Stay with our people!
by Dr. Patrick Vinay
President, Living with Dignity
COVID 19 events have given us pause to reflect on our core values and the importance of our life-giving relationships with our close owns. Without wishing to criticize the authorities who have done their best, and to the best of their knowledge, to organize our defences during this pandemic, we need to reflect on our choices and actions in living spaces dedicated to the elderly. There was particular suffering: because of the health policies of confinement that had not foreseen the course of events, many families had to abandon their loved ones who were being cared for, while many were dying of complications from COVID. Health policies must now be developed for the future that better take into account what seniors are experiencing and their vital need for contact with their loved ones.
Our caregivers, with their masks, gowns, visors, and all reasonable precautions in place to protect themselves, acted on the priority given to caring for the sick, while accepting for themselves the risks of the pandemic. We admire their dedication and are enlightened by their testimony: their determination offered in the face of potential danger did not hold their hands. They were there. They did everything they could, and the Canadian military came to their aid with great skill. That is certainly a bright side of this pandemic. Our gratitude goes out to all of them, but that does not exempt us from thinking about the future.
Indeed, our parents who are ill or confined to long-term care centres have been deprived of visits from their loved ones in order to protect them and their immediate families, other beneficiaries, local caregivers and the entire society that revolves around these places of life. Could we have done otherwise? Even though our seniors have benefited from the work of the attendants and caregivers, they have lost that familiar and loving presence of their loved ones that changes the colour of the present. They have been condemned to solitude, to the loss of those human landmarks that are their loved ones. And they have been deprived of the privilege of being present with them, especially in the last moments of life. People at the end of life go through a profound period of identity maturation. They have a particular need for contact with their loved ones, for exchanges with them, for the explicit reformulation of their choices, in order to face the questions that arise in them. They need the comfort that comes from the love of their own. Depriving them of the dear faces at this time of great interior mobility brings forth new suffering that is very real, and also contagious in their own way. This deprives them of the desire to live and thus contributes to their fragility. And their loved ones cannot begin the normal mourning process that begins in the last moments of life with them: it is a determinant of the health of the survivors that is threatened.
Shouldn’t things be organized differently in order to better preserve the presence of loved ones with seniors by including certain significant people in the care teams and providing them with all the personal protection techniques required? This would make it possible to provide care without amputating all encounters and without suppressing the expression of a humanity that is continually maturing. We should also facilitate the accompaniment by a volunteer, by this generous stranger who gives his or her time and all his or her listening skills to create a human environment around the most lonely people.
How can these relational imperatives be reintroduced into protection practices in times of pandemic? Innovative thinking and proposals are required here. And it is up to public health to open its eyes and hands to create more inclusive contexts for these precious links. It is a matter of keeping life that continues to have its full flavour despite the adoption of precautionary measures.