One sunny morning in August 2017, Mercedes Arribas loaded her mother into the passenger seat of her Renault Grand Scenic minivan.
and took her to a residence on the outskirts of Madrid.
Her mother, Aurelia González, was 78 years old, suffered from Alzheimer's and her deterioration was advancing.
She could no longer walk on her own, but she still talked.
-Come on, mom, we're going to be fine.
-Yes, daughter, everything will be fine.
You will see.
The Nuestra Señora del Carmen public residence was reached by leaving the M-607 motorway that leads to the mountains, at the height of the Autonomous University campus.
Upon entering pushing Aurelia's wheelchair, daughter and mother passed into a central room with a glass ceiling through which the sun's rays filtered.
They were welcomed by a social worker who called the place “this house”.
Mercedes found everything charming.
A few days before that trip, Mercedes had received a call that filled her with joy.
She finally had the place of residence that she had been waiting for four years.
At 50 years old, this divorced mother worked as a freelance fashion pattern designer, but she had more and more difficulties to reconcile her job of a lifetime
with attention to Aurelia and her two adolescent children in her 55 square meter apartment near the Puerta de Toledo.
She had cut back on her free time and had crazy hours that exhausted her.
She thought that her mother was going to enter a place similar to a hotel.
She associated the residences with a fond memory of her adolescence, when after classes at a boarding school in Talavera de la Reina (Toledo) she and a friend of hers kept company with the elderly in an asylum run by some nuns.
The spell at Nuestra Señora del Carmen was broken early in the afternoon, when Mercedes sat in the office of the doctor who was going to take care of her mother.
She surprised her by telling him that she was going to take away the Alzheimer's medication that she had been taking for a long time.
She has engraved on fire what she said to him:
“You have to assimilate that people come here when they are already very bad.
Her mother is already in palliative care, so we are going to keep her on three paracetamol pills, morning, noon and night, in case she has pain.
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Mercedes didn't know what to say.
Her mother's mental abilities had been greatly improved by a medication called Donepezil, and she had had no adverse effects.
If her mother stopped taking all the medication, she would throw herself out of bed and start screaming, but Mercedes complied with that prescription, coming after all from a person in a white coat.
This was going to be a happy day and she was grateful for this opportunity for both of them to have a better life.
She returned to Aurelia's room and stayed with her until eight in the evening, when she finished visiting hours.
When he got in the car, his bad body entered him.
She realized that the doctor had made the decision without even seeing Aurelia and her world fell on top of her.
She thought: "But where am I putting my mother?"
She made the way back home in tears.
“Plot” in the yard
After four months, he requested a transfer to another public residence in the Community of Madrid.
Luckily, she had managed to get her mother to continue taking the medication thanks to a report from the neurologist at the Clinical Hospital who had seen her until then, but she saw that the residence lacked sufficient staff to provide decent care.
She tried to make up for those deficiencies by visiting her mother as much as she could, one day out of every two.
For this reason, she was relieved when they granted her a closer center, just fifteen minutes from home, the Vista Alegre residence, where Aurelia was admitted on June 29, 2018.
Once again, he was deceived by the appearance of the center, surrounded by green areas in the heart of Carabanchel.
Inside, the residents strolled through a beautiful and spacious garden.
But when he walked around the facilities, he was shocked to see the older ones sitting in the common rooms, looking at the wall in the dim light, with no caregiver nearby.
In the corridors, he was surprised by some posters with large capital letters in red: "Anyone who verbally or physically assaults a public employee of this center, can be accused of the crime of assault," they said, "and may be punished with the sentences of imprisonment from one to four years.
After accommodating her mother in her room, he announced that she would take care of cleaning her mother, as she had done in her first residence.
"Well no.
Here you will not be able to touch her, ”she recalls that she snapped at a person in charge.
"Here are some rules."
Mercedes remembered the posters in the corridors and felt intimidated.
She had put her mother in an even worse residence.
The elderly were neglected all day, the food was bad and scarce, and the treatment of the staff was “tyrannical”.
She had to do something.
A photo that Mercedes Arribas took of her mother one day when she found her looking at nothing.MERCEDES ARRIBAS
The response began that same summer of 2018 in the courtyard of the residence.
There, far from the ears of her staff, Mercedes met Eli Martina, a Peruvian who was one of those who visited her mother the most times.
"It's that there in Peru it's like here before, when the daughters took care of the elderly," Mercedes told her new friend.
“Hey, I've been complaining a lot too,” he told Eli.
The two realized that the claims were systematically falling on deaf ears.
They were joined in a circle by other concerned children and several of the more autonomous residents, who spoke to them of punishments, harassment, yelling, little food and lack of cleanliness.
“We felt that we were being watched as if we were hatching a plot,” recalls Martina.
Mercedes, who had spent a lot of time looking for help on the internet, told them that if they got together, perhaps their claims would have more effect.
At home, she wrote the articles of incorporation on the computer
of the Platform for Relatives of the Vista Alegre residence
and a collective complaint that detailed point by point all the ills of the center.
She returned to the residence with the paper in hand, which began to circulate secretly.
They got 45 signatures.
It was quite an achievement, considering that many relatives of that center of 146 places shrugged their shoulders.
It worked.
The Ombudsman and the Madrid Social Care Agency, the body that controls the 25 public residences of the Community, began to pay attention to Mercedes.
She joined an association of relatives from all over Madrid, Pladigmare, and together with one of its leaders, Miguel Vázquez, she was received by the Minister of Social Policies, Lola Moreno.
"Grandma is going to die"
He spent the nights in front of the computer writing papers and studying protocols, but his activism bore little fruit.
A purrún in her head did not let her sleep.
She wanted her mother to be okay, but she didn't know how.
Aurelia was fading.
In photos and videos from her first days in Vista Alegre, in the summer of 2018, Aurelia appeared smiling.
But by early 2019, her face had withered and she no longer responded to Mercedes or her grandchildren.
It was one of those days when she saw her mother dehydrated and lost when, on her return home, she told her 17-year-old son Álex that she feared the worst and that perhaps they should bring her to the apartment.
-If I'm still in there, Grandma is going to die.
- But mom, how are we going to do it?
I have the EVAU in June.
To the left
Aurelia González in the first months in a residence and to the right.
in the last days.
Your son was right.
How were she and her two children going to get their mother bedridden into a two-room apartment? How was she going to reconcile her work with caring for an increasingly dependent sick mother? Would she have to resign again to the holidays and his social life? And where was he going to get the almost 3,000 euros that he calculated he would need for a geriatric bed and a crane?
But at the same time she thought: was she making a mistake? Wasn't she seeing the sadness and rapid deterioration of her mother? Would she recover if she was brought home?
He took out a meter and began to measure the width and length of the room.
The 2 meter x 90 centimeter bed could hardly fit next to the window so that her mother could get light.
She had a stroke of luck because in Wallapop she found someone who gave her the electric adjustable bed.
The crane got it for only 400 euros.
They covered a wall with an image of a paradisiacal beach and installed a sofa bed next to it for Paula, their teenage daughter.
Everything was ready to receive Aurelia, but the moment did not arrive until the end of July 2019, when Mercedes and her children were spending their vacations in the Rías Baixas.
A call startled them.
Aurelia had a fever of almost 40 degrees due to a urine infection.
They packed their bags and arrived at the residence almost at dawn.
They picked her up.
Forever.
He told the people with whom he had shared months of struggle.
Not everyone got it.
Miguel Vázquez, the president of Pladigmare, congratulated her on her courage and was pleased with her for the speedy recovery of Aurelia, who was speaking and smiling again.
But she told him:
-With everything you've fought for, how are you going to give up?
Being treated in a care center is a right and taking it home is little more than saying 'we have lost'.
-I know.
It's my right.
But my mother is not going to die for my rights.
Seven months later, when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, in the midst of the nightmare of confinement and abandonment, Miguel spoke to Mercedes again:
-You did very well.
You almost certainly saved his life.
Álex Sánchez next to his grandmother Aurelia González's bed, in the apartment they both share.
INMA FLOWERS
Pladigmare has seen other cases of partners who take their elders out of residences to care for them at home at the cost of much sacrifice, sometimes in homes that do not meet the most appropriate conditions.
Now, both the central government and the Community of Madrid (with residence checks) want to delay entry to a residential center and encourage home help.
Miguel Vázquez tells this newspaper over the phone that Mercedes' dedication and generosity is commendable.
But he adds: “It is unfair that this sacrifice falls on families at the cost of their well-being.
Now they promote care at home, but that is like saying that the education of the children should once again depend on the parents.
Is that what we want? For families to assume that burden?
And at what cost?
Why women stop working?
It would be a setback for women and for society as a whole.”
Mercedes is convinced.
At the residence, Aurelia would have died from covid, hunger, thirst or sadness.
Mercedes has once again given up her scarce leisure time and her job as a pattern maker.
She lives thanks to sporadic jobs designing interiors and restoring furniture that she supplements with a help for home care of 290 euros.
Her son Álex, who is studying philosophy at the Complutense University, helps her by taking care of her grandmother when she works.
Mercedes feels that she has aged at an accelerated pace.
“I have gained five kilos, my hands are swollen, osteoarthritis, hernia, carpal tunnel... I have moments of despair and crying and I am overwhelmed thinking that this could last ten years or more, but all the bad things are offset when we see her smile.
Here she at least has dignity ”.
One night, ten days ago, Mercedes and her son Álex were playing with Aurelia next to her bed in the living room, before giving her a vegetable puree for dinner.
They sang something that she sometimes repeated with amusement in the first days after returning from the residence, when she felt euphoric: "As at home, nowhere!"
Aurelia laughed out loud.
Mercedes Arribas attends to her mother Aurelia González on Thursday in the living room of her apartment in Madrid. INMA FLORES
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