I love this picture, it is framed and mounted at the top of our stairs at home. The picture is of my paternal grandmother, and I believe that she was about eighteen at the time dating it around the year 1900. I only knew my grandma as an old lady and she died a few days before my fourteenth birthday aged one hundred years, which in 1972 was quite an achievement. I remember visiting her every week with my parents, her last four or five years were spent in a geriatric hospital in a ward with about ten or eleven other women. The staff at the hospital were lovely, and my gran was well cared for, but even today all these years later, I remember the metal beds, the smell of the place and my dad’s misery when he said one day “I hate this place, all these people just waiting to die” I believed that my gran deserved much better, she was an amazing, gifted lady who had lived life to the full, even flying to Ireland for the first time in her eighties.
One of the great privileges of my present role is that I lead worship once a month in our local Methodist Home, Norwood. I often think about my gran as I stand in front of a room full of people in their twilight years. The comparison between Norwood and the hospital where my gran spent her final months of life is quite stark and I note just how far care for our elderly loved ones has come in the last fifty years. Care homes these days look much more like hotels than hospitals and whilst many of the residents would love to live their final time of life in their own home, they are well cared for and are stimulated by a whole range of activities, and I am so impressed by the work that the devoted staff members do. Today is Methodist Home’s Sunday, the day when people throughout the Methodist Church give thanks for the work MHA does, and it is a day when many people will make donations for the continuing work.
Methodist Homes for the Aged was established as an independent charity in September 1943, meaning that later this year they will be celebrating eighty years of work and today they are the largest charity care giver in the country. Today, they care for over eighteen thousand residents, many in one of their eighty-eight specialist care homes, but also caring for people in their own homes. I am personally thankful for the wonderful staff at our local home, Norwood, in Ipswich who do an excellent job and are amazing to work with. It is perhaps too easy for us to forget the journey we have been on over the last three years and each time I visit the home, I am reminded of the horrendous situation so many of our care providers experienced and am thankful that those days are now confined to history.
My Grandma was one hundred years old in June 1972, and the hospital laid on a big party for her, which to be honest, I think she found the whole thing quite overwhelming. It was a moment of great pride when she received her telegram from the Queen. Back in those days, she was the only person I knew who achieved a hundred years of life. I have known so many more people since then and have celebrated several hundredth birthdays. It is still a huge achievement, and I am thankful for the army of people across our land who care for people in their later lives and I am thankful for the way that care has developed during my lifetime.