Growing old is not for sissies

‘Aye - There’s raisons for everything and currants for bread’. Another nugget of wisdom was fired after me as I edged out the narrow back-door, while making my rounds of the sick and housebound for the First Friday. I had been trying to reassure my monthly friend that the postponement of her medical appointment might be for good reason. Conversations with the elderly often veer on to medical matters and occasionally the roles and titles of ‘Father’ and ‘Doctor’ get confused. The last time I visited her she had asked me, with typically forthright humour, to say a ‘selfish Mass’ for her. I knew what she meant and I appreciated the spiritual insight that she showed as she knowingly tried to twist God’s arm to her medical advantage.

It was raining heavily and I sprinted from porch to car to porch again, sheltering with hunched shoulders under umbrella or porch-way as I waited for the mobile elderly to make their measured way to their front doors. ‘Old age is not for sissies’ said the late American actress Bette Davis. Her quip has been paraphrased as a best-selling book titled ‘Growing old is not for sissies’. The lady with the quick-fire wisdom whom I had just visited was certainly no ‘sissy’. In fact, I suspect that she thought I was a bit of a ‘sissy’ myself because of the lady’s umbrella that I was unwittingly carrying. ‘I know what to buy you for Christmas’, she had joked earlier. A man’s umbrella was what I lacked, she helpfully told me. There was no time to explain to her that umbrellas and myself part company easily so I recycle them by borrowing brollies that people leave behind in the chapel. I then leave them behind me somewhere else, perpetuating the cycle for as long as the umbrella lasts.

Americans, usually the most politically correct of peoples, have a medical term for those whom we call the housebound. They refer to those who are confined indoors by illness or age as ‘shut-ins’. Whatever about the terminology, the reality for many elderly is an existence that is largely confined to the four walls of their house or even their room. The priest who ministers to his parishioners monthly may be one of a small group of callers who visit them regularly. Being privileged to live at the heart of a parish, a pastoral priest often has the latest in local news, knowing who is ill or in hospital or what is happening locally and we can often help to keep people in touch with the community of which they were once an active part. The monthly chore of visitation is not something that is necessarily looked forward to, yet I always conclude it with a certain satisfaction and sometimes with an all-pervading sense of sadness. The stale odours and the stickiness of the sick-room and the physical flakiness that sometimes goes with neglect can permeate and linger for a while following the final house-call. The thought of what might lie ahead for any of us who are fortunate to reach old age can be disconcerting. More reassuring are their interjections in my favour when they observe me from the pillar of great age and tell me, ‘sure you’re only a gasan’!

There are characters whom I have met over the course of the years of First Friday visitation who remain vivid in my memory. The crotchety, complaining ones, contemptuous of all that is modernity, are generally easily forgotten. It is largely the quirky characters who have retained their sense of humour that live on in the memory. Others remain fixed in my recollection because of their long-suffering or their interesting life-stories. When I linger on the routine that often confines the elderly, it makes me acutely conscious of the freedom that is mine and the independence and opportunities that I enjoy. There is a freedom of an internal kind, though, that the still-active may not have mastered. The process of ageing sometimes frees up the elderly from the inhibitions and the neuroses of adult living. They occasionally reach the stage of ‘not-caring in the right not-caring way’ as Patrick Kavanagh once described it. I suppose it is the lure of attachment to status and success, so common in the generative years, that are shed and the detachment of childhood that is regained in the process of letting go. It is the honesty that comes with this shedding that can be most engaging.

‘And where are ye from?’ an elderly witch-like lady who was on my First Friday list once asked me. She had the sharp features, the long, lank hair, the gap-toothedness and the high-pitched, cracking voice of a broom-stick driver but she was most amusing, kind and informative. ‘Crossmaglen’, I proudly informed her, knowing that there was a certain negative prestige in being able to say that I came from ‘bandit country’. ‘Oh’, she exclaimed as she cackled long and shrill, ‘I suppose you never go home’. That put me in my box, as the saying goes.