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At this time of the pandemic, in many different contexts, there is particular concern about the health of the elderly. While doing everything possible in relation to physical health is the number one priority, I wonder if we can also think about other projects that may be significant to elders and different generations. 

Perhaps we can generate inter-generational projects with people interviewing elders about how they have endured previous hard times and how the insider knowledge from this could assist others at this time of pandemic.

Gathering, documenting and sharing Elders stories of endurance

• What year were you born?
• In your lifetime, what are some of the things that you and your generation have lived through?
• What was one of the hardest times and how did you live through it? How did you make it through?
• What is one of your fondest memories that relates in some way to getting through hard times?
• Can you tell me a story about this?
• Were there any stories that older people in your life told you (parents, grandparents, other Elders) that have helped you through hard times in the past?
• Are there any mistakes or regrets that you would wish you could prevent for the next generation? 
• If you were to think of any significant things you have learnt over your lifetime, what would these be? And can you tell me a story about who you learnt this from or with?
• We will place your stories and knowledge into a resource to try to assist people through these hard times of the pandemic. If you were to dedicate your contribution to this project to someone (living or no longer alive) who would you dedicate it to? And why?   

Volunteers can interview Elders and then we create a document/resource honouring their knowledge at this time.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, if you know Elders who would like to be involved, please let us know.

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Speaking of endurance … here is a story of someone who lived through the 1918 flu and has survived COID-19 twice!

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Here is the first story that has been generated as part of this project: 

Mildred’s story of endurance

Mildred was interviewed by Reginald Jayamaha and this story was created together.

I (Reginald) am a Catholic priest, working as the assistant pastor at one of the Catholic churches in Adelaide, South Australia. Amidst social distancing, lockdowns and isolation during COVID-19 pandemic our challenge was to innovate new means of carrying out our services to the people. Due to necessary prohibitions against assembly one of the groups who needed our attention most was the elderly who became isolated, cooped up in their houses. Our main concern as priests was to be connected with them and stop the enforced solitude turning into loneliness. One of the suggestions made was to organise a ‘phone tree,’ so that individual volunteers might telephone three or four elderly each day.

Among the many rich stories of elderly, about how they coped with this strange time with the abundance of their past experiences, I like to present the story of Mildred for the ‘Elders knowledge project’ about how she and her generation have endured previous hard times, so that her insider knowledge could assist others at this time of pandemic. First I interviewed her with the questionnaire for the project over the phone and documented it and sent it back, for her to go through the written piece of her contribution for the project, then she added some more details to the story. Later when I asked how she felt about the process, she said that she was so glad to share it, and that she showed it to her next door neighbour too. She and her husband, both are of same age, who did not know each other when they were children but they were from the same town, sat with this written story the whole evening and recalled the memories of eighty years back.

Mildred was born in 1935. World War II broke out in 1939 and lasted for six years. Below is an account by her of the experience from the viewpoint of childhood.

My generation lived through the war as children. I (Mildred) lived in Birmingham, which is a large industrial city in England where armaments were being manufactured at that time. My mother died in 1944 through childbirth when I was nine years old. The bombing was almost over for us by then. There were still unexploded bombs here and there which were attended to by bomb disposal units. No-one I knew was ever injured at that time. It is with great sadness that I have learned since then of children in other war zones in the world who had been maimed in that way.

As I think back to my childhood I can only think of it as a happy time. Back then the people lived more together, neighbours were there and all adults were very caring of all children. We were looked after and protected by everybody because the children were the only future the people in war had got. As for food rationing: we children we never went hungry even though the best we got in sweet foods was bread and jam. Kids of my age who were only four when war broke out were too young to remember ice cream, bananas and oranges so we didn’t miss them. There were some very annoying things, like for instance, we had to carry gas masks with us whenever we left the house. If you had forgotten to take it to school then you had to go all the way home to get it. Not once was it ever needed.

There were the air-raid shelters to cope with. It wasn’t nice to be dragged out of bed at night in the cold and be taken down to the shelter because the warning had sounded. Now there is something we who were children will always remember:-  the sound of the wailing warning siren and the welcoming ‘all clear’ which was one long uninterrupted sound. When the blitz was constant and every night it was decided that we must all go to a communal strongly reinforced shelter and spend the whole night there. Nearly all kids got head lice and scabies, a skin infection. I do remember the particular place we went to was the cellars under Nechells Hall which was the local Methodist church. As Catholics back then we were strictly forbidden to enter any protestant establishment and I dimly remember being told this was alright because we were only going underneath the place. Why would I remember such a silly thing? All I will say is that none of this made us unhappy because we were altogether and surrounded by love and concern.

School was always on. It was something to keep the kids together and safe during the day. My mother was not a Catholic but my dad was and she thought I would be better in a religious environment. So off I went with my friend Pat. When we started instructions for our first Holy Communion Sister learned to her horror that I had never been baptised. I was duly baptised on the same day as my first confession with Pat’s grandmother as my Godmother and she fulfilled that role fully in the years after my mother died. At that time churches were always full. I had no reason to think it had ever been otherwise or that our congregations would ever dwindle.

I do not know what my adult life would have been like if I had not been a child in the war. It is difficult to know such things. Trevor and I are both the same age and both grew up in Birmingham though not in the same suburb. When we migrated to Australia in 1966 we had our two boys and our daughter were born here. We bought a house in Elizabeth where we lived for seven years. One night after the kids were in bed we were sitting alone when we heard an aeroplane fly over the house. We looked at each other then he said, “Do you think it is one of ours?” In that moment we both realised that memory of wartime was still embedded in our consciousness. During those six years of war every time we heard a plane we didn’t know if it was going to drop bombs or if it was one of ours. Remember this was before the jet engine which has a very different sound.     

Another experience that I had is when our boys joined a scout group. We were a part of a group of parents who met to discuss building a permanent shed to replace the shed currently in use. We started the meeting and one of the parents said that he had been to look at one that another group had already built and that we don’t want one like that, it looks like an air raid shelter. I looked at him and realized that, this man George, same age as me, had been in his air raid shelter in Germany while I was in my air raid shelter in Britain. It was the same experience for all the children who were caught up in this war. Even now I get distressed to see war pictures in the news of countries in the Middle East where a whole street is bombed and children are still playing, with a ball or something. I don’t want children to be involved and yet quite honestly, as I told you before, I don’t remember been upset then.

This current emergency we are living through now is not like W.W.2. We are not united in this trial because we are made to isolate ourselves and to isolate our children. [That has been relaxed now.] Plus we are all on the same side of the barricade. I expect that someone may see a similarity in the wearing of face masks and the gas masks back then. A major difference then is that we didn’t ever have to wear them.

In point of fact the hardest time I lived through was being homeless when I was in my teens. My father had been evicted. He went to live in lodgings and I moved from place to place to stay with various families that I knew. From the age of fifteen to twenty one I had seven different addresses. Some were people who had known my mother and some were families of school friends. I stayed longest with Nan, my Godmother. She had had 10 children who she brought up in a little two bed roomed house. When the last one left home I went and stayed until I got married at twenty-one.

A reflection from Reginald

During these times of COVID-19, ‘double listening’ to the stories of elders’ hardships and accompanying survival skills has edified me. The process of getting in touch with the stories of people and their insider knowledge is sensational to me.  I hope the practice can go viral and become more contagious than Corona virus.

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Elders’ stories from Hong Kong 

I am Ho Shan Wong. I am a social worker from an elderly centre in Hong Kong. I would like to share some insider knowledge about Pandemic from a group of older persons in my centre. The group of elderly is Men’s Group in our centre. They had interesting conversations on the topic of wisdom counter against the difficult situation evoked by the pandemic, and they are glad to share their stories to the readers from different countries.

Here are some of the extracts of Men’s Group:

Henry (group member of Men’s Group):

Legacy of “It is Not the Worst”

“’A way to face with adversary situation is to say to myself, “it is not the worst”.  Feeling are comparative, a person would be happy because he/she has been unhappy, and/or, a person would be happy if he/she compares himself/herself to other persons who are more misery than he/she.

A person must be sensible enough to put himself/herself to do the above, he/she would not be overwhelmed by the past misery of himself/herself or past/present misery of other persons. Otherwise, the whole purpose would be defeated.’

These are the notions that my mother taught me when I was very young.

When I was younger, my parents told me, my grandparents told my parents to be content on prevailing conditions, because life of my grandparents were much worse than my parents and also there were other people who were much worse than my grandparents.

This is family education that is passed from one generation to one generation. The substance of such family education is really man-in-the-street wisdom or common sense and for people of past generations, not particularly peculiar. They either have experience of hardship/harder life or even not so, they have witnessed people having hardship/harder life. They are not defeated but become stronger.

I have heard the stories of hardship from my father(over 90 years old), my mother  and other older people. As a person of 90 of age (born in 1930) to review Hong Kong’s history of his life-time, he/she would remember faintly, news about the war broke out in the mainland China (in 1937), then more vividly, the occupation of Hong Kong by the Imperial Japanese Army (in 1941). During that time, he/she would suffer from hunger, fears, uncertainty and even threat of death; particularly, because he was a kid, he/she might feel that the adults would be unable to protect him/her. Such sensations would leave a scar deep in his mind. In retrospect, this period of time would be the most difficult time in his/her life-time. At the end of the 1940s before he/she was reaching 20 of age, he/she had to try hard to locate a job, but even though it was hard to find and hard to work, he/she would eventually settle down and start his/her family.  He/she would have little or none leisure time, least to say to do things they would like to do or to enjoy, such as hobby.  Yet, because this was the way of life of the average persons, he/she would not complain. Even though there were civil war in the mainland and later, regional conflicts, such as the Korea War and the Vietnam War; add the Cultural Revolution, Hong Kong was not gravely affected. During the 1960s, he/she had experienced water shortage and riots. Such events made hard life much harder, but eventually he/she would get through.  1970s and 1980s were uneventful compared to his/her earlier life and he/she would busy keeping up his/her family: to give birth to the next generation, to educate them about their independence, etc.  Then, he/she would find that many opportunities had arisen in the 1990’s due to the “economic reform” in the mainland. But, by then he/she would not be in a position to make the best possible benefit out of it, but rather, his/her next generation (the generation of Henry who is over 60 years old) would ride on the tide. Now, after retiring for many years, he/she found the COVID-19 had overwhelmed the community, but he/she would not scare, he/she would say “what problem I have not seen?” and he/she would say to his/her next generation (Henry), “you have to taste the bitter together with the sweet”.

The stories of my father and mother give me the confidence that the pandemic situation now is not the worst.”

In Hong Kong, many of us may think that the elderly are vulnerable group in pandemic. After the conversations with Henry and the Men’s Group, I changed my impression of the elderly. I found resilience from the wisdom and life experience of the elderly. I am surprised that they are even more confident than the younger generations in the hardship we are experiencing nowadays.

An elder’s story from Sydney, Australia

Gayle was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1943. She shared her story with psychologist Andrew Wu.

My generation experienced great inequality in the way women were treated. Girls didn’t go to university. I went to secretarial college at 14 and became a legal secretary. At 18, I became a court reporter. But I wanted to counteract the idea of not allowing women to be educated to their full potential. I went to TAFE as an adult to get my high-school certificate and was admitted to Macquarie University at 36 years old. I was married at this time and had two children. Between 1980 and 2011, I attained four degrees, including a Master of Education (Honours).

Throughout my life, I have endured schizo-affective disorder. It has been managed by frequent hospitalisations, medication, electroconvulsive therapy and psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists.

After my hip replacement operation in 2016 I was in a lot of pain. I was  admitted to hospital where they discovered I had a life-threatening blood infection. They tried every antibiotic on the market and nothing worked. I was in hospital for six months. My two doctors were very supportive. They never gave up on me. I saw at least one of them every day over the six months.

In 2018 I had to take out an apprehended violence order against my abusive husband. Although it was extremely difficult and I experienced trauma, I finally escaped into a nice unit in a retirement village. I don’t know how I got through all these difficult times of domestic abuse and mental illness, but I kept going and didn’t give up.

I must have learned somehow not to give up. I eventually realised that I am a capable intelligent person and I have four degrees to prove it. The title of my thesis was: An autoethnography of a mature-aged student with a schizo-affective disorder: The place of education in maintaining wellness.

Life in the COVID-19 lockdown has been very challenging, especially living by myself. These are some of things that have kept me going:

• meditation – being in the present, not the past or the future
• showing self-compassion and self-care
• persisting when I want to do something – when I do achieve it, l feel good
• becoming savvy in the use of computers and smartphones so I can keep in touch with grandchildren
• even when I can’t do my usual volunteer work, I try to contribute in other ways like knitting squares for a charity blanket
• exercising – this is very important for physical and mental health.