My eldest daughter sent me the news with satisfaction, as if she was finally beginning to see my future clearly. "It's in the Netherlands, but she will eventually get here," she added. Under the name Dementia Village, she had discovered a new concept of residence for the elderly, with or without Alzheimer's, which avoids locking them up. It is a small town with streets, squares and shops run by professionals who are actually caretakers or nurses, who greet its inhabitants under the open sky, with terraces in the sun and private homes. And instead of infantilizing them, reducing them and sedate them, they allow them to be as autonomous as possible.
When the pandemic swept through our residences, images of their interiors surfaced and we managed to see their ugliness. Then I thought of that life of oilcloth tablecloths and faded armchairs without any antiquity, also of days that pass between medication, shadows and straps. Yes, Philip Roth said it: “Old age is not a battle, but a massacre”. Yet why do the centers caring for the most vulnerable, some in their last days, have so little to do with the idea of home? These are not places where the individual lives anonymously and alone. But it doesn't matter, our society persists in making old age invisible, accompanied by its intolerable physical and intellectual degeneration.
Spain is aging at a gallop: in 2021 the average age of the citizens of our country stood at 43.8 years, 26% with 65 or more. The data pales if we add the sharp drop in the birth rate, which last year recorded its worst data since the INE has records. The UN has already warned us that, in 2050, the oldest population in the world, with four out of ten inhabitants over 60 years of age, will be ours.
On the other hand, in the spaces that welcome our elders – a destination that should not be alien to us – a model forged in the seventies is perpetuated, whose containment methods are still customary. “They don't know anything”, it is said of those who have lost their memory, ignoring their sudden lucidity, their emotions. “How are you?” I recently asked a loved one with Alzheimer's. “Terrible, I don't remember anything”, he answered me. And that flash of lucidity: remembering that he doesn't remember, made me think of the cracks through which the light of reason snakes. How necessary is an ethic of dignity and respect that comforts those we call "insane", forgetting how much insanity nests in our supposed sanity.
4
