For the Time Being: Reflections on Life and Aging: When one of us dies
Joking about our ultimate fate is fine up to a point, but there is a serious side to it that we need to address.
Mr C and I are great fans of Daffy and Dicky Tottering, Annie Tempest’s cartoon creation, first published in Country Life magazine. The Totterings live in faded grandeur at Tottering Hall, in a fictional but very English county. Minor characters include their daughter Serena, their grandchildren Freddy and Daisy, Dicky’s much-loved black Labrador Slobber and the cleaner, Mrs Shagpile. If you have never seen Tempest’s work, you are in for a treat. The Totterings are of a certain age, and there are plenty of laughs around the concomitant problems of growing old in a changing world, but Daffy is timeless in that she encapsulates the preoccupations of women everywhere: topics such as hormonal changes, food and dieting, entertaining, fashion and the role of men in family life provide rich sources of humour. One of our favourite cartoons appears on the front cover of Out and About with the Totterings. The wind is lashing rain against the window behind the sofa where the woeful pair are sitting out a storm. “When one of us dies,” muses Daffy, I’m going to go and live in the south of France.”
Facing up to the inevitable
This tickles both of us, partly because it hints at those minor annoyances that no couple living together can escape, and it gives us a humorous voice through which to express our own niggles. “When one of us dies”, Mr C will say, wistfully, “I’ll put three times that amount of butter in my mashed potato.” And I can tell you unequivocally that when one of us dies, I will have all the junk in the loft cleared in the blink of an eye. It has become a family joke: you won’t have to put up with that when one of you dies, will you Dad? Not everyone gets it though. Someone said to me recently when I was having a minor rant about Mr C’s hording tendencies: But how do you know he’ll die first? I don’t, I replied. It’s just our little joke. I could tell from her expression that she saw nothing funny about it. At one level she is right. It isn’t funny. One of us will die.
I have already told you that I am more tomcat than ostrich. I don’t pussy foot around when it comes to facing up to the big stuff. When someone says to me If anything happens to my wife…. I feel like saying What, like she gets locked in the lavatory at King’s Cross Station? And why say if, when we all know our ultimate fate? And yet, and yet… we are just as likely as any other couple to ignore what is increasingly inevitable and assume that we will be together for ever, untouched by the hand of fate. Every year we plant bulbs in the autumn with the absolute certainty of seeing them bloom the following spring. We never waste time considering any serious interruption to the usual round of birthdays, holidays and Christmases that are the rhythm of our life.
Not until the now, the summer of 2020, that is, as Coronavirus disrupts the life of almost everyone on this earth. Shielded because of our age, Mr C and I feel that we have had a taste of what our life might be like in the winter of our years: unable to go out to shop, neighbours looking out for us. Hopefully, as lockdown eases, we will return to something like normal and resume our lives in the wider world. Many will not; tens of thousands of people have already died. As the crisis in England grew, radio and TV programmes urged us to consider “putting our affairs in order” and to think about “end of life care”.
How should we live in old age?
Is it really time to think about all that? Well, we have a will, for sure; as a ‘blended’ family it was always important that our respective kids knew where they stood on the inheritance front. In terms of how we grow old and how we die, there is still much to be considered.
First, where to live out our days? Whereas Dicky is happy in his crumbling pile, subject to the vagaries of English weather, Daffy yearns for warmer climes. We have discounted the villa on the Med option. We both speak reasonable French and Mr C’s Spanish is excellent, but we love to be in England, with family and friends, roses in summer and Christmas shopping wearing gloves and scarves. We have also discounted, for now, the move to “sheltered accommodation”. I persuaded Mr C to take a look at very nice flat for the over 55s: new build, state-of-the-art technology, beautiful grounds, no maintenance — but the prospect of sacrificing a lifetime of personal possessions for peace of mind in the form of having someone on hand to call an ambulance if needed, rendered him almost in need of resuscitation there and then. So here we are, in our large, comfortable, rather-more-cluttered-than-I-would-like-it-to-be semi, until one of us dies.
And then what? How about residential care? My grandfather had a friend who in his nineties took to living in a hotel in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, where the climate is relatively mild. There he met a woman, equally well heeled, who along with her Pekinese dog became an amiable companion as they lived out their days over afternoon tea together, looking out to sea from the hotel lounge. From where I am sitting right now, this sounds utterly idyllic — for about an hour and a half, maybe twice a week. And for the rest of the time? I like to cook, and entertain, deadhead my own roses, decide on some new curtains or a change of colour on the wall every now and then. But maybe you do get to a stage in life when those things no longer matter. This is what happened to the late author and editor Diana Athill, who died in 2019 at the age of 101. In her nineties she made a conscious decision, before it was forced upon her by an increasing reliance on other people, to move to a residential home. Despite the anguish of paring down a lifetime’s possessions to what would fit into her small room, she was delighted to be free from domestic responsibilities, and found unexpected new friendships.
Being and non-being
I have been a fan of Athill ever since a good friend gave me her book “Somewhere Towards the End” on the occasion — somewhat prematurely, I hoped — of my retirement. From the “high plateau” of old age, as she refers to it, Athill writes about death, but as Katharine Whitehorn pointed out in the Guardian review of the book: “with such verve that it becomes a book about life”.
“What dies is not a life’s value, but the worn-out (or damaged) container of the self, together with the self-awareness of itself: away that goes into nothingness, with everyone else’s…. The difference between being and non-being is both so abrupt and so vast that it remains shocking even though it happens to every living thing that is, was, or ever will be.”
When I first read that, at the age of 60, I barely flinched at these words, but as I reread them over a decade later, they have a much more profound effect. In that decade, I detect some wear and tear in the container of my own self, and it is increasingly evident in Mr C. Athill’s answer, though, is not to dwell on the “non-being” but to continue to make the most of the “being”. Not a bad plan. We have help in the garden, we do our own cooking and domestic chores, we make plans for the short and the medium term, and I refrain from mentioning a house move. In our neighbourhood we are surrounded by the loveliest people — not just neighbours but dear friends. If we sit out at the front of our house there is always a friendly word to brighten our day.
So, we have a will — making things as straightforward as possible for our loved ones after we have gone — and a broad plan for our future accommodation — how we’ll live while we are still here. The transition between those two states — how we die, is the bit we haven’t yet really faced up to. We have had the odd conversation between the two of us, usually prompted by a tragic news item or a TV drama, but we have yet to formulate a plan. I remember having a birth plan that went out of the window as soon as medical necessity came into play, and I wonder if a ‘death plan’ might suffer a similar fate. I know there are circumstances when death comes as a blessed release from pain and disability, easing the burden on loved ones. Old age can be a very protracted, slow descent. To what extent can any of that be managed? Does thinking about it in advance mitigate the realty as it creeps up on us?
I recently had a serious conversation with a very dear friend, where we played out a scenario in which we suffered something like a catastrophic stroke. Under what circumstances would you want to live, rather than be allowed to die? The “do not resuscitate” line is a very difficult one to draw even when you are well and rational. How much harder must it be in the moment, when faced with a devastatingly life-changing situation? Best to think about it now! We identified three areas of life that seemed to us so precious that without them life would not be worth living. We tried to recall them when we met up again a few months later. The first was to be able to engage in two-way communication: that is, to be able to see or hear, if not both, and to be able to write and read if unable to speak. The second was to be able to go outside: in a wheelchair would be fine, but we couldn’t see ourselves being confined to bed, unable to move, never again to watch the sunset or smell the grass after rain. And the third? The thing is, neither of us could remember. Help with washing and dressing? Well, provided by a kind and sensitive stranger, we could accept that as a price worth paying to still be alive. Did we want to insist on being able to feed ourselves? Being helped wouldn’t be so bad, would it? To read a book? There’s always audio. To maintain fine motor skills, for example to turn on the radio? We have the technology not to worry too much about that. We laughed at ourselves, concluding that actually there was precious little that could happen in old age that would mean we would rather give up on life.
Athill makes the same point in her book. Just before he died, her brother took her sailing along the estuary and out to sea off Blakeney Point.
“Sky and water were mother-of-pearl and the breasts of doves, a blend of soft blues and pinks so delicate that I had never seen its like”
The wonders of the natural world are just one thing I will miss. What really fills me with dread is not being here to share the lives of those I love, never knowing how things turn out for my kids and grandkids. It is in the natural order of things that their lives will go on long after mine is snuffed out, but curiosity will surely keep me going for as long as possible. Athill, on the death of her brother:
“What filled him as death approached was not fear of whatever physical battering he would have to endure….but grief at having to say goodbye to what he could never have enough of.”
We think of grief as being for the dead, but belonging to the living, but I can see how, when comes the dying of the light, I will find myself grieving for all that will soon be beyond my reach. This thought renews my resolve to live in this moment, for I am fortunate, for the time being, to be in a place and time that I have no desire to leave. There will be time enough to reflect again on these matters when one of us dies.
