When Children Know Best

Sun Herald

Sunday April 8, 2007

Erin O'Dwyer

A moving documentary explores the dilemma of placing aged parents in care, Erin O'Dwyer writes.

THERE is no way around the grief and guilt that comes with placing a loved one in a nursing home. A powerful new television documentary, Me And My Mum - made by British personality Tony Robinson - shows just how difficult the decision can be and takes viewers into the homes of families who have coped.

Robinson, best known for his role as Baldrick in the comedy Blackadder, made the film primarily about his mother's battle with dementia, and tells of his anger and frustration at seeing her spend the last years of her life in a nursing home.

But the personal documentary takes it one step further, interviewing politicians, care providers and family carers about how society is attempting to care for the aged.

Most devastating is the story of the Edwards family. Loana Edwards and her two daughters recall how 82-year-old John Edwards suffered brain damage after falling down stairs. His need for constant care forced their hand. Then, one week after he went into the home, he died.

"You feel so terribly guilty," says Loana Edwards, his wife of 63 years. "I married this man for life and I feel as though I'm letting him down. He's been such a good man to us."

Robinson's experience began 15 years ago when his father began to show signs of dementia.

"I was overseas and I picked up the phone and there was someone on the other end saying 'bring bring' - mimicking the sound of the phone," he recalls.

"Then my mum gets on the phone, she was really distressed and she said, 'He insisted I should phone you and he's behaving in an unbelievable fashion. He wants all the handles of the cups pointing north-east. And I don't know where north-east is."'

Doctors provided Robinson with little insight into his father's condition and less than a year later the old man went into a home - a cold and frightening 19th-century building.

"Hate is a really negative emotion but if I hate anyone it was that GP who left us without any information whatsoever," Robinson says.

"My dad used to march around the home saluting. I realised he was dramatising his memory. The last time he had been somewhere as cold and regulated and under the thumb was when he was in the war."

Robinson's father died in the home. Then a few years later, Robinson's mother was paralysed after a routine operation went wrong. She, too, required constant care and Robinson was forced to put her into a home.

"She was very confused," he recalls. "We lived with that confusion for the best part of eight years."

Robinson was asked to make the documentary for Britain's Channel 4 after writing a series of newspaper articles on the plight of the elderly. He agreed on the condition that his mother's story was central. This meant asking his mother's permission.

"Although my mum's short-term memory was shot, I knew that was a motor malfunction and inside she was as bright and perceptive as she had ever been," he says.

"When I asked my mum she said, 'Ooh yes' and then she forgot all about it. Sometime later she said, 'When is that thing happening?' and then had this look of irritation on her face when her stupid son didn't understand.

"'That nice thing', she said. And I knew she'd given me the blessing to make the film."

Robinson allows the cameras to film his mother as she continues to decline. Some viewers will find the footage upsetting. Me And My Mum shows a dignified woman at her most vulnerable. The final scene is shot just hours before her death.

"It probably looks to an audience as though the camera was there when she died," Robinson says, "but we all decided when it was no longer appropriate for them to be there. I had about eight hours of those final hours with my mum without the cameras there."

For guidance and reassurance, Robinson relied on his two adult children.

"They were close to her and I don't think they would have wanted her to be undermined in any way. I constantly sounded them out about it."

The process also prompted on-camera discussions between Robinson and his children about how they would deal with their own dad's decline. His daughter says she'll probably dump him.

"Those kind of ironies we trade all the time in my family," Robinson says with a laugh. "That's how you cope with the sharp end of life. All three of us are intently aware of each other's needs. We don't need those discussions. We know all about each other."

In Britain, as in Australia, the ageing population is confounding those working in social policy.

A United Nations report, World Population Ageing: 1950-2050, showed there were 600 million older people (over 65) at the beginning of the 21st century. That was triple the number recorded 50 years earlier. And that number is expected to more than triple again by 2050, to 2 billion.

The report also found that the proportion of older people will exceed the youngest age group (under 15s) for the first time in history by 2050. Meanwhile, the oldest population group is getting older. The number of "oldest olds" - those aged 80 or older - is increasing by almost 4 per cent each year.

In a society obsessed by youth, several organisations have established media awards for coverage of ageing issues. Older People Speak Out (OPSO) runs an annual program of national media awards, and the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) awards in Victoria recently added a new ageing category.

Ageing expert Professor Sol Encel, of the University of NSW, says choosing an image for his new book Longevity And Social Change In Australia was a difficult process. They rejected a picture of wrinkled hands, and went instead for an image of an older man sitting in front of a laptop.

He believes documentaries such as Robinson's will help foster discussion of the ageing issue. "Most people don't like to contemplate ageing," he says. "It's a culture that is focused very heavily on youth and the concerns of older people come in second or third place. But sooner or later people have to face the fact that a large proportion of the population are going to survive for 30 or 40 years after they leave the paid workforce. And that older people make up a large section of the unpaid workforce doing voluntary work which is vital to keeping parts of our society going."

Robinson, whose documentary has been longlisted for a BAFTA, is calling for greater investment in Alzheimer's disease and dementia research. He also wants more money allocated to respite care and better financial support for the carers themselves.

"We have stopped seeing old people as simply other people," he says. "They've become old people - in inverted commas; it's embarrassing and smelly and something that we don't want to cope with.

"In 100 years people will look back on the plight of our old people with the same kind of horror they have when they look back on child labour. Most politicians are blind to that and they are blind to that because we don't shout and scream enough."

ABC TV will screen Me And My Mum on April 19 at 8.30pm