Open Writing

Looking back on my life, it occurs to me that the people I was most aware of at any given time were close to my age. As a child, other than my immediate family, younger or older people hardly existed in my consciousness. They were there of course – my teachers, my bosses and my neighbors, but my connection with them was very narrowly specific, and shadowy. Now I am old, it is the turn of the aged to populate my life. The younger people I encounter enter it only briefly.

During my youth I lost just two of my cohort, each killed in the military, though not from enemy action. One died when the plane he was flying crashed on take-off. The other died when a tank he was sleeping under, on an exercise in Germany, sank in soft ground during the night. Their deaths were sudden and dramatic, and the news shocked me.

Since then, a number of friends, acquaintances and family have died, almost all of them after protracted illnesses. Terminal illness allows the survivors time to gird themselves for the anticipated end, though the eventual loss still has to be dealt with, whether with sadness, anger, or sometimes even with relief and happiness.

At my present age, I have become aware of a different kind of dying; not sudden and dramatic, and not clearly anticipated, but a gradual, an almost unnoticed, fading away. In retrospect, the signs are there all along, but inconsequential in themselves – the garage door left open all night, the garbage can put out on the wrong day or not at all: rotted food in the refrigerator, or less than adequate fresh provisions. The halting, delayed response to questions.

I first noticed some these signs when my wife and I were staying with an aunt of hers, Sonia, who, at the time, was probably in her late seventies and lived alone. Other than minor ailments, she had been hale and hearty, never learned to drive, and therefore walked every day, everywhere she needed to go. At some point towards the end of our stay, one of us had need to go to the freezer, there to discover many loaves of bread and a number of pies and other dishes.

When we queried Sonia about it, she was obviously embarrassed. Her explanation for the loaves was that once she was at the supermarket she often couldn’t remember whether she had bread at home or not. Not wanting to make a second trip, she would buy another loaf. She had baked the pies and made the other dishes in preparation for our visit, but had forgotten them. She was within months of being 100 when she died, having slowly disengaged over the intervening twenty years.

One of my neighbors is a semi-retired, successful businessman in his seventies. I’ve known Al for around five years, and when we first met, he prefaced our chat by saying that he was pleased I had approached him because he had been told that he wasn’t easy to befriend. In the time since then we’ve formed a relationship neither warm nor close, but it was still nice to have someone to wave to as I came and went.

He lives alone, having been twice divorced, and has chronic heart problems requiring a pacemaker and a quadruple by-pass. Despite this, he has led an active life, going to the gym every day, and playing golf once or twice a week. In the summertime, he, like many of us around here, drove north to spend time with his family, returning in the fall. This past October he came back, driven by his older brother.

Apparently, his brother had concluded that Al wasn’t fit to drive himself. In the weeks since then, occasional memory lapses seemed to be nothing more than preoccupation. He confessed to being aware of the problem, but was unconcerned. Then a week ago he suffered a bout of breathlessness that put him in hospital for several days. When I visited him there, he was disoriented, and his short-term memory noticeably worse.

Later, I went into his condo to get him clean underwear and toiletries, and it was immediately obvious that he was no longer able to live alone. The TV was on, as were some lights. Bills and receipts littered tables and almost any other piece of furniture that had a flat surface. The refrigerator contained very little except some rotted bananas and pears. The laundry basket held some dirty clothes, but there was no clean underwear anywhere. His mailbox, normally locked, swung open, with uncollected mail inside.

He has now been taken back to Michigan, where some of his family are, and it’s unlikely I will see him or hear from him again, since I don’t have an address or ‘phone number. He has faded from my life, and is likely starting out on his own, perhaps long journey to eternity. I wish him well.

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