Summer reading
Our Community Matters • 7 •
One good person BY ALISON BROWN
This is a tale of synergy. A “what goes around comes around” kind of story. My mother is 93. She lives in a modern, inner-city, high-rise, not-for-profit aged care “facility”. It’s not one of those get-me-out-ofhere places you see on Four Corners with $4 a day meals; it really tries to be “best practice”. Mum’s place has artworks, picture windows, balconies and barbecues. It has a theatre, a hydrotherapy pool, policies, feedback loops and consultative groups. It tries. But tending to 150 residents of different backgrounds with different needs isn’t easy. It’s so not easy that one wonders why bundle them all up together in the first place. But that’s another story.
laundry. Food was a challenge. A piece of toast might arrive with centimetre-thick Vegemite and no butter. The carers, from every culture, knew other cuisines. Cooks came and went We’re constantly thankful for the real café on the ground floor, opening to the world, where regular people come and go. The café is a lung. Breathing. At first mum got out a lot: a regular Italian class, movies, lunches with friends. She lived in the real world and came home to roost. But friends also get old. And die. As her independence waned, she pinned hopes on organised trips and groups for the like‑minded.
Mum was a librarian in Moonee Valley, a northwestern suburb of Melbourne, for many years. For the last 10 she drove the mobile library van, delivering books to housebound readers from Glenroy to Fawkner. She picked and packed for all tastes: Le Carré and Christie, Cartland and Kerouac. Long after retiring she kept visiting a Polish refugee, did her shopping, took her to appointments and kept bringing books.
But where were they? She would hear about others with crossword brains on different floors. But because the floors are staffed horizontally, residents live largely by level. So she rarely met them. She joined a trip to the gallery to see the Great Masters. But loading and unloading a busful of people of multiple abilities left time for only a brief manoeuvre through the exhibition itself. The art of logistics.
Mum and I are connected through language. When we first looked at aged care places our radar was up. Sometimes our “young” guide, in clickety heels, or uncomfortable suit, turned squarely to me. “So what does mum enjoy?”
She also hadn’t counted on the vast spectrum of dementia. From charming if nonsensical conversations to anger, fear and distress. Uncontrollable crying, smearing of faeces, nudity at dinner. As in a giant shared house, she interacts with all; people with names and families and rich pasts. Life. It’s what happens. But it wasn’t the company she’d imagined.
No, no, she’s MY mum; that’s “your mother” to you. And hello, she’s right here. If they didn’t talk to her and used the unpossessed “mum” (like “baby”), the place was out.
And the institutional smell begins to seep over The one she chose was brand new. There were the newness and the telly is almost always on. some early disappointments. She couldn’t But this is a synergy story. A coming together. bring her car. There wasn’t an accessible A few suburbs away is a small second-hand
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