The elderly are resilient
They have no choice
Stature shrinks
As does their world
Physically anyway
It is shocking to the young
My grandmother’s enormous resplendent gardens
Her rambling home full of generations of family memorabilia
Huge family gatherings
All the cousins, aunties, uncles
Great mobs of us
With assorted friends
Became a couple of boxes in a tiny room
My mother has shrunk further
To a shared room and a wardrobe the size of a broom cupboard
She doesn’t walk, so her range is where she can be easily wheeled
To the balcony at the end of the corridor
To a bathroom across the hall
That’s it
The doctor calls in, we call in, as does the dentist and the hairdresser
I’d rather die than go to a nursing home she said.
I pray that God will take me
I never thought I’d come to this, I hope I die soon
Her home before this was an aged hostel
Here we live, jolly together
Until illness takes us somewhere else
Or we die
In the nursing home it’s a different culture
Here you are minded until you die
There’s a trade-off between liberty
And higher care
Higher care is greater personal assistance
But there are no after dinner chat groups
Bed time is early and compulsory
You can’t go to the toilet after breakfast
When you want to
You have to go now to fit in with the schedule
This is what you get
Settling her in, staff ask
“What’s your mum’s funeral plans?”
They speak from experience
And the need to tidy up affairs
Yet
Mother is as bright as a button
In pearls and silk scarves
Always sporting red lippie
Gossiping about her comrades
ABC radio keeps her up to date
Still the lynchpin of family news
Losing control is her bane
Bossy staff who tell her what to wear
Fer goodness sake!
Bossy boots imposed bed times
She screamed blue murder
At the thoughtless aide who shoved the shower head
At her newly done coiffure
Trouble and expense for a beaut do
Zif the elderly need to wash their hair every day
No-one does
As if it wasn’t clear she had a new do
Malice? Put upon and distracted? Thoughtless?
Ray dropped by on his stroll the length of the corridor
He likes to sing mum a song
And at the end he kicks up his heels and does a little jig
On his skinny little legs
I’m very lucky you know
Not like those blokes who did hard work
And ruined their knees
I was a teacher so I can still dance
At 90
Mum laughed about one or other of her comrades
Who’d been railing at the misfortune of being in the nursing home
As if anyone wants to be here she guffawed
Amused at her own joke
Yet within those few square feet
She is as alive and lively as ever
There’s always something to look forward to
Though you mightn’t have predicted what, years ago
Arvo tea
New teeth
The little dove that pops in, late afternoon
She walks around looking for floor crumbs, cooing
The old girls love her
A small world is no less a world
marykrone 