Icing on the crumble

My mother was born in 1920. she stopped working when she got married in 1950. But as soon as her kids went to school, she started getting out and about. One of her wheezes was meals-on-wheels. Round about noon, she'd take delivery of a hot box of dinners [mostly meat-and-two-veg with gravy + crumble-and-custard] a deliver them round the county. The service was as much about the di♬g-do♬g on the doorbell and the bit of chat, as it was about calories and five-a-day.

My late-lamented FiL Pat the Salt had a brief encounter with Meals-on-Wheels in Waterford when he was still married, still ambulatory but getting a bit vague. In his case, he was induced to use his free bus-pass and go into Lady Lane House like Mohammed to the Mountain; get his dinner and the bit of chat; and then take the bus home.  He cd/shd have stayed there in the warm-and-dry playing cards with the other chaps and got tea and a biscuit before leaving. But he had no interest in cards and would only stay if there was a bit of music put on instead. 

After his wife died, Pat was untethered, of course, but the Alzheimer's Society of Ireland found space for him at their Pinegrove Resource Centre. He used to spend a [short] day a week there on the reg'lar and enjoyed the sing-songs; the nostalgia quizzes, not so much. Bob's Taxis picked him up several times. It was confusing the first time, because I hadn't done the delivery and nobody (not me, not Pat, for sure) knew which was his top coat. Next time we communicated with Team Deliver. Coronarama clobbered all that in person stuff with vulnerable elders. But Pinegrove also ran / runs an outreach service, where, for a nominal fee, a kindly person would appear at Pat's home and hang out with him.

Seamus, and after the lockdown, Gwen, came on different days with different toolkits. In the early days, when Pat was still able for it, he and Seamus would, weather permitting, tramp the golden pavements of Tramore chatting about the old times - Seamus was interested in WWII, especially the war at sea, in which Pat had <ploosh> been an active participant. Gwen knew all the old songs and was usually able to get Pat to si♬g alo♬g. Or failing that, wash away his anxious cares with a blast from the pipes of the Scots Guards. The bonus was that the family carer could have 2 hours carefree, even if that meant leaving the car in for service, shopping for dinner, or nipping up to the dry cleaners again.

And then, after his decade-long decline, Pat died and, as is the custom in Ireland, 30 days later a somewhat diminished family assembled again for his Month's Mind Mass.  The night before the MMM we achieved a form of closure by inviting all the carers to dinner in O'Neill's at the top of Main Street. At the end of the meal, one of the admin-side at Pinegrove leaned across the table to say thanks for the unexpected feed. I demurred: the thanks were entirely from the family to the carers. I suspect that many outsiders think that home visits are the icing on the cake of care. The preferred, subsidized, business model for elder care in Ireland is Care Homes with all their economies of scale. Run as a business, with minimal wages, and maximum clients, care in Care Homes tends to the perfunctory. There is no time to chat; it's far quick to feed someone than wait for them to feed themselves; and ambulatory elders are a trip-and-fall liability which the Home tries to avoid if at all possible (so many forms to fill in!). 

As I explained to Mr Adminside at the end of the carer's dins, Seamus and Gwen and their peers make the difference between A Life and mere existence.