On Monday last week, I watched a very moving programme about the realities of care for the elderly with dementia.
It was made by the usually relentlessly cheerful and upbeat Tony Robinson, who I'm used to seeing getting excited about obscure archaeological digs in the remoter areas of the English landscape.
This film was about the last months of his mother's life, as she slipped further into the incapacity and vulnerability of dementia, physically and mentally. But it was as much about his own feelings of frustration, anger, helplessness and guilt as he considered the limited and unsatisfactory options available for the care of elderly people with that amount of care need.
Part of the story included a visit to an extraordinary woman in her fifties, devoting herself to the care of her own mother, aged over 90, in the tiny council flat they shared in north London. Surprisingly, both mother and daughter seemed happier and more serene than Tony Robinson and his mother, who was being cared for in what looked like well run and resourced private care facilities. In contrast, there was a particularly telling moment when Tony Robinson acted out the inchoate grunts of rage and frustration he observed his mother making in her care home.
Tony Robinson's passion and rage was most directed at the lack of political will, the virtual silence in the UK about the poverty of facilities and options for the care of vulnerable elderly people like his mother. He went round a group of people he was talking to in the film. Everyone of them had some relationship with a vulnerable elderly person like his mother, without any really satisfactory care solution. But nobody seemed to be talking about it publicly, and it just wasn't registering on the radar of public political discourse the way that providing childcare is.
I knew what he meant. My mother too is incapacitated by dementia, and has to have 24 hour care. Her physical capacity is increasingly breaking down. But unlike what was shown in Tony Robinson's film, the reality of that is all about the consequences of double incontinence, and a local health service that doesn't seem able to provide the right quality and quantity of pads and supplies. Such an apparently mundane need looms very large when it increasingly means interrupted nights and constant changing of soiled linen. The local service people are thoughtful and eager to help. But the rules of service delivery say, once every eight weeks, whatever the changing needs. And the supplies seem determined by arbitrary limits, not what the patient needs.
And then two days later, it was the Israeli election, and the big surprise was the unexpectedly huge vote for the Pensioners' Party, including a big surge of support for them by the young people of Tel Aviv, usually seen as hedonists and the self-absorbed of the "me" generation.
The analysts said it was a protest vote. Maybe. Some of them said it was also a sign of the immaturity or the instability of the Israeli electoral system. Different one-issue parties come and go in successive elections. Last time around, the ferociously anti-religious Shinui party made huge gains out of nowhere. This time, they disappeared off the radar. So why should the young have joined with the old in supporting the pensioners?
Maybe in the context of Israel, the younger generations feel a special level of respect and admiration for the generation of those in their eighties and older, a higher level of it than we feel in England. They are the people who created the state of Israel out of so little, who fought for Israel's survival and independence when there were no superpower allies, and they triumphed so much against the odds. They include the generation of the remaining survivors of the Holocaust. And maybe they represent a still untarnished image of the old socialist ideals of the early Israeli state.
Yes, the vote may represent a vote for the impossible. Because I don't know how any state can afford the levels of one to one round the clock care that elderly demented people like my mother need, especially when the tax base to pay for the care is diminishing, and the numbers and lifespans of the demented are constantly increasing. I've no idea how that problem can be solved. But I've said to my daughter that I think people of her generation and maybe the next will be well advised to have as many children as they can, for it will be increasingly families that have to take the burden of care when the state can't act as an unlimited resource.
It seems to me that for all the apparent instability, there's something very positive about a democratic system that allows an issue like this to acquire some real clout through the ballot box. It is something that is never going to be available to people like Tony Robinson and the rest of us who are the next of kin of the vulnerable elderly in the UK.
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