In France, Elder Care Comes with the Mail
n a quiet Saturday afternoon, Aurore Raguet, a fifty-year-old mail carrier,
followed her route through the streets of Revin, a small French town near
the Belgian border. The houses in Revin are sturdy boxes in gray, white, and
the color of wet sand. Aurore stopped at one of them, making her way through
its untended lawn to the front door.
Jeannine Titeux, the owner of the house, appeared after the fifth knock.
"You're early," she said. Jeannine, who is eighty-eight years old, wore her
short hair, dyed light brown, tucked behind her ears. She led Aurore inside,
into a living room so rigorously decorated that it inspired good posture.
Aurore took careful steps past a candelabra with blue candlesticks, a
pyramid of green digestif glasses, and a miniature plaster nude on a fluted
pillar. She smiled and glanced down at her tablet. Ordinarily, she uses it
to scan packages. Now it displayed a list of scripted lines designed to
initiate conversation:
Introduce yourself to the client and talk about a subject that might
interest her.
What weather we're having!
Did you watch TV last night?
Have you received any visits lately?
Jeannine didn't need any prompting. She launched into a story about the time
when, as the wife of Revin's mayor, she had directed the town's ballet
school; she had allowed a young girl with polio to dance. "I don't know what
became of her," Jeannine said, addressing the room. Aurore listened. A month
of these weekly visits plus an emergency-call button costs Jeannine €37.90.
The fee is collected by La Poste, the French postal service, as part of a
program called Veiller Sur Mes Parents ("Watch Over My Parents"). Every day
except Sunday, postal workers inform the program's subscribers, through an
app, if their elderly relatives are "well": if they require assistance with
groceries, home repairs, outings, or "other needs." Since V.S.M.P. was
introduced, in 2017, about six thousand elderly women and fifteen hundred
elderly men have been enrolled across the country. The program mandates no
minimum visit time, but data collected by La Poste shows that conversations
tend to last from six to fifteen minutes, long enough to soft- or hard-boil
an egg. At the end of each visit, the elderly person signs the carrier's
tablet, providing proof of life as though accepting a package.
Jeannine has three children, ten grandchildren, and eighteen great-
grandchildren. They didn't sign her up for V.S.M.P., however, and they don't
receive the app's automated updates; Jeannine subscribed herself, after a
long holiday at home without her housekeeper. "I don't want to be found two
weeks after the fact," she has told Aurore, about the prospect of her own
death. Jeannine's housekeeper comes six days a week, Aurore on the seventh.
"On Sunday, not even a car went by," Jeannine told Aurore. "Not one car!"
"It's calm," Aurore said.
"It's tedious!" Jeannine corrected.
Jeannine talked about what she used to do, what she can no longer do, and
what she does now to make time pass. Every now and then, she wondered at the
flow of the conversation: "I'm not sure why I'm talking about this," she
said. Aurore leaned back in her armchair, her head against a lace doily. She
laughed in the right places and didn't rush to fill the silences. "All those
young girls I knew are old ladies now," Jeannine said, trying to recollect
the name of the dancer with polio. "Every life is a novel." On the wall
behind her, an acrylic self-portrait showed a much younger Jeannine smiling
into the distance.
In a sense, Watch Over My Parents was created by accident. The service began
in 2013, after a heat wave, when a number of overburdened city halls asked
their local post offices to check on vulnerable and elderly residents. Éric
Baudrillard, the director of V.S.M.P., told me that there has always been a
"natural link between the French and their postal workers." At first, La
Poste was happy to do the check-ins for free. Soon afterward, though, it
proposed a paid version of the program, called Cohésio, for insurance
companies and municipal governments. The service was extended to the general
public in 2017, under the name V.S.M.P.
La Poste, which became a public-private hybrid in 2010, is adapting to
changing conditions. It must continue to fulfill its mandate of uniform
delivery to every address in France. But where, a decade ago, La Poste
delivered eighteen billion letters, it now delivers less than ten billion.
The cost of mailing a letter went up eight cents this year, to eighty-six
cents; still, revenue from stamps alone can no longer support the postal
service. As a result, the definition of "postal work" has been expanding. In
some places, French postal workers now pick up prescriptions, return library
books, and deliver flowers. Last year, only twenty eight per cent of La
Poste's revenue came from sending mail.
In France, as in many developed countries, people are living longer than
ever before. By 2035, a third of the population will be over sixty. Millions
of people over the age of seventy-five already live alone. As the population
ages and disperses, with more young people moving away from their
birthplaces, traditional safety nets—family, community, the government—may
not be enough to support the elderly. V.S.M.P. is a response to this grim
prognosis; La Poste sees opportunity in "la silver économie."
On a Tuesday morning this summer, I watched Aurore, one of the few female
mail carriers and among the oldest employees at Revin's branch of La Poste,
load a yellow electric bicycle with the day's mail. Aurore has broad
cheekbones, blue-gray eyes, and a commanding, contagious energy. She refers
to her co-workers who are in their thirties—most of whom make deliveries by
car—as "the kids."
We set off for the center of Revin, up a low hill above a horseshoe bend in
the Meuse River. For the most part, the view was green in all directions,
dotted with rapeseed fields and forests home to wild boars. There are still
factories for Hermès bags and corrugated cardboard in the region, but Aurore
told me that Revin, where she has lived her entire life, "has everything
except jobs." The current population of six thousand is half of what it was
when she was growing up. In the nineteen-seventies, the now-defunct factory
where her father worked exported tens of thousands of bathtubs each month.
Fifteen years ago, hundreds of employees in one of the town's factories
produced an Electrolux washing machine every twelve seconds. Today, in the
same building, twenty-four people assemble motors for electric blinds.
Aurore delivered mail to a two-star hotel; to the office for the Fight
Against Illiteracy; to one of the town's two butcher shops; to the jewelry
store. The owner of a store selling lottery tickets and hard candies
announced that she would be retiring at the end of the week: Did Aurore have
the necessary paperwork to reroute her mail?
Walking her bike through the open-air market, between stands for local honey
and off-brand phone chargers, Aurore received unsolicited summer fruits.
People stopped her in the street to ask after their mail; invariably,
without checking her bag, Aurore remembered whether they had received any
letters. She heard the same joke again and again—"They're only bills,
anyway!"—and laughed warmly each time.
She cycled past modest row houses, scanning for clothespins attached to
front gates or to the metal flaps of mailboxes. The clothespin signal—which
indicates that one of her elderly clients, who can't make the trip to the
post office, has mail for her to pick up or would like to purchase stamps—
predates V.S.M.P. "I invented this system so they wouldn't have to watch out
for me all day," she explained.
Aurore speaks quickly and assuredly, with the kind of breezy conclusiveness
you'd want from a nurse or a pilot. When her sentences run the risk of
tapering off, she punctuates them with a short, decisive voilà. Over the
years, she explained, her professional role has become more personal: "I got
along well with people, and they got to know me well, and so . . . voilà."
She is, in many ways, a model of the nostalgic ideal on which V.S.M.P. is
based. A survey commissioned by La Poste found that French citizens rank
mail carriers among their "favorite figures encountered in daily life,"
second only to bakers. During certain hours of the day, people leave their
houses unlocked so that Aurore can let herself in and hand-deliver their
mail. One older man considering the service told me that V.S.M.P. reminded
him of the "doorbell culture" of his youth, when people would drop by
unannounced for casual coffees. (With V.S.M.P., of course, he's entitled to
a refund if no one rings his bell.)
Aurore stopped along her route to drink a glass of orange juice with Yvette,
who wore a floral house dress and walked with a cane. She briefly visited
Joelle, staying long enough for Joelle's grandson to model each of his
virtual-reality headsets. A few years ago, when Joelle had cancer, Aurore
began checking in on her. Now it's a matter of habit. "We got used to seeing
each other," Aurore said. She knows that "some people just deliver mail,
period, nothing else," and is quick to insist that she doesn't hold it
against them. Even if other mail carriers don't "share the same appreciation
for the human touch," she told me, many of them keep a compassionate watch
from a distance.
For La Poste, the modest success of V.S.M.P.—the number of subscribers is
lower than anticipated, but only slightly—has been tempered by considerable
criticism. Postal unions have challenged La Poste for monetizing an activity
that was once done for free; they also argue that the fee is exclusionary,
barring those who might benefit most from the service but cannot afford it.
La Poste, in turn, sees V.S.M.P. as a way to standardize and preserve an
admirable tradition that has come under threat. "The free time on a route
allocated to these informal services was only made possible thanks to a
surplus of revenue," the C.E.O. of La Poste, Philippe Wahl, told the
newspaper La Croix, in an interview. When there were fewer old people and La
Poste was more profitable, it was easier to stop when the clothespins
beckoned.
In 2012, Joe Dickinson was recovering from a stroke at home in Jersey, the
largest of the Channel Islands, when he had an idea for the local post
office, where he worked as an "innovator." Much like V.S.M.P., the resulting
service, Call&Check, enlists mail carriers to monitor the sick and elderly.
Unlike caretakers or social workers, who "sort of intruded into their life
on official business," Dickinson said that mail carriers offered a "relaxed
form of connecting with people who are particularly lonely and isolated."
Loneliness, he explained, is the new smoking; epidemiologically speaking,
it's as unhealthy as smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. (Though there is
broad agreement among researchers about the downsides of loneliness, there
is some disagreement about whether we are in the midst of what many
journalists have called a "loneliness epidemic.") The Call&Check doorstep
visit—free for those who qualify, £6.75 for everyone else—is now offered
island-wide.
In the U.K., the privately owned Royal Mail has piloted its own version of
the program, called Safe and Connected, funded by the Home Office, which is
responsible for immigration, security, and policing. (In addition to
health-related queries, Safe and Connected's emissaries ask, "Are you having
problems with anyone bothering you?") As of last year, South Koreans with
parents over the age of sixty-five can sign their elders up for visits from
postal workers, who send relatives photo updates. In Japan, monthly
conversations between mail carriers and senior citizens have been available
since 2013. For several years, Finnish post offices offered seasonally
appropriate services, such as lawn-mowing or leaf-raking, on a weekly basis;
now there is a year-round "befriending" service, through which elderly
customers can request long walks through subarctic snowscapes with a postal
worker, described as an "outdoor buddy." (Several American companies have
designed smartphone apps for checking in on the elderly—Snug Safety, for
example, prompts users to press a large green check mark on their phones at
the same time every day—but such systems rely on touch screens, rather than
human touch.)
The commercials for V.S.M.P. strive for an upbeat, playful tone. They
feature adult children who are conscientious and resourceful—they aren't
outsourcing their filial responsibilities so much as seeking the best for
their parents. In one TV spot, an elderly woman in a knit cardigan remarks,
incredulously, "We don't have children just so that they can take care of
us!" She laughs and sets down a tray of coffee and biscuits for her postal
worker. The program's slogan is "For your peace of mind, we'll care for your
parents' peace of mind." There's no way around the sadness of the situations
portrayed in the advertisements. Still, they present V.S.M.P. as a
commonsense way of coping with modern life's atomized reality. The program
assumes the good faith of all involved; it lightens the burden of caring too
much, not too little.
At the post office in Revin, a man in slippers bought downloadable stamps
and a young mother collected welfare benefits. People in line fanned
themselves with messages that could not be sent from their phones. Aurore
was working in the back in a fluorescent-lit storeroom. The night before, in
a nearby city, the next day's mail had been machine-sorted; she preferred to
sort it a second time, rearranging the letters in the order in which she
would deliver them. Watching her thoughtful and meticulous movements, it was
easy to forget that the envelopes mostly contained bank statements and
promotional flyers. When Aurore had first started her job, in 1998, personal
correspondence already accounted for just about five per cent of the mail
delivered by La Poste.
That afternoon, Aurore visited Jeannine Titeux's neighbor, Monique Jaspart,
the eighty-nine-year-old former secretary of Revin's town hall, who lives on
property that her parents bought before the Second World War. Aurore entered
the house through a side door without knocking. Monique was waiting at the
kitchen table beside a vase of papery beige flowers, a collection of
supermarket coupons, and some roast chicken. She offered Aurore a chair and
pulled up a stool for herself. She liked to be ready, she explained,
spinning toward the counter and miming hostess gestures.
Monique, who has delicate features and a voice so high that it often cracks,
has lived in Revin for her entire life—much of it alone. She and Aurore met
more than a decade ago, when Aurore first started on Monique's route.
Monique told her to stop in "when you are thirsty, when you are cold,
whenever you need," and they've had coffee at least once a week ever since.
Monique speaks with strict enunciation and dated conjugations, but she has
long since shifted to the informal tu with Aurore. "I worked my whole
professional life, and I understand that people who work need a little
smile, a little welcome," Monique said.
"Madame Titeux wanted me to tell you that she says hello," Aurore said,
leafing through the local newspaper on the table. "Maybe it would be good if
you gave her a call."
"Yes, yes," Monique agreed. She stood to return a stick of melting butter to
her Electrolux refrigerator.
A copy of L'Ardennais, the local newspaper, lay open on the table; an
article announced that the Revin branch of Monique's bank would be closing.
"The money that they have of mine there, in stock, what will they do with
it?" Monique asked. By way of an answer, Aurore read the article aloud.
In the past year, Monique has encountered various "problems"—a fall in the
garden, a slip on the stairs. She describes them as if they were avoidable
mistakes, the result of her absentmindedness. A few months ago, her
refrigerator door came off in her hands. She fell and, from the floor,
considered different strategies for standing up without slipping on the
yolk- and milk-covered tiles. When Aurore heard this story, she recommended
V.S.M.P., in part for the security of the emergency-alert system, which is
included in the program's "premium" offering. Monique's nephew visits once a
week, but her daughter lives on the Atlantic coast and her neighbors are
often away. "Don't you see?" Aurore asked. "If you hadn't been able to get
up, how long would you have stayed there?"
Monique doesn't always know the whereabouts of her new emergency-call
button, which looks like a waterproof watch with gray plastic where the time
would be. Still, she wore it that afternoon, assuring Aurore that she
wouldn't take it off.
When they first met, Monique felt charitable inviting Aurore in. Now she
feels that the reverse is true: Aurore is doing her a favor. "She brought a
breath of fresh air straight from the center of Revin," she told me. "When I
have a little problem, I think, 'Ah, I'll tell it to Aurore!' " Recently,
Monique broke her hip, and has since been confined to the ground floor of
her house. Monique's daughter, a retired teacher with two children of her
own, discussed transitioning to daily visits with Aurore and planned to call
the regional office to confirm the upgrade. But, at €112.40 a month, daily
visits turned out to be too expensive.
"How would she do it, though?" Monique sighed.
"It's fine the way it is now," Aurore reassured her. "We'll leave it like it
is."
Aurore will continue to visit on Tuesdays; she cannot now, in fairness to La
Poste and the other V.S.M.P. subscribers, stop in casually on other days, as
she might have before. On the other hand, with V.S.M.P., visits to Monique
are guaranteed. When Aurore went to Corsica for summer vacation, a
substitute mailman stopped by. ("A young man, I believe," Monique reported.
"He was pleasant enough. But it's not the same thing.")
The visit came to an end. Aurore held out her tablet for Monique to sign,
reminding her not to use her nail to inscribe her signature. Monique signed
the screen with her fingertip, in tight, slanted loops.
Over lunch in the post-office break room, as Aurore ate careful spoonfuls of
yogurt, I asked her if she could imagine one day becoming a client of the
service. "I have a son," she responded abruptly, perhaps a little offended.
He is twenty-eight and lives with Aurore, along with her seventy-eight-
year-old father, in a house across the river, not far from the marina and
the nearly vacant factory. There will be no need for any postal worker other
than herself.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/in-france-elder-care-
comes-with-the-mail