A death in the village

When a quiet, private man, living in a retirement village has a fatal heart attack, his body is not discovered for five days.  Keryn Curtis hears the story from the daughter of one of the village residents.  Initially it is with outrage that such a thing could happen in that environment.  But as they talk, they agree that it’s, well…complicated.  And there’s little to gain from a blame game.

I had an interesting conversation a couple of weeks ago with a neighbour in her mid-sixties – let’s call her Sandra- whose mother lives in a retirement village.  “Oh, have I got a story for you,” she told me when we caught up in the dog park after the New Year.

The story concerned the very unfortunate circumstances around the death of a resident in her mother’s retirement village, which went undetected for several days.  The resident in question was a quiet man in his seventies who lived alone in his unit and volunteered for a well-known care-related service at night. Let’s call him ‘Jim’.

In the view of his fellow residents in the village, Jim was “a pleasant enough fellow who mostly kept to himself”.

Because he kept a different timetable to most of the other residents, it wasn’t unusual for nobody to see Jim for a few days or even a couple of weeks.  Word was that he had a child or children but he was not known to have many visitors.

In the view of his fellow residents in the village, Jim was “a pleasant enough fellow who mostly kept to himself”.  He wasn’t very social and didn’t invite friendships.

So when Jim had a fatal heart attack, it took a while for anyone to notice.   In fact it took five days before he was finally discovered.  Several residents complained of an unpleasant smell that had developed and intensified over the week but nobody could quite pin it down.  The circumstances leading to Jim’s eventual discovery (by the maintenance man) are best left alone, but according to Sandra’s mother, the maintenance man hasn’t been himself since.

Is anyone to blame?

Sandra finished telling me the story, slightly breathless, her eyes alert for my outraged response.  “So this is the sort of thing that you hear about happening in big public housing developments,” she went on with a confident air of outrage. “People being dead for days and weeks and years and nobody noticing…

“But you don’t expect to have that happen to you in a retirement village!”

Well… I began.

“What about the management? I mean, what’s the point of moving to a retirement village if you aren’t going to be looked out for and at least checked up on?” she declared.

“Well…,” I began again, “the thing is, a retirement village isn’t an aged care home.  People might be in their 70s, 80s or 90s but they live there independently; many take extended holidays, some go to work.  They usually go there because it is a way of downsizing from the family home that frees you up from a lot of maintenance while also providing a range of facilities, amenities and social benefits.

“But you can live there any way you want,” I said.  “Most retirement villages these days offer things like call buttons in the units and many offer lots of other forms of support for ‘peace of mind’. There are a lot things changing too,” I added.  “Often there will be a good gym, an on-site nurse and health facilities and you can have quite a lot of services and assistance delivered in.

“But as long as you abide by the laws and regulations, nobody can make you do anything.  Some people just don’t want anyone ‘meddling’ in their lives and can be quite rude about rejecting any overtures from management, other residents or anyone else offering support or even ‘looking out’ for them.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that; yes, I suppose you’re right,” Sandra said, slightly surprised but already visibly recalibrating her views.

“Yes, I can see that,” she capitulated.  “And actually, Mum says the guy’s family doesn’t blame the management at all,” she added.

Village management protocols

But she continued,”I don’t think the management handled it very well. They didn’t seem to have any protocol. They just went into defensive mode, avoiding the whole thing,” she said. “The only reason mum found out a few details was because she’s a busy-body and she went up and talked to the man’s daughter, when she came to pack up his unit.”

While residents didn’t blame management, they had expected some sort of thoughtful gesture from the village management: a nice letter to residents; a special item in the newsletter; a morning tea to acknowledge the man’s passing and enable people to come together, share stories and memories, ask questions and perhaps even discuss how this situation might be avoided in the future.

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of ‘neighbourhood watch’ arrangement in retirement villages?” she asked.

Many do, I said.  But it’s up to the residents and the village how they choose to balance security provision against expectations (or demands) for privacy.

A complicated issue

“I think a lot of people like me,” Sandra went on, “probably assume that you automatically get that kind of security – someone at least looking out for you – if you live in a retirement village.”

And so we went on to discuss what WE would want in a retirement village.  In the case of socially active chatterboxes such as ourselves, we agreed, it would take all of five minutes before someone noticed how quiet it was and wondered where we were…

If choosing to move to a village, at least in part, for some sort of ‘peace of mind’ not available to us living at home, what level of privacy would we be prepared to sacrifice?  What level of ‘surveillance’ or ‘supervision’ would be prepared to accept?  What would be totally unacceptable?

Another question we pondered is whose job it is to do the looking-out?  Should it be the village management or the resident body, we wondered? What is the responsibility of family members? Should everyone moving into a village be automatically signed up to some minimum level of surveillance?  How do retirement villages deal with that?

The lure of technology

For me, especially if I was on my own, I would be very happy to sign up to some form of ‘passive monitoring’.  There is so much clever, unintrusive technology that can be installed in homes now where the technology monitors a few triggers in your daily patterns of behaviour – in the background.

If you usually open your curtains or raise your blind by a certain time (and one day you don’t) or you haven’t opened the bathroom door by 10am one day or you fail to open the fridge door by lunchtime, an automated alert message is sent to a human, who can then call you, call a family member, or send someone to the door to check everything is OK.

Of course, I’d like to think that living in a close community would mean a strong network of friends and neighbours, as well as village staff, just naturally keeping an eye out for one another.  I am certain there are many places where this is largely the case.

But hey, humans are humans – we’re not all the same. And we tend to change our views over time too.  To be happy, we need choices and flexibility.  But we also have to understand that all choices come with sacrifices.

If you live in a retirement village, how do you look out for others?  What level of ‘surveillance’ is acceptable to you?

If you are a manager or operator of a retirement village, how do you deal with this and what is your view?

I think this is a conversation worth exploring a lot more and baby boomers need to be involved too.