Every time her husband visited the care home, Toos asks if she can go home, she has now been ‘long enough in this prison’ she says. It was in a piece de Volkskrant, And I immediately recognized the text from my father: “I’m in a house of custody here.”
The miserable thing is that you agree with the prisoner so often in mind. Yes indeed, you sit there in a room to look at boring houses in a suburb, while you have a nice house at home. All those things you mention are true: “I don’t have my car, I can’t go with my money, I can’t go anywhere.” The boredom is immense – not that it was not there at home, but now there is really no ball to do anymore. Not even a cup of washing up or just tea (“How did I do that again?”) And the associated searching and scratching. That goes slowly and awkward, but time enough, and at least people are busy.
The woman from the Volkskrant piece with him and tooth against absorption in a care home, and although it was certainly understandable that her husband saw no other solution, you could not help but sympathize with her.
I often wonder if there really is nothing better to come up with for old people than they put in prison. Expensive prisons, with good care, certainly, but the coffee is dirty, the siege you love is not there, you have to ask for anything, you no longer get a beer. From one day to the next the old man has lost all autonomy.
In the villages that I get through every day, posters with ‘Talk today about tomorrow’ are now hanging. On the website of the same name there are videos on which people promise each other with tears in their eyes that they will continue to take care of each other. HMPF. Toos’s husband would also have liked that, but he couldn’t afford it anymore. My father’s wife gets a piece by phone calls from the house of custody, she feels guilty and how could that be different if the person with whom you have been married for 50 years is desperate and feels away and trapped?
Talk about that today. About that tomorrow.
In a nice book about Vasalis and De Tijd, Douwe Draaisma quoted the poem ‘Cet âge est sans pitié’. I thought it would be about old age, but it was about how hard children are. In this case opposite the ‘start -up ugly’ neighbor, with whom they might still want to play, but no longer when her father offered their money to do that: ‘We/ that it was a kind of work – and did not want.’
That is exactly why I hate the word ‘caregiver’. Then it is ‘a kind of work’. I take care of my mother, who also lives in a care home, but I am not her ‘caregiver’. I am her daughter. I like to see her and she always says happy (and how lucky that is that) ‘Hey how cozy’ when I come.
So I also understand those people on that video very well. You want to keep each other and you hope that it will work. Perhaps the most painful is if you, like Toos’s husband, really turn into a (overloaded) caregiver: dutifully fulfilling your task, torn apart from the prisoner you once was so sweet.