ANNE WAS AN ADVENTURER. She had traveled to the Alps and the Himalaya and conducted postgraduate research at a remote station on a Canadian mountain. Later in life, working as a geography teacher, she led expeditions to Scotland, Arctic Norway, and the Faroe Islands. She recalled camping below Okjökull in Iceland—a glacier on a volcano—through a gale so extreme that she had to lie inside her tent to prevent it from blowing away.
I found it hard to picture any of this. It seemed too far from where we were: suburban England, a rainy day in July. To my left was the nursing home where Anne has lived for the past four years. The home had recently opened to visitors for the first time in fourteen months, its residents having received long-awaited vaccinations against COVID-19. I was sitting in a chair at a distance of two meters from Anne’s mobility scooter, with a picnic table between us. Over her shoulder I could see glimpses of tidy gardens: a trim lawn, two rosebushes, pink and orange flowers looking sharp and bright against the gray sky. The drizzle came and went. I was concerned about Anne’s bare head and sockless feet. Perhaps I could come back later in the week, I suggested, but Anne smiled slightly and shook her head. “We had a picnic out here, at the end of lockdown,” she said. “It was only when we could see individual raindrops falling onto the cakes that we felt we ought to go back in.”
This was my first introduction to Anne. I had asked a mutual friend, Rob, who lived in an assisted living community, whether he could put me in touch with somebody who would be willing to talk to me about what it is like to be cared for long-term. At the beginning of 2020, I had been working occasionally in a care setting for the previous two years, but that stopped abruptly when care homes in the UK were closed to visitors and nonessential workers. I felt sorry for the people who lived and worked in these places—everybody seemed to. Being subject to institutional care is an experience that is likely to be in my future, or yours, as the geriatric population grows, but I noticed that discussions about care in the media, in Parliament, in my home, were sentimental and generalized. This wasn’t a new conversation. Care-givers are often described, vaguely, as admirable—overworked and undervalued—while their patients, unable to feed and clothe themselves, are tacitly pitied.
These are not necessarily misperceptions. From the isolation of lockdown, though, it occurred to me that seeing professional carers and patients as people whose experiences are circumscribed is missing something. With the entire population siloed, care homes were outliers because they were places in which it was impossible to avoid contact with others. This close, frequent contact existed outside the prevalent cohabitation arrangements—most people live with friends or family if they do not live alone. Life in a care home offers an unusual insight, one that is not available to those of us who go about our lives with an assumption of personal independence. Dependence is a felt reality there. Residents of a care home are physically vulnerable to their
