Befriending for Age Concern

Whilst on countdown for baby Browns imminent arrival, I am still managing to fit in my visits to Rose and Peter, an elderly couple in Stacksteads, who I met through Age Concern 4 years ago. 

I started voluntary work when we lost our granddad, and seeing how my gran had to adapt to life on her own after 60 years of marriage, it made me so sad to think of so many old folk who are desperately lonely.  It seems the older a person becomes the less visible they are.  

I spend a lot of time with elderly people due to the care I provide for my little gran who is 91 years old, and now my regular visits to Rose and Peter.  The more time I spend with them the more I realise that, whilst their bodies are frail and their minds sometime fail them, inside is still a human being who hasn’t forgotten what it is like to love, laugh and cry.   

I could say lots about the training, the excellent befriending matches, on-going support, safeguarding issues, signposting to other services, and lots of other formal stuff but what this is really about is people. The lovely, interesting, caring, funny, challenging, intelligent, mischievous, confused, warm, frightened, angry, gentle, beautiful, playful, amazing people I have had the privilege of befriending.  I would never have met Rose and Peter without being a volunteer.

 

My visits usually last about 2 hours and involve lots of cake and subsequent chats about the calories that were in that cake, and what I will need to do that week to burn those calories off !  Peter is a great story teller who loves a good gossip, he retired early due to ill health and now cares for his wife who is profoundly deaf.  Although there are two of them, they have no family and seem to get quite lonely, and look forward to my visits.  I always seem to come away with something useful, this week was a rape alarm which sounds at 145 decibels and is equivalent to the noise coming from a jet engine 100 feet off the ground.  Rose kept sounding the alarm, because bless her, she couldn’t hear it !

 

We have quite a set routine, a bit of a chat about what’s been going on, what they have watched on TV or updates on my family, especially my sister who they watch without fail.  We cover current affairs, the state of the feral cat population and how we are single handedly going to save them all, their failing health and how they have donated their bodies to medical science, and the practical jokes he likes to play on his neighbour.

Anyone out there with just a spare hours a week, go for it.  Volunteer.