Steve Braunias: The lost and found - A portrait of life inside a rest home
26 minutes to read Summer in Auckland can often turn dark and oppressive. On days when the slow approach of a tropical thunderstorm turned the sky black and drained the Waitākere ranges of colour, I dreaded heading out to the Roseridge rest home in Henderson. It was deathly weather and it trapped the residents inside as surely as lockdown. They were housebound, feeble. Old age is a slope of decline and fall – the physical indignities, the mind wandering into some lunar wasteland. A visit on days like that seemed a bleak and cheerless way to spend my time but in fact every time I visited Roseridge in the summer of 2020-21, I left on a high, as though I had emerged from some strange and magical kingdom.