Vermeulen, L.

English

International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion online publications

UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl)UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository)Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing homeVermeulen, L.Publication date2018Document VersionFinal published versionLicenseCC BY-NC-SALink to publicationCitation for published version (APA):Vermeulen, L. (Author). (2018). Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home.Web publication or website, Somatosphere. http://somatosphere.net/2018/09/folding-time-walk-talking-joint-moments-in-the-nursing-home.htmlGeneral rightsIt is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s)and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an opencontent license (like Creative Commons).Disclaimer/Complaints regulationsIf you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, pleaselet the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the materialinaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letterto: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Youwill be contacted as soon as possible.Download date:10 Mar 2023Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home | Somatospherehttp://somatosphere.net/2018/09/folding-time-walk-talking-joint-moments-in-the-nursing-home.html[29-10-2018 12:07:02]A collaborative websitecovering the intersections ofmedical anthropology,science and technologystudies, cultural psychiatry,psychology and bioethics.HomeAboutMastheadResourcesTagsSelect Tag~Stories about time shifted, folded and shared, the extraordinary ordinary, and keeping separate and being a-part. September 17, 2018Folding time: walk-talking jointmoments in the nursing homeBy Laura VermeulenWe knew each other from the drop-in centre. Aspects of our daily life concernshad been shared. ‘We’ were drop-in centre participants: the majority had beendiagnosed with a form of dementia and were living alone. Others werevolunteering, overseeing the daily course of events or, like myself, doingresearch. We had shared with Willem (74) attempts at keeping up daily life inthe face of memory loss and others’ concerned support. This encompassedpractices of eating well, of looking after keys and bicycles that tended to getlost, of caring for one’s house, and of being in close contact with GPs,neighbours and relatives.Willem had shared with us reflections on his rich and troubled life. Throughthese reflections, we had become familiar with the way he transformednarratives about his past into life mottos that enabled him to get out of bedevery day. We knew how the way he plotted his future was rooted in place-based practices that were intimately linked to the inner city apartment andneighbourhood he lived in, and which harboured many of his memories. Wealso thought we could, to some humble extent, support Willem by engaginghim in drop-in centre projects.In the spring of 2016, despite their efforts to stay together in their worriedconcern for his situation, the network of people surrounding Willem brokedown. In the traces of that social network falling apart, Willem quickly movedto a nursing home. No longer able to walk the streets with him that we hadoften explored together while talking about his life, I was afraid we had losthim as a person whom we could ask how he was doing. That we had lost theThinking with DementiaEdited by Krause, Kristine;Pols, Jeannette;Driessen, Anneliekeand Yates-Doerr, EmilyContributorsSusanne van den BuuseFrancesco ColonaAnnelieke DriessenAlessandro DurantiSilke HoppeKristine KrauseNatashe Lemos DekkerIngunn MoserElinor OchsJeannette PolsAnnekatrin SkeideLaura VermeulenHenrik VighMaarten van WestenEmily Yates-DoerrOverviewIntroductionTimeDaily lifeParticipationLicense: Log inScience,Medicine, andAnthropologyFollow us: 1 CommentAging, Alzh imer, anthropology,Care/caregiving, Dementia,ethnography, Europe, fieldwork,Mental health, Method, nursinghome, Phenomenology, time,world-building   Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home | Somatospherehttp://somatosphere.net/2018/09/folding-time-walk-talking-joint-moments-in-the-nursing-home.html[29-10-2018 12:07:02]opportunity to share a world with him by joining him in his place-basedpractices of routines, projects and plans.Days, months and a year into Willem’s stay at the nursing home taught us thatthis was not the case. Willem’s first period in his new residency was marked byhim making new plans. With some of these plans, most of the peoplesurrounding Willem could, however loving or grim they were, easily relate tothem. Such as when he told his daughter that he had fallen in love again, orwhen he shared plans to move back to the big city with visiting drop-in centrefriends. In other plans, it was more difficult for us to partake. This included themoment when Willem told his daughter that he was very happy because he hadseen his mother again. His mother, whom he had told me before had died whenhe was in his forties, he now knew to be applying for a position in the nursinghome’s staff! Yet despite the fact that Willem drew on times very differentfrom the ones we thought of when narrating his current situation, he stillseemed to create a time-world we could join in on. By speaking about hismother as applying for a job at the home, Willem made far-away moments intime meet our shared world of his current situation in the nursing home.I learned more about the way Willem created joint moments by folding timewhen I visited him one day in May 2017. On the evening of that day, Willemhugged me when he saw me, and took my arm. We didn’t go upstairs for acoffee in the home’s restaurant as we usually did. Instead, we quickly foundourselves walk-talking[1] the dimly lit nursing home corridors, exploring pathsI imagined him walking often during his days on the closed ward.As I asked Willem how life was, he told me that more people were about tovisit him soon. This was a good development, he thought. It showed him thathe had “not fallen out of the lap yet” (Dat betekent dat ik nog niet uit de schootgevallen ben).[2] Without these visits, he pondered, it would be difficult tocope. “And that is another thing”, he said as we were approaching a smallbench at the end of the corridor before turning right into another hallway. “Mymother died.”Here Willem stopped. He did not look at me, but his voice had lowered, and,looking up, I saw that his eyes were softening. We were standing there, stillsupporting each other’s arms. I softly commented on the gravity of his loss,confirming how his mother had been a very important woman, and he told mehow the loss had severely affected him. “I have really…” he said, and then hesuddenly bent his knees, pulling my own arm down along with him, and stoodupright again. “I could feel it from here” – he lifted up his shirt collar at theback of his neck – “to there” – and he briefly lifted his leg and reached forwardto pull at the cloth of his trousers covering his knee.A moment later, we started walking again, and I asked Willem how he wascoping. He brought in comments on his current situation. “The thing is”, hepondered, “I now have to concoct something myself (Nu moet ik er iets vangaan brouwen). And that is not very easy these days”, he added in a weakvoice, looking at me with a faint smile. “There is little fuel left (Maar het gasis een beetje op).”Turning into the bright light of the ward’s living room a moment later,Willem’s tone of voice returned to the positive bustle I was so familiar with.This, however, did not prevent him from saying that he had to continue living,hoping that other people still liked him being around, and that he continued toaim to return to the big city. When I asked him why he wanted to return, heFolding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home | Somatospherehttp://somatosphere.net/2018/09/folding-time-walk-talking-joint-moments-in-the-nursing-home.html[29-10-2018 12:07:02]said that he was “kept busy with activities” at the nursing home, but that theplace “[did] not really allow [him] to live.” “Live my own life”, he addedfrowning. Then he smiled faintly.During this evening conversation, Willem wove together an account of hiscurrent situation that I marked as unusually grim, and a story about the difficultloss of his mother that, chronologically speaking, must have taken place thirtyyears ago. In doing so, he not only made far away moments in time meet in away that strengthened their respective messages. By both plotting his storyalong a stroll on his familiar ward, and by physically pulling me along in hismoment of despair, he allowed me to join in, for a tiny moment, in his worldthat was rimmed with a sense of abandonment by others and by his own lifeenergies that particular evening.A year into Willem’s nursing home residency, the question of whether wecould share a world with him had proved not to be dependent on us sharingdaily concerns and place-based practices with similar orientations in time.Shared worlds could be created by folding time together, narratively andviscerally, by walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home.[1] The term “talk-walk” has been used in the context of the walking seminarhosted by Annemarie Mol at the University of Amsterdam. The initiative’sblog page reads: “Talking-while-walking enhances thinking in ways notattainable behind a desk or in a seminar sitting down.” My reversal of‘walking’ and ‘talking’ in this case is meant to emphasise the primacy ofwalking in this encounter I had with Willem. It was walking and exploringinstead of talking that we set out for.[2] Willem’s language use is particularly creative in this instance. By saying“dat ik nog niet uit de schoot gevallen ben”, he implicitly combines threeexpressions: 1) ‘falling off the lap’ (van de schoot vallen); 2) ‘falling out offavour’ (uit de gratie vallen); and 3) ‘being born of the womb’ (uit de schootgeboren worden).Laura Vermeulen is a PhD candidate at the Long Term Care and Dementiaresearch team at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation explores world-building processes as engaged in by community dwelling and single-livingpeople with dementia in The Netherlands. Probing stillness, sociality and timein the everyday lives of her interlocutors, Laura discusses the withdrawal ofeveryday life worlds using phenomenological and philosophical approaches asa lens. Alongside her work on her dissertation Laura has conducted severalprojects in applied and collaborative anthropology. She recently finished alarge-scale evaluation project on a care workers’ training programme fundedby the Ministry of Health. Laura currently works at an academic learning lab,the Ben Sajetcentre. She is co-author of “Dementia and the good life.Collaborations with the field.” (Medical Anthropology Theory, February 6th,2018) and of “Moments of collaboration: practicing relating differently indialogue meetings.” (paper in progress).[view academic citations]Other stories from Time:

Folding time: walk-talking joint moments in the nursing home

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