U.K.: Old Age Isn't for Sissies, Comments Times Columnist

LONDON (The Sunday Times), August 19, 2007:

Old age isn’t for sissies
By Rachel Johnson

I’ve always adored Dawn French – and her announcement that next month she is moving to Cornwall, where she spent her childhood, to die, is impressive in lots of ways.

I like the blissful image it evokes of the majestic Dawn as a super-sized salmon, battling upriver against waterfalls and strong currents to reach the sacred spot where she herself was spawned. Dawn French
But I also admire the courage and foresight that Mrs Lenny Henry is showing both to plan ahead and to confront mortality at a time when
1) Most of us seem to believe that old age is never going to happen to us,
2) Our society worships youth and cherishes its young but blanks out age and the old, and
3) This is a horrible country to die in.

My grandmother moved from her flat in Oxford to a private care home in Vicarage Gate in Kensington after my grandfather died, to be nearer to some of her five children. There were written assurances provided that the home – run by the charity that used to be the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Association – would not close, and the place would provide my grandmother with a home for the rest of her days.

Sure enough, a mere three years later the site was flogged off, as sure as night follows day, for private development. The residents were offered a move to another home, miles across town in Elephant and Castle. She was told that all the staff who had looked after her, and to whom she had become close, would accompany them. On that basis, my grandmother moved south of the river.

When she got to the new place, she saw none of the same faces, and lived in a small bedroom with a little window too high for her to look out of. Like many other residents who suffered the trauma of the move, she succumbed to what geriatric professionals called “accelerated death syndrome” and died a year later.

So I didn’t need the 100-page report issued last week by the Joint Committee on Human Rights on older people in healthcare to know that in too many cases the elderly don’t have any human rights. But when I did read it – and the report should be required reading to everyone stuck in middle youth who goes around saying things like 60 is the new 40 and clings desperately to the delusion that old age is a sad and unattractive thing that happens to other people – it made me both very ashamed and also rather relieved. My grandmother was one of the lucky ones.

Although my grandmother was ultimately betrayed by the people she depended on, she was not evicted for complaining, bullied, drugged into quietude, left in her own faeces or urine for hours, sexually abused, neglected, illtreated, starved or dehydrated. But according to the report these abuses are common, and Age Concern estimates that half a million older people are suffering them at any one time in Britain. If we treated our children and infants half as cruelly as we treat our elderly, many parents would be in prison.

Other countries are civilised in comparison. The peers and MPs visited Denmark and Sweden, where elderly people remained in situ, and as their needs increased, so did the care provided.

In America, federal law states that care homes “care for their residents in a way that promotes their quality of life”. Despite this, there is a growing grassroots movement for the oversixties to live in autonomous “villages” run by residents, not by social services or government agencies, where a monthly sub helps pay for transport, companionship, repairs, and other needs. Several of these villages are opening this autumn.

Meanwhile, here, while awareness and hysteria about child abuse has raised dramatically over recent years, the abuse of the elderly is accepted as part of life. According to the report, discrimination against the old in the NHS is “subtle and indirect”, and there are “embedded ageist attitudes on the part of NHS staff”.

The National Director for Older People’s Services says there are deep-rooted negative attitudes and behaviour towards old people and the Royal College of Physicians says there is structural ageism in the NHS that biases itself against the “multiple pathology of older persons”.

And so on, and so on. I know this year it has become fashionable to complain about how awful it is having to transit Heathrow and other large UK airports, but frankly the prospect of the NHS final departure lounge (“Deathrow” as we call it in my family) that looms for the millions of us who do not have the guts and resources of Dawn French to make alternative plans, is infinitely worse.

© Copyright 2007 Times Newspapers Ltd.