Page 53 - Green Builder Magazine May-June 2019 Issue

CREDIT: GLENNER TOWN SQUARE

Reaching out. New experiences such as yoga can be encouraged in village visitors, who are more likely to want to learn when in comfortable surroundings.
have had on young women or Walt Disney’s own anti-communist games, his memories may be sanitized and recast, neutralizing the
fervor and their eyes glaze over. And let’s not even mention “The real lessons that his experience may carry to future generations.
Song of the South.” Which way to Mickey’s parade? I challenge the designers of dementia villages to make them
Dementia villages, on the other hand, take the Disney model and more than “God’s waiting rooms” and resist regurgitating nostalgic
add a societal value. Where Disney’s primary aim is to comfort fantasies of a time and place that never was (for a deeper dive on
the comfortable with escapism, Alzheimer’s villages may reduce this, read The Way We Never Were by Stephanie Coontz, about the
su ering for families and patients. For people who have watched real conditions in 1950s America).
loved ones descend into Hades with Alzheimer’s and/or dementia, Let’s have a library stocked with Popular Mechanics, yes, but also
these artiƒcial reality experiments are simply the last, best hope for books about the futility of war, Climate Change and Buddhism
comforting the a icted. Making their confused loved ones feel some basics. In the theater, let’s reverse engineer the propaganda of
sense of belonging again, familiarity or simply reducing their stress white supremacy, male supremacy and American supremacy with
levels may be seen as a priceless soul balm. storylines that encourage new brain cells to replace old, withered
So forgive me if I sound too critical of the dementia village concept. (and frankly, unkind) ones.
It is not without merit, particularly in light of the alternatives. As Why stick to stereotypes? Serve up the familiar with new
a friend pointed out, the current system of warehousing dementia challenges. Isn’t that the goal? To make people feel more comfortable,
patients in sterile nursing home settings, where they may wake up at the same time urging them to activate their mental facilities? For
frightened, confused and alone, is heartbreaking. The thought that some, this might be the deepest they’ve ever looked at their lives
grandpa might be able to walk into the artiƒcial quaint small town he and beliefs.
remembers, sit down in a diner and order a co ee, while talking to sta In the next dementia village, let’s install soda stands and
dressed in period clothing, removes a certain burden from our hearts. 50-cent movie theaters, sure, but let’s also introduce a mayor who’s
On the other hand, not every fantasy Grandpa likes to remember proudly First Nation. He’s good friends with the chief of police, who
should be indulged. is Pakistani and Muslim, and a gay couple who run the local diner.
The T-Bird is being converted into the ƒrst-ever solar electric car,
HACKING THE NOSTALGIA NARRATIVE and a nerdy testing center sta ed with white guys in crewcuts, and
We seem to be careening toward a future of overlapping virtual Latino and Asian scientists, is proving “deƒnitively” that cigarettes
realities. Can’t we at least make the narratives kinder, more inclusive cause cancer, that seatbelts work and that all human beings are
and less reinforcing of our worst behavior? To date, dementia villages created equal.
seem tailored to white, middle class fantasies about the “golden age”
of their youth, not the real world of segregated water fountains, FAD OR INSTITUTION?
“mother’s little helpers,” chronic alcoholism, post traumatic wartime There’s no denying the attraction of dementia villages for those
stress and the rest. who need them. But I for one would like to see them pass into
That doesn’t mean we have to highlight all the negatives in these the graveyard of 21st century oddities soon, rather than become as
virtual settings. But rather than engage visitors as two-dimensional ubiquitous as Starbucks.
caricatures of their former selves, why not let a little actual reality Alzheimer’s disease research has shown several promising leaps
into the scene? Take that World War II soldier, for instance, who forward recently, so there’s reason to hope. In the meantime, if we
may have endured untold horrors during the conŒict. In the brightly must warehouse our aging relatives in la la land, let’s make it a place
lit, bloodless world of a dementia village, as in virtual reality war that their 20-something grandchildren can visit without cringing. GB

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