One of the main imperatives contemporary society puts on us is to stay young and fresh as long as we can. Just look around you – TV program, magazines, popular culture generally are cluttered with tips and advice of how to postpone getting older. You must exercise, eat healthy food, use expensive cosmetics and practice esthetic treatments and surgery in order to obstruct erosion of physical beauty.
But no matter for how long we successfully postpone process of getting older, we can’t avoid the inevitable!
What usually happens with aged people, those who’re invisible and not in focus of mainstream? Have you ever wondered how they deal the problems they're facing with?
I’ll try to give you an insight on this matter from my personal perspective.
Living in chronicle depression
Probably you’ve never heard of lapot. It’s brutal mythical practice of killing elderly family members in the Balkans, once they become financial burden on the family . Real or not, that’s the paradigmatic picture of how family members sometimes treat their loving ones.
My grandmother is 87 years old. Circumstantially, I’m the only person who takes care of her.
On a daily basis my grandma and I struggle with a more or less the same challenges.
Loneliness. Some psychiatrists say seniors feel loneliness because they are alone. Your partner and most of your friends have passed away. Try to imagine yourself cut off the outside world. A lot of processes and phenomena that happen around, you don’t understand. Our grandparents had been living in a totally different surroundings than today and their point of view is completely unlike ours. This fact can cause feeling of being at the margin or isolated from everyday reality.
Feeling of redundancy is ubiquitous. Aged people usually think they’re useless. This feeling is reinforced in cases of reduced mobility and lack capacity to do the things they used to do. In case of my grandmother feeling of redundancy is especially emphasized by her inability to be useful as much as when she was younger. She finds herself inept to fulfill her own expectation on being useful. In fact, my grandmother is self-fascist.
Have you already killed your ancestors? :)