“A Matter of Time”: Time and Temporalities in Senior Care Facilities
“I know what time is, as long as no one asks me to explain it,” wrote Saint Augustine in his Confessions back in the Middle Ages [1]. Resistant to definition, and in modern physics a human construct, time is perceived differently by each of us.
In everyday life, we say that moments of happiness “pass in a flash” while difficult moments “drag on slowly and painfully.” We discover at least two dimensions of time: its multiplicity of meaning, and its fluidity. Which means: each person has their own experience of time, shaped by their history and their reflection on it. We might therefore accept that time is plural, a subjective time, lived through many different and interconnected temporalities.
In Senior Care Facilities, things become even more complex. Defined as medicalised long-term care settings, these facilities house an exceptionally heterogeneous population, both in terms of residents’ levels of dependency and their personal life trajectories. When dementia enters the picture, or memory loss, or when we are dealing with very elderly people perpetually adrift in a kind of hazy reverie, can we still assume they are operating within any recognisable logic of time?
“How many years have I been here? Four!” answers one resident, every single year.
Older residents living with dementia seem to inhabit a point where dozens of different temporalities converge: there is chronological age, but also the age one believes oneself to be; the current year; the day they were brought here, the years they have been here; the time for meals and the time for exercise; the afternoon coffee hour, but also the time shown on an old watch; bath day; important holidays; “back in my day, I…”; the days since the last phone call from family; the days since they last saw them; the years of life that remain.
One resident, well into her nineties, believes she is living through the second or third decade of her life. She is, in her own account, the head nurse at a large island hospital, and addresses the care facility staff as colleagues, always promising to do them favours, arrange their shifts however they like, shower them with gifts.
Forever hungry, literally and figuratively full of appetite for life, when asked whether she has eaten she always says no, even with traces of food still around her mouth. The afternoon coffee cup is greeted each day with unmistakable longing. She drinks it down in one go, visibly satisfied: “The coffee here is wonderful! That’s why I only drink it here, I never go anywhere else!”
How does one approach such a singular relationship with what is called normal ageing? Freud tells us clearly that the unconscious is timeless (zeitlos), in some sense disconnected from the logic of chronological time. In dreams, for example, the dreamer can appear at various ages simultaneously, or in no particular chronological order.
In the timelessness of the unconscious, old age does not exist. There is, as Paul Laurent Assoun reminds us [2], a gap between the subject of the unconscious, who resists ageing, and the body that changes with the passage of time. In care facilities one sometimes encounters very elderly residents who call their fellow residents “grandma,” even when those residents are younger than themselves. As if old age were something that applied to others, never to oneself.
As a real place of living, Senior Care Facilities stand at the crossroads of many different temporal logics. There, the present is multiple: “the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future,” as Kostis Papayiorgis might have put it. Here is one more small piece of what genuine care for older adults requires: to care means managing to slip, even briefly, into the temporality of the other.
References
- Augustine of Hippo (1999). Confessions (Vol. II). Patakis Publications.
- Assoun, P. L. (1983). Le vieillissement saisi par la psychanalyse. Communications, 37(1), 167-179.
- Papayiorgis, K. (2008). On Memory. Kastaniotis Publications.
