Student Sarah Harrison's prize-winning story, A Home Without Bird Song, is an eloquent and poignant piece that captures with raw accuracy the experience of life in residences for frail elders. This is a work of art rather than dialectic, but that's really what we need to engage our sensibilities in the subject. Clearly great efforts are made in most residences to make lives of residents happy and comfortable, but there are systemic impediments that need to be addressed, and which will be the subject of these blogs, "Culture Change."
It is too easy in the world of health care to discuss the issues of ageing in care in a way that sanitises them of the losses people are forced to accept; loss of privacy, personal dignity, autonomy and access to their possessions. Usually they have been recently separately from the people who shared their lives most intimately, and their families are often scattered. So many friends have died or cannot move around easily. It is commonplace that people fear incapacity and isolation more than death.
Sarah's keen imagination captures the most pressing question concerning treatment of people who have done so much to make our home what it is. Wouldn't it be great if people were able to balance the irreplaceable losses of their last years at least with a sense that they would be entering "a place full of companionship and meaning?"
David Lemon
A Home Without Bird Song
by Sarah Harrison
The yellow taxi van halted outside St. Catherine’s Nursing Home. A woman who had come to meet me pulled open the back doors of the cab and with practiced ease lowered the ramp. She rolled my wheelchair out into the chilly fall air and steered me towards the great glass doors of the bleak grey building where I would spend the remainder of my life. She introduced herself as a care aide and punched in the security code for the first thick door, then the second one, but I was in my own world listening to the sounds of the birds nearby. The melody of their twitters and chirps brought beauty to the crisp morning air.
The great glass doors shut behind me. The bird song was silenced, muted by impenetrable cement walls. It felt as though I was being led into a maximum security prison from which I would never escape.
When we emerged from the elevator four floors above, I was greeted by cold white washed walls, hung with paintings of bright artificial scenes. There was a steely silence as I was pushed towards my room, punctuated only by a ringing phone in the nursing station, and sobs floating eerily through one of the many doors we passed.
I felt lost in this new and sterile environment. A desperate desire to get back in the taxi and go home flooded the pit of my stomach. But this was my new home, and I had nowhere else to go. I was stuck in this infernal metal chair and needed the care these people would give me. There was no choice now.
I was jolted out of my thoughts as my chair lurched suddenly to a stop. “This is you Mrs. Matthews,” announced the care aide, “room 408”. She pushed open the door to reveal a rather small and sparsely “furnished” room. There were two hospital beds, one on either side of the room. Beside each of these was a small oak dresser, upon which rested a ghastly porcelain lamp. Beside the door to the room was a small card table with a dust cloaked television set. A well worn armchair sat feet from the screen and I could only assume the door in the wall behind it led to the washroom. The most attractive feature of the room was a single, large window. Situated on the back wall between the beds, it overlooked a bright garden, edged with tall trees and full of lush hydrangea bushes. I surveyed my “cell” with a feeling of foreboding. It took me a moment to realise there was someone else in the room.
“Oh Hello!” She bubbled in the warmest voice I’d heard since my arrival. “Who are you?”
