“It is an enormous danger”: in the face of the elderly who refuse to let go of the wheel, the dilemma of loved ones

“Drive, grandma!” Ilan fears every one of his trips with his grandmother. At the wheel of her small car, this 70-year-old retiree has the ability to exasperate her grandson, who believes that he drives at a pace and allows himself to be distracted by the slightest detour on her road.

“His behavior is dangerous,” summarizes the 18-year-old law student. Especially because, to make matters worse, “her dog systematically climbs onto her lap, under the steering wheel.” “Every time it’s horrible, they honk at us everywhere because we drive too slowly,” says the young man, “extremely embarrassed” by other drivers who get angry or lose patience, “often rightly so.”

According to him, his grandmother is “more and more distracted” and “loses her memory a little.” “She is in her world: she overtakes the cars in front of her, slows down as soon as we talk to her and suddenly speeds up again. She can also stop in the middle of the road to appreciate monuments or a church” .

Fear of loss of autonomy.

However, it is difficult to broach the subject with her. In the family, Ilan recognizes that the topic is a bit taboo: no one really has the courage to confront the matriarch on this point because everyone knows that she is easily offended or that she avoids conversations on this topic. And rightly so, everyone is a little embarrassed at the idea of ​​asking her to give up her only means of getting around the Paris region.

This is the crux of the debates currently agitating Europe: to stop road deaths, this Tuesday, February 27, a reform aimed at burying the driving license for life will be debated in the European Parliament.

The idea would be to impose a medical examination every 15 years, as already exists in some European countries. Thus, people declared medically unfit could lose the right to drive. But the possibility of removing the car from older people undoubtedly raises the question of the risk of isolation of this category of the population.

In France, at the moment, nothing is mandatory. Road Safety admits that driving skills evolve over time, but invites those close to you to do “education.” Authorities recommend encouraging older people to adapt their route, for example avoiding rush hour or driving at night, or encouraging short trips instead of long ones.

“Raising the specter of the ban among older people is counterproductive,” says geriatrician Sylvie Bonin-Guillaume on the Road Safety website. “The oldest will try at all costs to prove that he can still drive.”

“You’re not going to teach me how to drive!”

This is precisely what is happening to Élodie’s father, whom she describes as “a great danger” on the road. Almost deaf for fifteen years, this 78-year-old former soldier refuses to stop driving, although he does “anything while he is behind the wheel.”

Hearing him say “no one drives better than him”: “he is in control” and it is the others “who drive like hell.” But in reality, her daughter believes that she no longer really calculates the environment around her, that she has lost her reflexes and sense of priority. Last week, the septuagenarian lost 4 points on his driving license for taking a prohibited direction in Paris.

Élodie, who now categorically refuses to join him, is absolutely convinced that something will eventually happen.

“He runs red lights, he goes two an hour and he doesn’t hear what’s going on around him, neither the motorcycles nor the ambulances that let him pass,” he laments.

“I once got into a fight with him in the car because he went into the middle of the Porte de Bagnolet intersection (in Paris) to answer a phone call,” he recalls. “There was a lot of traffic, everyone was speeding and he was blocking the way.”

“The worst thing was that I had no idea how dangerous what I was doing was. He yelled at me: ‘I’m doing what I want! You’re not going to teach me how to drive!'” he says.

Decreased vision, hearing, reflexes…

A few weeks later, he ran over a motorcyclist when a fire started, but no one was injured. This forty-year-old press officer in Paris has been trying desperately for months to reason with him, but for him it is out of the question.

“Suggesting that he let go of the steering wheel is like telling him that he is going to a nursing home,” explains the 48-year-old Parisian.

“Every time it ends in an argument. I have the impression that I am the one who wants to take away their only reason for being. It is their last space of freedom,” he analyzes. For her, only an accident could make her question herself. “As long as it lasts, it will continue. Until the day it is too late…”, fears Élodie.

But even a traffic accident is not always enough for older people to realize that they are no longer old enough to get behind the wheel. A few years ago, Jérôme’s grandmother died in a traffic accident caused by her husband, who was 86 years old at the time. The whole family had been trying to get the car keys from him for years, without success.

“We always tried to dissuade him from taking the car because we saw that with age he had lost his previous cognitive abilities,” says his grandson, now a police officer in Metz (Moselle).

“But he was showing incredible bad faith. No one had the right to question his ability to drive. He didn’t want to change his habits or lose his autonomy. I remember him denying the obvious with little phrases like ‘I have no worries.’, ‘Leave me alone.’ ‘.

Fear of accident

But one day, the old man suffered a fatal accident with a third party at an intersection in Chalon-sur-Saône (Saône-et-Loire). “Everything suggests that once again he ran the red light and cut off the road to the motorist who was arriving from the right,” says his grandson, who is now 32 years old. The other car then crashed into the right door, on the side where his wife was sitting. Seriously wounded, she died a few days later.

Only from that moment on did the octogenarian’s three children agree to permanently confiscate his car keys, against his will.

“Even after his wife died, he didn’t want to let him go. He didn’t want to admit that he had made a mistake,” Jérôme recalls.

Looking back, Jérôme says that his father retains some bitterness about this tragedy and regrets that he was not able to force his father to let go of the wheel. “At that time, he always told me that he couldn’t stop me from doing what he wanted, that he was an adult and that he still had his wits about him. In fact, he had no administrative influence to stop him.” And he added: “Still, if I hadn’t been so obtuse, Grandma could still be here today.”