-
7. Beyond Fear and Anxiety
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
c h a p t e r s e v e n Beyond Fear and Anxiety The monologue continues: Yup! You’ve got it right: I’m scared and I’m worried about my forgetfulness. My friends all joke about it. But what good is it to know what psychologists say about fear and anxiety? I want to know what to do about it! Isn’t there some kind of pill I could take? For starters, our imaginary friend might read Anne Basting’s (2009) book Forget Memory.1 In the concluding chapter, Basting writes that we need to get beyond the fear so that we can create better lives for persons who are living with dementia and, in the process, create a better world for all persons to grow old in. Basting insists that people need to find the courage to ignore the sound bites of tragedy found in so many accounts of people who are living with dementia. We do not deny that dementia brings painful loss to persons who have the diagnosis and to their families and friends, and we will say more about suffering in a later chapter. But, through the journey of dementia, there can also be growth and joy. Keeping these opposing images from flying apart poses a challenge to all of us, but if we are going to create communities where all persons are valued, regardless of their mental status, then we need to learn how to do this. Basting describes the kinds of advocacy activities that must occur to create communities where people are proud to acknowledge and take responsibility for their interdependency and where memory loss does not have to produce shame. She makes the important point that young people need and want to be a part of this effort. Contrary to stereotypes about their sense of entitlement, many young adults really do care about making a better world for people living with memory loss. This may come as a surprise to politicians and marketers whose simplistic parsing of generations leaves the impression that people care only about others in their own age group. Basting’s final point on her list of twelve ways to get beyond fear is worth quoting: “Don’t be afraid of reducing fear” (2009, 165). She notes that perpetuating fear and anxiety about dementia helps organizations’ fundraising, because fear may motivate people to donate money to support the search for a cure for the condition that elicits the fear. Some organizations may be afraid of eliminating 110 Aging Together the connection of this powerful aversive emotion to memory loss. But consider the implications of not reducing the fear. Try to imagine a world in which increasing numbers of persons receive the diagnosis of some form of dementia and have to learn to live not only with memory loss but also with the stigma, social malignancy , and excess disability that flourish in a fear-saturated environment. We would rather imagine a different scenario, one in which people have the courage to acknowledge that progressive memory loss may come to any of us, that we are all traveling the dementia road together, and that we are not driving our own vehicles, isolated from one another and using up Earth’s resources to preserve that isolation. The image of traveling this road together reminds us of a time when a new highway was built in our city, part of which included a bridge spanning a beautiful section of the river on which the city had been built more than 150 years earlier. Before the highway opened to vehicles, pedestrians were invited to explore it. People swarmed to see this new highway, especially the view of the river from the bridge. Parents pushed strollers and people propelled themselves in wheelchairs; some rode bicycles and others skimmed along on skateboards. It was a beautiful autumn day, and the shared joy of a huge group of people gathered where individuals in the privacy of their cars and trucks would soon be traveling at high speeds was palpable. In just a few days, people would be terrified to walk, run, skate, or wheel on this road, but for those few hours, there was no fear. There was community. In the introduction to Ageing, Disability, and Spirituality, Elizabeth MacKinlay (2008a) relates a story of how fear drives people apart. After one of her public lectures, MacKinlay, an Anglican priest, geriatric nurse, and director of the Centre for Ageing and Pastoral...