This is the 50th instalment in a series on dementia, including the research into its causes and treatment, advice for carers and stories of hope.
In the last years of her life, my mother grew increasingly frail. She seemed to get tired faster, move with less confidence and agility, and walk more slowly. I began to worry about trips and falls: she sometimes seemed more breakable.
She began to do less. “I’m too old for this nonsense,” she would sometimes rail. She began to think herself old, which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
As we get old, a doctor told me, “we expect less of ourselves, so we do less”. And in doing less we become less able.
The Oxford Dictionary defines frailty as a condition of being weak and delicate, and uses advancing age as an example: “the increasing frailty of old age”.
Dr David Ward, a research fellow in Ageing and Geriatric Medicine at the University of Queensland, in Australia, defines frailty as a health state “reflecting how people are ageing”.