Time and life
It’s a slightly strange thing – but possibly these days a more frequent one – being an old age pensioner whilst still having one of your parents alive, but that is my lot in life. That phrase ‘that is my lot in life’ has undertones that I wish it wasn’t this way, but it won’t surprise Rust readers that I genuinely wouldn’t have it any other (especially when you think what the alternative is).
One of the issues of having an aged parent is that, through encroaching physical and mental infirmity, they gradually become more demanding of your time. For the most part, understandably, they don’t realise that this is happening.
I guess this is a situation that affects all of us who live to a ripe old age: despite all our brave comments years previously (e.g. “I don’t ever wish to be a burden to anyone” and “If I get to the stage where I’m becoming a nuisance, just give me a bottle of whisky and then shoot me!”), when it gets to the time when we are indeed becoming a burden, we’ve gone way past the point where we can ‘register’ it.
By that stage, of course, the enfeebled nature of our minds means that we cannot see the wider picture in situations where we’re incapable to one degree or another of looking after ourselves, need therefore to rely upon others to assist in a comfortable daily life, are resistant to change and (on top of all the above) are a bit lonely. Loneliness for a really old person creeps up as all the old mates and cronies gradually die off – a sad fact in itself, of course, but one which also has implications closer to home because each death effectively crosses another off the list of potential people you know well with whom you can spend agreeable time and/or just keep in touch.
As it happens, at the moment – in an almost unique circumstance for your author – I am knee-deep in working ten hours per day (it was actually twelve yesterday) on a project close to my heart with an old school chum. In my case this has the effect of sending the attendant ‘frustration and stress factor’ off the scale simply because my father, living in the country but now fortunately supported by a live-in carer, in is the habit of ringing me on the dot of 8.00am every morning to ask when I am next going down to see him.
There’s nothing special to me in this. Either just before, or just afterwards, he rings my two brothers with a similar query.
My diagnosis is that the reason this happens is twofold: (1) despite having a carer on hand, he would far prefer to be in the company of a member of his family; and (2) because he has so little to do but sit around all day devising new projects with which to fill his time – e.g. outings, domestic things that have got to be done, bills to be paid and so on – he’s incapable of occupying himself with the sort of things that anyone a generation younger would jump at with glee at any moment he or she found they had an hour or two to themselves.
In short, there is a degree to which my father’s average day is spent sitting around trying to think of things to do which might or will involve his family having to get involved in order to help him complete them.
Which would be fine, save for the fact that – e. g. in the case of a lunch outing with friends – if attendance to act as his ‘wingman’ is required of one of his sons, that means that (because a four-hour round-trip to the country is involved) one of us effectively has to ‘lose’ an entire day of our own lives in order that my father can go for a two hour lunch that, if he was indeed as ‘independent’ as he likes to claim he is, he could travel to and from quite easily in twenty minutes total if only he bothered to ask his carer (who is an expert driver) to take him.
It’s not easy being old – and, if we should be so lucky, that is something that awaits all of us – but it’s also not easy having parents who live beyond the age of 85.
Ah well, that’s life I suppose.
POSTSCRIPT:
At a tangent, I would like to finish my sermon today by touching upon one of the many conversations I had yesterday with the pal I am currently working with.
A talented eccentric, he possesses a strong but idiosyncratic religious faith that runs through him like ‘Blackpool’ does through a tube of Blackpool rock. I’d probably best describe it as full-on ‘Muscular Christianity with overtones of Monty Python’. He’s also the type that is always prepared to help others in times of trouble – yesterday he had to field (and in some case put off) six or seven calls from local church-goers who regard him as the ‘go to’ man whenever something in their lives goes wrong.
Having put the phone down after finishing one of these calls, as it transpired from a bereaved friend, he turned to me and said in his inimitable way: “I do so hate it when people get all precious and describe a dead person as having ‘passed away’. Or even say things like “He has passed to another room” or something. No he bloody well hasn’t, he’s DEAD, for God’s sake! Why can’t people just say it?!? …”
As I said or meant to apply above, a singular form of Muscular Christianity from a singular man.
