The problems of age

By Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

My former student Parvathi Nagasunderam, one of the most impressive teachers in the university system, gave me for Christmas three books written by her nephew, a doctor who had worked first in Australia, and then moved to America. I picked one at random to take on last journey abroad, and found it compelling reading.

Entitled Brainbow, it dealt with a very unusual topic that however concerns more and more people. The main protagonist is a refugee from Bosnia, who had made a life for herself and her family first in England and then in the United States, but who when the novel opens seems to be suffering from dementia. This has crept up on her after the death of her husband, when she is alone in a flat in New York, and imagines that the neighbour is persecuting her.

One child is in Australia, and the other in England, which means they are not always at hand, though in the course of the book they make several visits to her, and both in turn get her to stay with them. But her paranoia simply gets worse, and she is suspicious even about her children and aggressive towards their spouses.

Much of the novel seems exaggerated, but it also has episodes of fantastic black humour as when Diana, at Christmas lunch with the family of her son’s girlfriend Patricia, suddenly says, ‘I wonder what Patricia’s boyfriend is doing for Christmas?’ The reaction of her son, ‘Wow! What a party pooper’ hardly seems adequate for what ruins Christmas and seems likely to destroy the relationship. The aftermath, when Nicholas tries to pick up the pieces, and Patricia copes with not just her own anger, but the worries of her family, verges on the bizarre.

There are equally zany sub-plots, as when Diana becomes a victim of religious groups keen to get her money, the Hindus on Hari Krishna lines in England seeming preposterous, only to be outdone in both greed and subtlety by Born Again Christians in New York. And then towards the end she finds herself in a care home which is equally anxious to plunder her, with a black matron who seems straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. This last happened when the madness had diminished after surgery: it had been found, after better medical examination, that the mad behaviour was because of a hematoma in the brain which had affected its functioning, and when that was removed Diana was more her old self.

But with the children having to get back to their lives she entered a care home, which turned out to be a form of entrapment, with no exit possible except with its sanction, and that not forthcoming without a takeover of her property. All that seems over the top, for professionals were not likely to have committed her to such a place without checking on it. And equally preposterous is her escape, when the children try to smuggle her into Canada.

But though all this seems excessive, it does draw attention to the exploitation of the old that is so common, in a context when, even if the family is supportive, it cannot bestow the care and attention that an increasingly old and concomitantly vulnerable population needs.

The book would have benefited from some editing, but then again perhaps its vigour would have been diminished. And when Paru told me that the story was based on an actual case, I realized that perhaps I had no right to think it exaggerated, and that the suffering the aged are prey to could well take this form. At the age I now am, recognising my own diminishing faculties, and aware of friends and relations much further along that path, I realise that this is a subject which needs much greater social attention.

When we prepared the National Human Rights Action Plan, way back in 2008, we laid stress on this, and I was impressed when I chaired the Task Force to implement it a few years later at the dedication of many individuals, including in particular Tilak de Zoysa who seemed then, and I think continues now, to be in charge of HelpAge. And there are certainly conscientious individuals in government agencies.

But what is lacking is coordination, as also attention at the last mile. I tried, when I was trying to reform local government, to lay down specific responsibilities for personnel in Divisional Secretariats to work with committees at Grama Niladhari level to monitor all households and ensure interventions when necessary. But when election madness set in, in 2014, despite my writing service delivery from Divisional Secretariats into Maithripala Sirisena’s manifesto, nothing more was heard of this initiative.

from The Island https://ift.tt/IvPjO4J