My eldest daughter sent me the news with satisfaction, as if she was finally beginning to see my future clearly. "It's in Holland, but it will end up coming here," he added. Under the name Dementia Village he had discovered a new concept of residence for the elderly, with or without Alzheimer's, which avoids closing them. It is a small town with streets, squares and shops run by professionals who are actually caretakers or nurses, who greet their inhabitants in the open air, with sun terraces and private houses. And instead of childishing, reducing and sedating them, they allow themselves to be as self-sufficient as they can be.
When the pandemic devastated our homes, images of the interiors surfaced and we could see the ugliness. I thought then of that life of rubber tablecloths and faded armchairs without any antiquity, also of days that pass between medication, shadows and belts. Yes, Philip Roth said, "Old age is not a battle, but a slaughter." However, why do the centers where the most vulnerable are cared for, some in their last days, have so little to do with the idea of a home? These are non-places where the individual lives anonymously and alone. But so much so, our society persists in making old age invisible, accompanied by intolerable physical and intellectual degeneration.
Spain is aging at a gallop: in 2021 the average age of our country’s citizens stood at 43.8 years, 26% with 65 years or more. The data is palpable if we add the drop in the birth rate, which last year recorded the worst data since the INE has records. The UN has already warned us that by 2050, the world's oldest population, with four out of ten people over the age of 60, will be ours.
On the other hand, in the spaces that welcome our elderly people - a destination that should not be alien to us - a model forged in the seventies is perpetuated, with methods of containment that continue to be customary. "They don't know anything," he says of those who have lost their memory, ignoring their moments of lucidity, their emotions. "How are you?" I recently asked a loved one with Alzheimer's. "Fatal, I don't remember anything," he replied. And that flash of lucidity, remembering that it is not remembered, made me think of the cracks through which the light of reason winds. How necessary is an ethic of dignity and respect that comforts those we call "insane", forgetting how much dementia there is in our supposed sanity.
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