The Best Years?

I’ve mentioned the cardiac rehabilitation sessions I go to once or twice a week. Mostly we are men and dispell the myth that it is women who do all the talking. The first twenty minutes of the hour is spent walking, running, marching around the gym and exercising in various permutations; and there is so much nattering amongst us that the instructor’s voice can’t be heard ( we know the routine so well,it hardly matters).

This evening I found myself next to David. Without warning he suddenly said, ‘this is the best period of my life’. But I said ‘it’s not long ago that you were in hospital suffering from acute pneumonia’. ‘Ah yes, he said, that was a cracker’. ‘So why is this such a good time for you?’ ‘Because I’ve no responsibilities’, he replied – ‘although mind you, I keep busy and living with my daughter and granddaughter, I look after the house’.

This was all remarkable because when I first started attending these sessions more than two years ago, I found David very worrying. Every so often he would retreat from our perambulations and continue to try the exercises in a corner or just lean against the wall to get his breath. And when the next twenty minutes were spent on exercise machines, he would again follow a minimal regime clearly lacking energy and breathing with difficulty. He continues to look a sick man, but gradually I have realised that this is normal for him. Whatever the struggle, these are golden years for him apparently. David is 85.

I am balancing the David experience against what knowledge I have of older people and what I observe about myself. This equation between an enjoyment of life and the lack of responsibility is interesting: even more so because as soon as he had made the connection, David needed to say that he was in fact responsible for the smooth running of a household. For myself I am glad that I no longer have a working life where I am answerable to an organisation, though occasionally feel a vestigial guilt about it or even regret that everything seems to be working quite well without me! But I can’t admit to a triumphal and fulfilling life in my approaching dotage, as David can.( Well,fulfilling perhaps but a singular lack of triumph!)

I think it must be a wonderful thing to speak so positively about the last years, and I should try and do the same – for my sake but also for the sake of my dear family, who have to listen to my frustrations.

How do you respond to the ‘David syndrome’?

B.R.

Alienated

This is something that older people try hard not to feel, but often do. I have no wish at all to belong to the ‘things aren’t what they used to be’ Brigade who are for ever mourning the lost world of their youth; the halcyon days of memory which may only exist in the fantasies of nostalgia. I have an image, for example of myself at seventeen in my new smart worsted suit doing my first job, having lots of energy, and (well so I thought) being noticed a lot and even being approved of. But of course I forget the bad times, only enjoying a sense of the joyful and self-centred limbo of those days of new freedoms and powers. And yet, it becomes almost impossible to have that sense of wellbeing as you live in a world where many of your generation feel beached on an alien shore.

Older people can feel very alone, not only when by themselves but even more in the company of those with whom they have nothing in common. We observe a technocratic world in which we have neither understanding nor place and with no ‘hooks’ on which to hang a conversation let alone establish a relationship. We had visitors the other day, friends that go back to my schooldays, and we were talking about this sense of feeling that we didn’t belong anymore to the society we live in and to a culture that requires skills or enthusiasm that are beyond us. And we wish it was otherwise, not because we want to throw stones at these for us uncongenial communities that surround us, but because we would like to understand them more and even to be one with them. We are living longer and are a significantly large part of the population but sometimes feel as if we are marooned on that inhospitable island.

Temperamentally I am against any sort of ghetto and have no ambition to spend my days entirely with people of my own age, nor to think and behave as a relic of the last fifty years of the twentieth century. But its hard work, especially as I find the pervading media orientated culture of materialism, trivial and ultimately meaningless. So I reserve the right to be critical of the commercially created world and the brutish political agenda of today, whilst trying to think beyond them and connect up with the many positive things that are happening around us, and to connect with people of all ages.

I don’t want to end my days on that island of the old.

Bryan

Time Span

We inherit a fairly literal idea of time. Just as a life has its birth and its death, the day its hours, the calendar its weeks and months, most of us live a day at a time, and then wait for the next one to arrive. However, it feels rather different as you get older. ‘Time’ is more of a confused patchwork of images and memories, plans and projects, people and places, rather than a seamless continuity. It doesn’t stand still but nor does it march on and on until one day, for us, its stops. It’s all around us.

I have been reading an absolutely brilliant book of short stories, ‘The Turning’ , by the Australian Tim Winton. In one of the stories he writes, ‘Time doesn’t click on and on at the stroke. It comes and goes in waves and folds like water; it flutters and sifts like dust, rises, billows, falls back on itself…the past is in us, and not behind us. Things are never over’. He reinforces this image by linking all his stories, although each one is an entity in itself.

I am moved by this ‘folding over’ idea and recognise the way in which bits of my life can sometimes vividly reoccur. Some of them are more welcome than others and have to be tolerated if not resolved to my satisfaction. But there is this strange way in which the past can suddenly become contemporary to us.

My sister recently died and there has been the inevitable sadness of a good person now lost to her family. My loss has been unique to me; perhaps selfishly so. There is no-one now with whom I can share childhood experiences, and have the benefit of an older sister’s knowledge and advice. I was always planning to ask questions about people and events when next seeing her, but can do that no longer. But even if some of those early moments are unresolved, they remain with me and others with greater clarity. As Tim Winton says, the past is in me. If in some ways now alone, I treasure it.

B.R.