You’ll see, you will be fine, mum

For the first time, the director of a retirement center for dependent elderly people (EHPAD) testifies

For nearly three years, Jean Arcelin managed an EHPAD in the south of France, before giving up, exhausted by an overflow of emotions and revolted by the weakness of the means put at his disposal. He rubbed shoulders with the worst but also the beautiful: the existence of isolated old people, most of the time without visits, who cling to life, comfort each other and replenish morsels of happiness.

Women and men who moved him to tears, made him laugh too, and whose daily life he fondly recalls.

Closing this book, we will long think of one frightened old lady, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, who lives a wonderful love story with a disabled man; a man who tells her to reassure her: “I will be your head, you will be my legs! ”

We will especially take a stand against those companies that, for the sake of economy, leave “our old people” too often alone, left to themselves for lack of staff, humiliated by the lack of care and attention. “As if society as a whole, says Jean Arcelin, wanted to bury them alive …”

A tender and chilling account.

At the end of the book, you will find advice and concrete solutions to take up one of the biggest challenges of our aging societies.