If we come to needing care or special protection, then
it will be best if we have already found out how to make friends with the
inevitable in life and to accept what is necessary with grace and
gratitude. That is in considerable
measure a spiritual matter, it seems to me.
It is something to be faced and attended to long before, through the
years of strength, activity and maturity.
Part of the homework is learning how to face reality and make friends
with the truth.
Now we have the gleaming spires of the modern Retirement
Village. It looms up before us in our
senior years as a serious option. What
is new about this phenomenon, I think, is that we are invited to make decisions
about moving to a retirement village before we actually, physically or
mentally, have need of it. It is seen as
prophylactic. And so one silly superfluous
wisdom wafting around these days is: Don’t leave it too late! You must consider your prospects in
wealth and health – not be blinded by how content you are feeling right now. You must ponder all the perils ahead in
life. It is an attempt to ward off
adversity, everything nasty such as dependence, loneliness, frailty, becoming
pathetic.
So now we are pestered with daily advertisements and
glossy brochures depicting all manner of happy senior people, usually well
groomed, poncing about in pleasant surroundings, bowling, laughing, lounging
and chatting, sometimes disporting themselves embarrassingly in some swimming
pool, sometimes being led in wretched geriatric calisthenics… There are always beautiful flowers nearby. I notice that what these shining handouts do
not show us are the inmates in real care, the ones not smiling, the ones
sliding into dementia, needing to be fed, the ones with collapsed spines from
osteoporosis and falling.
The modern retirement village has a hierarchy of
living arrangements. It categorises and
labellises life. You may have an
independent villa or apartment. That
means that you will live in your own self-contained space with largely your own
décor and stuff, but have access to communal facilities such as a dining and
social area, and perhaps a gym, a hair salon, a bowling green and
suchlike. It is all very contemporary
and jolly, and safe. You will have a call
button with which to summon help if you fall… in practice it turns out to be
not so simple.
The operative word in these places is Happy. They live with style. They have a weekly Happy Hour. One retirement village at Howick has a video
I watched with mounting horror, which shows all the geriatrics prancing around
joyously to pop music. It was false to
the point of terminal embarrassment. This
dreadful video was intended to attract me to their village.
Or you may have some closer care arrangement, depending
on your needs, including professional dementia care. Withal, you have their guarantee of
watchfulness over your welfare, on-call status of the management and staff,
protection of your asset…
OK. But what
you buy in most of these places is not ownership of your villa or
apartment. Ownership remains with
whoever owns the business. You buy
something called a Licence to Occupy. It
is pretty expensive. It more or less
equates to rent in advance. You must also
pay ongoing fees to cover management and costs.
These fees only increase over time.
And eventually you or your beneficiaries get back some substantially
reduced sum after various factors including what management had to do to bring
your/their unit up to date again.
Not all retirement villages have this arrangement. I believe there are some where you actually
do buy and own your living premises.
Lawyers are required to make sure their clients understand this
difference.
These places offer an illusion of safety and security
– but my impression is that anyone can drive into and through our nearby
villages, any time, without question, as I have frequently done. You are no safer living there than where I am
living, and hope to remain. And as for
on-call response if you fall… well, anecdotal evidence suggests you are really
on your own. It would be wise to have
your fall during weekday working hours – otherwise you may be calling your own
ambulance. Prompt, caring, professional
response simply didn’t happen in reports I have heard.
They have no sound of children playing in these
places, or adolescents occasionally hooning around. Everyone there is elderly, or getting that
way. How boring is that! I have heard that they can have fights at
their Happy Hour –that would be some excitement perhaps. Consuming topics at Happy Hour include the
weather, the temperature, their little gardens, the village management, and
everyone’s aches and pains.
The BBC series Waiting
for God dealt definitively and dramatically with some of these issues. Someone had seen the capitulation and horror
of it all and put it into drama. Waiting For God dealt often sensitively
and always hilariously with two retired people who had actually plenty of life
– which their new surroundings in a retirement home simply sought to deny, repress,
control and quell.
And there is the classic British movie, Mrs Caldicott’s Cabbage War, a delicious
account of rebellion in a retirement home. Somewhere in that movie Mrs Caldicott
describes the retirement home as “this overpriced knacker’s yard”.
My own impression of one of the local retirement
villages is its similarity to photos of Siberian gulags. It has rows of grey villas, relieved only by
pretty flowers they may have planted out the front. The village has rules, a list of which is
supplied to residents when they take occupancy.
The rules restrict what you can do to alter your villa or apartment and your
life there – changing decor, installing things, having pets, making
modifications…
However, it suits people who are frightened of danger,
ageing and dependence. For me.. well, if
I became obliged to become an inmate of one of these places, I hope I would do
so with grace and dignity and a minimum of fuss. But I devoutly hope not. It would certainly hasten my demise.
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