It is high summer, when even the dullest leaves glisten. The children next door are practising the piano. Even on a day like this we are in a world of sharp differences, bees good, flies bad, but I am ready to revive the idea that we live in a retreat house, where there is no stigma to dementia.
‘It’s not my fault,’ she says, repeatedly, facing down an imaginary accuser.
What would a dementia retreat house look like? There would not be deadlines or targets or performance management. None of the pressures to perform that drive most of human activity, even if you have dementia. I visited a C.I. unit in a local authority. C.I.? Cognitive Impairment – and, no, the people working there didn’t know what it meant, themselves, though the regime was formally therapeutic – every activity had a therapeutic purpose eg. maintaining independence, to be implemented in a very controlling environment of regulated tasks and locked territories!
My idea of a retreat is more like a Greek village, where the rhythm is slow and slow, and you wear simple clothes (only the young people are out to make an impression) and you eat in the shade and the stray cats lick up the scraps from the floor, and if you are a woman and have trouble with a step, a man takes you by the arm … well, it’s dream, but that’s very much as I remember it.
Anna used to say that I wanted to live in a monastery where they let girls in. Now she is worried that they let too many girls in, the different carers coming during the day.
It is not exactly a Benedictine rule here! But she likes to do things the same if she can and there are small rituals around acts of everyday living.
A retreat without squalor – that is what we are working for, in our own way.