Tags:
Journalism of Courage
What does it feel like to be old in America? At the Westminster Thurber Retirement Community here, Heather Ramirez summed it up in two words. “Painful,” she said,. “frustrating.”
Ramirez is only 33, but on a recent morning she took part in a three-hour training programme called Xtreme Aging, designed to simulate the diminished abilities associated with old age.
Along with 15 colleagues and a reporter, Ramirez, a social worker at the facility, put on distorting glasses to blur her vision; stuffed cotton balls in her ears to reduce her hearing, and in her nose to dampen her sense of smell; and put on latex gloves with adhesive bands around the knuckles to impede her manual dexterity. Everyone put kernels of corn in their shoes to approximate the aches that come from losing fatty tissue.
They became virtual members of the 5.3 million-strong segment of Americans age 85 and older, the nation’s fastest-growing age group.
As the population in the developing world ages, simulation programmes like Xtreme Aging have become a regular part of many nursing or medical school curricula and have crept into the corporate world, where knowing what it is like to be elderly increasingly means better understanding one’s customer or even employee.
“I must say, you look lovely,” said Vicki Rosebrook, executive director of the Macklin Intergenerational Institute in Findlay, Ohio, which developed Xtreme Aging as a sensitivity training program for schools, churches, workplaces and other groups that have contact with the elderly.
Then Rosebrook put the group through a series of routine tasks, including buttoning a shirt, finding a number in a telephone book, dialing a cell phone and folding and unfolding a map. Some tasks were difficult, some impossible. The type in the telephone book appeared microscopic, the buttons on the cell phone even smaller. And forget about refolding a map or handling coins from a zippered wallet.
“The next time you’re in line at the grocery store and you’re thinking, ‘You old geezer, hurry up,’ just think about how this felt,” she said.
To approximate the state of people entering a nursing home, she asked each participant to write down five favourite possessions, five cherished freedoms and three loved ones on Post-it notes. Then one by one she asked members of the group to part with possessions, freedoms, and family and friends — until all that anyone had left was a pair of possessions.
Kim Hansen, 46, who works in the facility’s rehabilitation unit, said the hardest part of the exercise was giving up the people in her life. “I gave up my parents first,” she said. “Then it was between my husband and my kids. I gave up my husband. I got very emotional with that.”
