Dementia Centre

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.