Grandparents

Euroresidentes received the following response from a new friend in Mexico, to whom we send our greetings and to her grandparents who sound wonderful. We have translated her comments ….

‘Hello, I'm a Mexican woman and am nearly 23 with a son of 3 and another one on the way. I read this article (the one about coming to terms with age) and I thought it was very good. My grandparents are my greatest treasure. She is 81 and he is 91 and they live on their own in a village near the town and I admire them so much because of their worth as they are ageing. They are both well and don't use glasses or a walking stick yet, and when I see them I feel so proud of them, even though I do feel scared about getting to their age, I'm sure it must be a difficult stage and I hope I have their worth and approach it with calm’.

…please don’t be scared! It can be difficult as you say, being old, and we have faced some of the problems in these articles. But it can also be rather wonderful providing that one accepts that a new way of living has to be found and celebrated, and the sense of regret, even grief that we can no longer function in the way we have lived most of our lives, can be endured. The difference is more about challenge and new experiences than about loss.

If its good to have grandparents, its wonderful too to be one! An elderly cousin of ours sent us some pithy - and very American! -comments about being grandparents the other day which she had found on the web. Here are four of them.

‘Perfect love sometimes doesn’t come until the first grandchild’.
‘It’s amazing how grandparents seem so young once you become one’.
‘If I had known how wonderful it would be to have grandchildren, I’d have had them first’.
‘A grandparent is old on the outside but young on the inside’.

There is something infinitely precious about having grandchildren and often there is a very special bond between them and us that defies the age differences. We cherish our three and we too have another on the way. We enjoy and celebrate the friendships we have with them whenever we see them and always when we think of them. They and their parents are so very important to us. Clearly, our Mexican correspondent feels the same way, but from the perspective of being a grandchild. Thank you for writing to us.

Bryan

Strategies

As you get older it becomes more difficult to live spontaneously. Things that once were done without thought, now have to be engineered, planned, facilitated.

Few of us spring out of bed in the morning as we once may have done, vigorously get showered and throw on our clothes. Leaving bed may have to be a series of slow well practiced movements, taking care that potential aches and pains are treated with respect. The shower is entered into cautiously, the feet well balanced on the base as with one hand on the wall another feels carefully for the lever which turns on the water. Dressing becomes a ritual of holding on to convenient props and putting on tights or socks may only be accomplished by sitting down, rather than hopping about on an unreliable foot.

Conversation can be a problem. Several of you in a room and voices all speaking at once. You try to keep up with the various strains of thought but concentration is no longer as easy as it once was and you find yourself having rests and losing the plot. Foolishly, you try to add a comment but find that it is an inappropriate one. People had left that subject some time ago and are now onto an entirely different one. They look at you with kindly bewilderment. ‘Is (s)he deaf, daft or distant’ they think. The strategy here is to look intelligent, appear to be listening with eager interest, laugh or smile as others do, but only speak when you are quite sure it’s safe to do so. Then, perhaps, people will think you are thoughtful and wise rather than in need of care.

Walking, as we have seen often in these blogs, is what all older people must keep doing, but here again it becomes harder to do that than the days when you were as fleet as a mountain goat. Make sure of the distance you are planning and that it is within your range. Five miles is my absolute limit. Be clear too that there are obvious resting places on the way. Most of all ascertain that there is a welcome hostelry with good drink and food at the walk’s end.

The strategy I find I need most of all and which I haven’t quite worked out yet, is what to do about matching thoughts with words. Happily I haven’t got to the stage of not knowing what to say – the image is clear in my mind – but too often these days I can’t find the word or words to fit the image. So I start a sentence and can’t finish it and the world and my dear wife wait for as long as they can bear it, before at last I can say what I want to say and say it, or they chime in and say it for me. I suppose the strategy is to wait and work it out before you speak. So far I’m not very good at that. And you?

Bryan