Star comment: Joan can teach us something
We hear a lot these days about the problems arising from the increasing age of the population.
The pressures on care homes and the NHS and the agonising decisions relatives have to take when they realise their loved ones need more help than they can provide themselves.
There is a voice in the debate which you hear less often. It is the voice of the older folk who are living in the care homes, having to adapt to new lives among strangers. They are looked after, but they have memories of their lives outside, of holidays, walks in the fields, their lovingly tended gardens of which they were so proud.
Today we hear one of the voices from the inside. It is from Mrs Joan Barlow. She is 96, and cannot now walk and can only see a little.
Around a year ago she slipped and fell in her bungalow in Wellington. The upshot was that she now needs to be cared for, and is in a home only a stone’s throw from where she lived – her home has been rented out to help pay the bills.
Despite her physical difficulties, Mrs Barlow is sharp, funny, and with some clear and forthright opinions about her present circumstances.
“I was an independent woman,” she says. “Now I am a dependent woman.”
The change has not been an easy one. She has her room, and from her window she can see the outside world which was once her haunt.
She watches television, she sleeps, and she remembers. All those things she used to do, all those places she used to visit, all those people she would meet.
Mrs Barlow is a writer, having written several little booklets, with imagined stories which have been inspired by real-life aspects of her long life.
She has now written a new one. It is about her new circumstances, mixed with dreamy reminiscences of how her life used to be.
She has done a great service in reminding us all that once older folk have to go into homes, their individuality does not evaporate, and the experience is made no easier through their age nor through the necessity of having to be cared for by strangers, among strangers.
The care of older folk is one of the great issues of today, and will be a yet greater issue for future generations as the proportion of elderly people in society increases.
As older folk like Mrs Barlow look out through their windows and yearn for the world they once knew, we should all remember to look back.
