When I was a teenager, my father was effectively sacked by his own father from the family business, but that’s another story. Before long, the multiple sclerosis with which he’d been diagnosed many years before, and which had been more or less manageable, took on renewed vigour. So much for the link between unemployment and ill health. A few years later, after downsizing house and lifestyle, he had reached a point of serious decrepitude. Since then he’s been in a home. Was it the right choice?
Like many an ageing invalid, he was resistant to the idea.
He preferred the comforts of home, the company of my mother, and his domestic routine. He was also fearful of being in an institution. Added to which were the guilty feelings of those around him, me included, who thought being in such an institution might not be such a bad thing.
But frankly, he’s never looked back. The place is clean and well-run. Besides, he spent years of his childhood at boarding school, and in those antiseptic corridors he no doubt finds something familiar. By now he’s almost completely doolally, but like many residents in such places, he also seems to live in an uncanny state of euphoria.
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It’s the routine that’s key. Freud said that pleasure comes from repetition, and it’s this that institutions excel at. What my father feared was not the home per se, but change. Once the new situation had become familiar, he was back on solid ground.
Do you have a conundrum for our philosopher? Email rrsmith@sundaytimes.co.uk