The illusion of living in an eternal present
In your experience as a caregiver, what does it mean to grow old in a society based on performance?
In Italy there are 2 million people affected by dementia,1 families are unequipped and dismayed, unprepared to deal with it: it means learning new behaviors, new ways of relating because, however cognitively impaired, the person affected by dementia retains the ability to read the non-verbal aspects of communication. Many times I have witnessed children trying to keep their parents’ memory exercised (“It’s impossible that you don’t remember what you had for lunch!”), with the sole result of increasingly impatient children and mortified parents. The intention is commendable, but the battle is lost from the start: it is not sick people who must maintain their cognitive performance, it is caregivers who must find a way of communicating suited to the characteristics of the people they care for.
How has consumerism led us to the denial of the future and of death?
Until the 1950s, death was a public event and sex a totally private matter, covered by the strictest taboo. In the following decades, we witnessed a complete reversal: what was private has now become widely public, while everything concerning death and mourning is rigorously concealed and covered by taboo. It is not socially accepted to speak about the pain of loss; children are not shown the dead nor taken to funerals; the practice of wearing mourning has disappeared, and so on. The development of medicine certainly contributed to this process of denial and removal, but in my opinion the decisive factor was the rise of the consumerist paradigm based on the continuous induction of needs. Remembering that our life has an end, as natural as its beginning, prompts the question consumerism fears most: “Do I really need it?” and shatters the illusion of living in an eternal present to be saturated with ever new products and services.
Why are we able to take care of children but not of elderly people?
The few children who are born are protected and cared for even before birth: from monthly ultrasounds to pre-birth classes. Once they are born, parents generally oversee their growth by consulting a pediatrician and, if necessary, turning to other specialists. With grandparents, however, it is not usual to pay the same attention. If it is normal to take sons and daughters to the pediatrician, it is not equally normal to take one’s parents to a geriatrician. It implies accepting that parents are entering the stage of life that precedes the end. The banishment of death means that we remove or minimize all the signs of fragility in the people we love that should instead lead us to protect them more. Moreover, taking care of children means taking care of their future and ours; taking care of our parents’ old age means seeing our own old age anticipated in theirs.
Italy is one of the countries with the highest life expectancy: around 81 years for men and 85 for women. How should we improve our approach to care and prevention in order to deal with this phenomenon?
By thinking of old age as a different stage of life, whereas the tendency is to imagine it as an endless extension of the present. The medical recommendations for aging well are well known, but far less attention is paid to the existential dimension of old age, which is the age in which one has a great deal of time to think about how one has lived, drawing from it satisfaction, remorse, regrets… Thinking ahead about one’s own old age is a way of preparing for it on an existential level as well: what kind of balance sheet will I want to draw of my life? What criteria and priorities should inspire my choices today so that, then, I may be able to say I am satisfied? Reflecting on what kind of old age we want to live is a beacon that guides our entire adult life.
Your book speaks about the “unspeakable” ambivalences of care: what are they? And why do we pretend not to see them?
Caring is an incredibly complex action, both professionally and within the family. First of all, caring is different from curing: it means accompanying a chronic condition destined to deteriorate. Those who care cannot expect the gratification of witnessing the recovery of the person they assist. One is not born a caregiver; one becomes one when parents begin to lose their autonomy. But the relationship with them does not begin at that moment: it is a relationship with at least five decades of family history behind it. A history that may be marked by conflicts, healthy bonds, toxic bonds, estrangements, generosity, spite, jealousy, resentments… everything that has happened somehow reverberates in the way the caregiving relationship is experienced, by both sides.
- According to data from the Italian National Institute of Health (ISS). ↩︎