
But I thought it was patronising as if they aren't even human anymore!
That wasn't the point I wanted to get across. I just feel that when you age you are still the same as you ever was, they have all been children, young men and women, ladies and gentlemen etc, you just slow down a bit but have so many years and experiences behind you.
It just seems like when you are a person of an older age, that is forgotten...and I think people with dementia are seen like this even more so and you think they are lost within this diagnosis when there is still a person there.
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4 comments:
I absolutely agree with you. I had to take a group of kids to sing at the old people's home at Christmas and it saddened me to see them all bunched together as 'the old folk', wearing Christmas cracker hats and trying to look suitably delighted to see the children - some of them were, of course, but mostly they were just doing what they were told.
I think it's one of the saddest things in our society, the de-individualisation of the elderly. And it's something too that terrifies me for myself.
It's sad that because "they're old" and "vulnerable" and haven't got many years left and can't do much for themselves, they are left out of society a bit, and can't do anything about it.
I haven't been to a nursing home in ages, and I know some must be very nice but I think some aren't so nice at the same time.
There's probably good ones and bad ones. But even the good ones make me sad (though obviously I think it's good that there are places to care for those who can no longer care for themselves). I just can't imagine having to give up my home and all the little bits and pieces of my life to live communally and be forgotten about by the rest of the world.
Yeah, I don't know what satisfaction you would get from life, I just hope I'm too old to care at that point perhaps...
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