Impuestos y tasas

Joe was 92 and had lived in Longleaf for eighteen months at the time of our prompted conversation. Joe was a proud Dutchman who had lived an active and adventurous life that included being a WWII fighter pilot. He had made his fortune in manufacturing after migrating to Australia. He often spoke longingly of freedom and travel, and his beautiful home on the waterfront.

He considered himself a ‘gentleman’, with ‘proper manners,’ and liked to dress well. Despite his diagnosis, Joe demonstrated ‘surprising insight’ into his condition, according to an RN when he spoke of ‘being too dependent on Liz’ [his wife].

Throughout our many conversations, I learned much about his personal history and life philosophy. His level of confusion and ability to follow the thread of a conversation fluctuated. Joe worried that he was not always able to adequately articulate himself and stories of his lived experiences, ‘I am, I get mixed up’ (PC, 11 September 2015).

Several residents, family, and staff reported that Joe called out ‘help, help, help’ with increasing frequency during the last few months of my study. A staff member related that rarely were his calls because he needed assistance, ‘it’s not like he needs to go to the bathroom or anything’ (Wayne, staff-CSE, DG, 10 March 2015). Joe’s plaintive calling seemed not to be about needing specific care. Rather, it was a plea for ‘help, help’ from his suffering and grief.

Joe often spelled out his name or pointed to pictures and photographs of himself on the wall, ‘this is Joe. I am up there alright’. Perhaps it was his way of trying to maintain contact with himself, ‘I am Joe E, that’s who I am’. Perhaps his habit of speaking in the first person was also to remind the staff and me of who he was. It may have been a long-term idiosyncrasy; it may be a result of his brain pathology. It was apparent, however, that he used the portraits, in particular, to help stay connected with his sense of past and self.

His expression of the loss of his past life, everything that was ‘normal’, and of losing his sense of self, his connection to others, and his loss of hope and freedom was heartrendingly clear and conveyed throughout our conversations. ‘I am sad; every day is a sad day. I am just not right,’ sometimes while crying (Joe, IC, 15 September 2015).

Part of Joe’s sadness seemed to be his awareness that while it was Liz who helped him maintain his connection with himself, others, and the world but that this was now limited. They were located in

separate geographic locations, ‘I could be happy too if my wife was here with me in this building’ (Joe, IC, 15 November 2015). Joe experienced the separation from his wife as a separation from himself, and his previous way of being-in-the-world.

Similar to many of the residents, his connection to others, primarily his wife, was key to his sense of well-being. Liz was the person he most closely related to, ‘We had so much in common’, and ‘We were a team. We are the same’. His wife was aware that as she was Joe’s only meaningful social connection and that she was his conduit to connect with his previous life. ‘I have to be here for Joe. He tells me “it makes my day,” so I keep coming because I know that. I know he needs me’ (Liz, wife, DG, 12 March 2016).

Threaded through all our conversations were notions of the loss of the familiar, ‘I don’t do what is normal in here,’ and his sense of his loss of ‘freedom’, a term he frequently used when describing grieving for his past life, colouring his lived experiences in Longleaf.

Joe often talked about his life as a fighter pilot and of his travels. Themes of freedom and movement featured heavily in his stories of flying, driving fast cars and motorbikes, and late in his lifer, caravan travel with Liz. Freedom seemed to be a key aspect of Joe’s sense of self-identification. Significantly, while Joe’s demeanour was often subdued, he became animated when he talked about flying, making hand movements to demonstrate loops, or when he used the pictures on the wall to speak of his past adventures.

Joe spoke in some detail about the meaning of his personal belongings in his room. He regularly took cues from the objects, mostly paintings and framed photographs of his previous home, planes, travel, and wartime experiences to remind himself of his earlier adventurous life and sense of self. When I asked about his lived experiences in Longleaf, he became sad and answered ‘Well, this is very minor (waved his hand around the room). Before, you know. I was, I am, I did a lot of actions, actions, actions, like I flew different types of planes like the Tiger Moth, the Harvard 2B plane and the Spitfire…but now…. nee7_{, this is not my place at all’ (Joe, PC, 11 September 2015).}

Figure 6.1 Joe’s personal belongings: Left photograph- One of Joe’s favourite items. It was a portrait of Joe as a young fighter pilot. Right photograph- Framed drawings and photographs of some of his previous homes including his childhood home in The Netherlands.

Liz reported that she had brought objects to ‘help him feel it was his own room…. I thought these were his favourite places and times, reminders of his good life’. His favourite object seemed to be a

painted portrait of when he was a fighter pilot during WWII, ‘I liked freedom, ja8_{, ja, ja. I felt free} when I flew’ (Joe, PC, 11 September 2015).

Joe often reminisced and spoke about freedom when he told me about his previous home and his travels with his wife, ‘I don’t like it here. My house in X Street, I felt freedom. I could see who I wanted, we could watch the boats, we could sit and do what we wanted, or we could go out’ (Joe, FC, 22 March 2016). He often spoke symbolically of not feeling that he was part of the ‘team’ anymore, which he associated with his loss of freedom and connection to himself and his wife. ‘We were a team. It was about freedom. Liz and I are the same; without her I am incomplete’ (Joe, PC, 11 September 2015).

Joe spoke of his growing despondency. ‘I know that the staff are concerned that I am depressed, but that is just how it is for me now. I have no hope’ (IC, 15 January 2016). He related that he had expected to ‘go home and things will be normal again’ but realised toward the end of the study that he did not have the freedom to choose. ‘I was hoping but now I know I will never be allowed out of here’ (Joe, IC, 21 January 2016).

Unlike his previously active life, he spent most of his days alone in his room, and the only thing he looked forward to were visits by Liz. Joe frequently became wistful as he reflected on his past and was quite sad about where he perceived his current life to be. ‘It was a profoundly sad moment when he spoke explicitly about freedom and action, then looked around his room and tears rolled down his face’ (Journal, 15 January 2016).

At times, he made unfavourable comparisons between the physical environment and aesthetics of his home and Longleaf, ‘We had quality bricks, this chair, all vinyl…I would never have vinyl. At home, we had chairs covered in…in plush. In here, the look, it is cold. My home is so much more beautiful’. It seemed, however, that the buildings were a metaphor for himself, and he was speaking of the contrast between how he had perceived himself as ‘a quality man’ and his current sense of self, ‘but this….[waving his arm around the room], I am not as good as I should be’ (Joe, PC, 11 September 2015.

Small and seemingly unimportant aspects of the physical environment and ways of being encapsulated symbolic messages of not ‘feeling welcome’ or ‘at-homeness’ for Joe. He was particularly distressed by drinks served ‘in plastic cups with no saucer’, and ‘fake timber [laminate] built-in furniture’ which were the opposite of his previous ‘quality’ home and to him symbolised the poor quality of the RACF and why he did not feel ‘at-home’.

Joe also expressed the move from his family home as a loss of his meaningful everyday activities. He spoke of missing things that were important to him and what he commonly described as his ‘normal life’. He missed ‘my chance of looking well-dressed’ and his ‘normal’ bedtime at ten or eleven pm. ‘Here, we go to bed at seven or eight, and I can’t sleep. Here everything is controlled’ (Joe, IC, 30 August 2015).

Joe was the only resident that I spoke with who was able to express a sense of grief and identify the loss of a specific physical home, and how it had represented freedom. For him, the experience of admission into Longleaf was a ‘double detachment’ similar to that described by Schillmeier and Heinlein (2009). Not only had he been relocated to a building that bore little physical resemblance to his previous home, but he had also lost his sense of feeling at home through established through

meaningful and comforting everyday practices and routines such as his preferred bedtime and rituals.

Familiar daily activities give a point of reference and meaning to our lives. For Joe, the self-identified ‘man of quality and freedom’, the loss of personal routines and small, daily pleasures, and the little things such as ‘making proper coffee from a machine ’and ‘my chance at shaving well and being quality dressed’ were experienced as more than a loss of a sense of ‘at-homeness’ (Joe, IC, 15 November 2015). It was also about his sense of who he had been in the world.

The loss of his previous home and separation from Liz represented the loss of freedom, adventure, and movement that Joe appeared to grieve for most profoundly and that he identified as a loss of ‘contact’ with himself. ‘I don’t like my life. Nee, but I am unhappy with my life because I live here, and this is not my home. This is nothing like my home, and I miss my wife. I miss freedom’ (IC, 5 September 2015).

The move from the family home into Longleaf had involved many losses for Joe; not the least of which was the sense of losing connection with himself and what had been his ‘normal’. His losses were at once about the loss of his aesthetically pleasing physical home, a place he also strongly identified with his sense of self as a man of freedom and ‘quality’.