The bus to the past

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I am not old, except perhaps to someone under thirty, but because of my condition, I now have to put up with many of the frustrations of the ageing. 

   I know I've said this before, but there's new depth to this understanding as the months I was expected to live have now extended into years, and there's no clear end point. Please put up with a little repetition if you remember I've said something like this before. Your memory is probably a good deal better than mine for things that happened recently.

   When I got this disease, I thought, if there were any benefits, one was that I'd escape the trials and rigours of old age. What I discovered, to my surprise, was that I haven't evaded them at all. They've just been compacted in time. In addition, I've been destined to experience them earlier than most in our fortunate society. The combination makes resistance to this change set in all the more deeply.

   This makes it possible for me to understand all too well what was never on my radar until I got a taste of it.

   Let me give you an example. It's a bit scrambled between separate things that should be sorted out, but here you have it.

   We've all seen the movie trope where someone sits down by an old lady or gent at the bus stop, waiting patiently for the bus to turn up. They get to talking, and it turns out they're waiting for a spouse who's been dead for twenty years.

   The dear old thing has wandered down the street, 'running away'.

   'They're just seeking a bit of attention.'

   They're not. What they're seeking is the exact opposite. They're craving not to be noticed, helped, or, as they may feel, 'spied' on, even though it's for their own good. In good nursing homes, people are monitored constantly for the best of reasons, but it may be hard for the oldie to see it that way. Even if they do, it exasperates. These people just won't leave me alone.

   They're running away from attention. It's not being alone that matters. They want to have power back over their lives, even though that's impossible. They want that spouse to be on the bus, and to go back together to a place where they had the control they were used to for their entire adult lives, until somehow it just disappeared. They want to sit in their own kitchen over a cup of tea made exactly as they used to, or, even better, or a glass of wine and some good cheese, and talk about nothing in particular with the ones their lives revolved around. The way life used to be.

   If in the real world they live in a place with care professionals, they don't want to return to share that little room with some stranger whose name they keep forgetting and, you never know, might steal their teabags or tissues. They don't want to be talked to like a child by the cheery young nurse.

   They want a return to a world that's gone forever, but there's always hope at this bus-stop.

   All the care and attention showered on them by their loved ones cannot compensate for that loss of who they were, especially if that loss includes the death of a partner, or the need to be separated from them to go somewhere else for heavy-duty care. So they tell their tale about who they're waiting for to the person at the bus stop, and the Good Samaritan realises he or she needs a loved one to come and pick them up. By one means or another, it happens, and the anxious daughter or son or carer rescues them and takes them back to safety; that comfortable prison where others make all the decisions. Mealtimes, food, medications... the relentless drivel on TV. Clothes, even.

   They don't protest when the rellie arrives; not much, anyway. They know that bus to the past they've been waiting for is too late again to beat the intrusion by the present. Resistance is futile. They go off meekly. It's been an adventure, and they chose it every step of the way. Till this point anyway.

   Attention is the last thing they want. I'm not at a similar stage yet, though I feel cramped by restrictions that I know simply can't be avoided. They're necessary, self-imposed or imposed by sheer circumstances. Without them things would descend quickly into chaos. All of us are locked in to this inevitability. Each has an inescapable but different burden, till that end point that defines itself.

   I know what the oldies want. I want it too, but it's impossible. This bus-stop world is locked in fluid, strangely static time.

   Ah, the Time Lords. Dr Who can do it, but Dr Wright can't. There's no Tardis at the bus stop. Nor, of course, should there be.

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