There are scales that are used to try and quantify what constitutes a life worth living, mainly as a way of channelling resources into palliative and end of life care. It should be noted that palliative care is any care that is intended to provide comfort rather than cure and can be offered alongside curative treatment, whereas end of life care means just what it says. Many people who are disabled or seriously ill may find that they have no quality of life according to these scales.
When discussing the theory of quality of life, what tends to be discussed is what makes people feel they are experiencing good quality lives, rather than focusing on the physical limitations they may have. These things tend to change throughout the life course, and are usually classified as hedonic (focused on immediate pleasure) and eudaimonic (focused on long term fufilment). I find my children immensely important to my quality of life in a way that my teenage sibling does not, indeed cannot. Fifteen years ago, my quality of life depended solely on my ability to be able to go out and get ratted. That is...slightly less the case now. Then you can take wider environmental concerns into accounts; things like living in a decent quality house, being able to find work, living in a low-crime area. It's difficult to have good quality of life living somewhere that makes you frightened. It's difficult to have a good quality of life if your main goal is wealth but you are poor. It's difficult to have a good quality of life is you are not able to do what you want through disability or illness. Quality of life is a multifaceted idea that can't really be quantified. Though, sociology being what it is, they keep trying.
My mum's quality of life at the moment is objectively crap. She can't eat much. She's mainly confined to bed. She's on some hardcore pain relief. Using the various oncology ratings for quality of life, she scores very poorly. She has hospice nurses coming in to cast their knowing eye over her medication and help support my dad. She has district nurses coming too, for clinical care. It would be very easy to look at her life at the moment and sadly shake your head and sigh at how bad she must feel.
You'd be dead wrong.
She has my dad. My mum and dad have been married for almost 32 years. They weren't together long before they got married, and I daresay a few people shook their heads and muttered that it wouldn't last, but it has. They are still in love, still in tune, still in harmony.
They have seven kids. Seven! They have nearly ten grandchildren, and some of their children haven't even got started yet (we breed like Weasleys). And believe me, if our love could heal, she'd be fine.
She has her twin back, which has completed her.
She lies in the garden, come rain or shine, with a cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, plumped up on cushions and watching the birds (or sometimes, the cat EATING the birds). When it gets dark, Dad puts on the fairy lights and she lays in her grotto and she's happy. Tired, sometimes in pain, but happy.
Cancer has stripped away most of the stresses of life. Now she is living for now, with no eye on some future anxiety, with no grief for what she cannot have. She is not afraid. She has faith in God and believes that she will go on.
The day I found out Mum had cancer, my friend (unknowingly) shared this poem on twitter and as I have watched Mum come home from hospital and take root in the garden, it becomes more and more apt.
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds,
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not take their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
No comments:
Post a Comment