Care and the luxury of trauma: A South African story

Abstract

My mother died of lung cancer on 15 January 2011. For almost a year she had been living with my wife and me. She came to us after a series of falls (associated, we later discovered, not with the illness itself but with medication she was taking). She had been living for many years quite independently in a facility for old people and after falling in her apartment a few times she went into the frail care section where she could be monitored more closely. She spent two nights in frail care, and on both of these nights she fell so badly that she later required surgery, once to stitch up a deep wound on her forehead and once to repair an injury to her spine. After these two falls on consecutive nights, my wife and I decided that we could not leave my mother in the frail care unit any longer. Subsequently, after a period in hospital for the first of her surgeries, she came to live with us. We were very worried she might fall again, and so was she, and from then on we employed care workers from a local service to be with her 24 hours a day. Our lives became very different from what we had been used to. Not only was there the adjustment to living with my mother again after living apart for almost forty years, but we were living with a person who was dying. We also had an ever-changing group of care workers, 24 hours a day, whose job it was to “care” for my mother, over and above making sure that she did not fall and hurt herself seriously.