Little Old Lady

The poem is framed and sits on the wall near the entrance to the nursing home.

It doesn’t rhyme or even scan particularly well. The writer in me wants to use the raw ideas and run with it to bring the words to fruition but it is not mine to take… just a reminder that was required.

The words gave me food for thought yesterday, making me appreciate the lot of the rest of the current residents and each little old lady who had gone before.

I cannot even reproduce it here for I have no way of acknowledging the copyright and it does not show in Google.

So I will give you the gist, along with my own observations, and accept her admonishment that these elderly people have so few visitors when they have given so much love during their lifetime.

As you walk into almost any nursing home, you will see them – the pale, wispy grey ghosts who haunt the corridors, shrunken and misshapen, shuffling in their odd slippers and ill-fitting garments. Sometimes loitering near the entrance, hoping to escape if visitors are not vigilant. There will be those who wander aimlessly and others who pace with intent, following a well-trodden circuit for hour after hour, marking the time between meals.

Some of them talk to themselves, others cling possessively to toys or touch pieces of furniture for comfort, and others still will lash out unpredictably when they sense that their space is being invaded. A few men, but mostly women, they live here not through choice but necessity, tended to by a small force of wonderful carers. A curious breed of people who do not get distraught at the prospect of clearing up a toilet accident.

This is the half-way house between Life and Death, a sort of Hotel California, where the only exit is via a wooden box.

As I pass them by, I give a cursory glance, feel momentarily sad for them and move swiftly on, trying not to make eye contact , intent upon reaching my own pale wispy lady. I spend a few minutes that I know she will not remember and then, having eased my conscience, leave her behind in the incarceration of her own mind.

Dementia is the cruellest of afflictions because it steals their memories as well as their personality. Each of those little old ladies was once a mother, wife, sister, aunt who loved and laughed but is now just a pale shadow of that former glory – ‘waiting in timeless suspension’ as the poem says.

I stopped visiting about two years ago because it was too painful, too uncomfortable to watch her wither away into that final skeletal husk of humanity – especially when a few moments after I had gone she would have forgotten that I had ever been. And, later, when she didn’t even know who I was, it seemed so pointless. Perhaps it was the coward’s way out…?

And, as we sat in the room where she lay dying, I watched my siblings almost enviously as they hugged and kissed the shell of what she had been. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t touch what was, whilst still retaining what had been. I had long since detached myself, separated the two women and pegged my allegiance to the vibrant memory.

But, in doing so, I had made myself sufficiently strong to deal with what was to come. No tears, just calm acceptance as the two of us kept her company through those final hours. Solitary, encouraging gatekeepers standing between this world and the next.

When my siblings had all gone and I was alone in the room, I looked down at her and I prayed to her God to take her, to finish this final battle quickly and let her have peace – but he didn’t seem to be listening. Maybe this was something that she needed to endure in order to put right a past wrong. Some kind of twisted karma that gave her a fabulous life, only to rob it from her in the final quarter.

A few times I wandered up and down the corridor looking through each open door at the various room’s contents. It was all the same. A frail old lady, open-mouthed and sleeping as their personal television blared away for no one in particular. Outside each door were pictures from days gone by. Like some curious aide memoire of before and after. A cruel reminder of what had been lost… and the grim fight still in progress.

There were no more antibiotics or painkillers on Christmas night, she was no longer able to swallow them and any moisture applied to her lips helped her for a moment before settling in the back of her mouth where it gurgled and bubbled, impeding what air was getting into her lungs.

In retrospect, perhaps the drugs, against which I railed so furiously, had been given to make her comfortable and ease her passage, whilst allowing her relatives precious hours to become accustomed to the idea that it was time and to say their final farewells.

Through the night, her breathing became gradually quicker and more shallow and, on Boxing Day morning, it was clear that the end was near. Each breath grew laboured, becoming harder and harder to achieve, it was like watching her lungs expiring before our eyes. The bellows, that had kept her vital organs alive whilst her mind was eaten away, were finally running out of energy and following the rest of her organs in shutting down.

The inhalations grew shorter and further apart, she had not been able to register us visually for days but, suddenly, her eyes brightened and dotted from side to side as if she saw something and was trying to work out what it was.

And then they faded again and started to roll upwards. Her finger tips went blue and the colour in her face changed as the imminence of the end became ever more pronounced.

The breath no longer reached her chest, just her throat. Each short pant saw its strength reducing, rising inexorably closer to her mouth until, with one final sigh, she was gone and the room was silent.

Finally, after over a decade in the thick of the battle, she was at peace.