Tom and his stroke and his wife and his death and the rooftops of South London
When I worked in a nursing home in Tooting Bec some years ago I helped look after an old Londoner I'll call Tom. He was too old and weak to live at home with his wife. They had no children.
He was a likeable fellow, pink dome with fluffy white tonsure and sad eyes, who had interesting things to tell me about the early years of tv broadcasting in this country. Caring for him was a pleasure, until he suffered a major stroke. After this, he was unable to use half of his body, and neither could he pass the time reading. He had to have weekly visits from a speech therapist who helped him regain most of his former verbal/vocal ability. Helping him was now a painful thing: it would require two staff to move him while washing the shit from him and manhandling him into his slacks, inco pad, shirt and cardigan, during which he would inevitably curse and then weep freely in his pain and frustration. His default expression was now one of terror. Jesus Christ I find myself blinking furiously and swallowing hard just remembering him. I tried to make him laugh sometimes but my rare successes usually ended up, as did any kind of emotional display, with Tom sobbing, tears rolling down his effort-reddened cheeks. I am ashamed to report my means of dealing with these developments was to gradually disengage from Tom as the person he was and think of him and treat him more 'professionally'. Towards the very end of his life his wife's visits to the home were of course more frequent. She was a sweet, birdlike lady with big, curious eyes and a frizzy cloud of hair dyed pale brown. I greeted her in passing one particularly hectic shift. No time to stop and ask why she looked so anxious and confused; of course, the condition of her husband of some fifty-odd close and faithful years was deteriorating fast but for the first time she looked more like one of our residents, a little fearful and uncertain as to where she was, and why. Her lipstick was unevenly applied and a good amount coated her teeth. I wish I'd stopped to talk to her that time. Another regret.
Tom died, and that day I stood looking out the window of a bedroom beside his, at the red tiles and grey slates, the peaks and dormer windows of the rooftops of our bit of South London, where traffic lights continued to change and folk came and went on a somewhat overcast afternoon, the world altered not a fraction of a whit by the death of a good man in ignominious obscurity. I thought of his wife, alone now, and how things would be for her. I did nothing to find out. As well as the duties they are there to perform, Social Services act as a necessary but unconvincing salve to our conscience in these our busy lives.
It's nearly five months since I last wrote anything here, and I have to come up with this gloom and angst? For shame, and me with a beautiful baby girl to renew my spirits? Why can't I write on some happier subject (just as typical of my journal as the foregoing death-trip) that's happened since we were last here? My sister's Loch Lomond-side wedding, perhaps? The Arcade Fire gig at the SCC which was me and Mo's first night out since the Bean was born (the last night out before the birth being the same band's show at the Barrowlands)? My new mania for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, or the excellent Kevin Drew/Broken Social Scene album and gig? The cheering prospect of a dazzling-looking movie adaptation of the first part of the wonderful His Dark Materials? Or even giving out like fury at my new job?
Well for one thing i was on the beer last night. Electrelane, my favourite British band, played King Tut's and, as the hard-rockin foursome are calling it a day after this tour, this was a show I couldn't miss. (They played a blinder as usual). While I didn't get pissed, I did not, as the festive booze adverts advise us so mealy-mouthed, 'drink responsibly', ie I fired several pints down my neck with no thoughts of consequent head pain or hangover gloom. Both came a-callin, unused to getting em in as I have become.
The band are going their separate ways and eras are ending, or beginning, amongst my frends, the best of whom in this town went to the gig with me. Couples are cohabiting, leaving the city. It's all happy stuff but I am ill-equipped to handle change. I will miss Electrelane too.
Such was on my mind as Mo and I tried to cope with setbacks in the Bean's sleep routines, having got out of bed with the now-usual stiff and cracking joints to wash, dress and frolic with the child. We're supposed to be trying to make room in our overstuffed flat by getting rid of old clothes etc so I had to hop over Oxfam-bound plastic bags containing shirts I still like but will probably be unable to button over my gut ever again.
I've told people that being a parent is hard work but that our daughter (when she's sleeping enough and, alas, the Bean is like her auld fella and his before him - hates the thought of missing any part of the party) is such a delight, such a funny little person, a smile from her wipes the day's record
clean of its quota of soul-sapping bullshit. But I have discovered that the boundless unconditional love I feel for her (and I didn't suspect I had the capacity for it) is double-edged. On a day like today I look at her busily pre-occupied with bright-coloured toy stacking cups, at the unutterably vulnerable slender neck and the back of her fluffy wee head, and I could cry at her fragility and at the inevitable portion of pain that awaits her. I can't find the words for what I'm feeling, really. Maybe it's too new to me. I want to encircle her and I ward off the spectres of faithless future fuckers yet unknown by intoning inwardly, mantra-like, Anyone hurts her I'll kill them but that's too crude a sentiment for what I'm truly feeling. My love for my child has permutations which can floor me with dread, and I can barely guess at how powerful her mother's like feelings must be. Actually debilitating. Mo has perceived that our society's vaunted love of and respect for family, babies and the institution of motherhood is all so much jaw music, as witness the general impatience and even hostility shown to herself, baby-buggy and precious cargo any busy November day in the city centre. This has added weight to the now-forceful, increasingly believable fact that we will slip unnoticed into history while the streets outside continue to bustle, the world all unknowing gets on with its idiot business. Whatever our hopes and fears for the Bean amount to, barring the unthinkable, we'll both have to leave her. The gorgeous little tyke, with her ponderous, serious looks leavened by an utterly irresistible grin, is unwittingly reinforcing her father's habit of thinking over-much on mortality.
But some crumbs of comfort were to be had from my weekly bath with Arthur Schopenhauer - philosophy offers that little bit more consolation when one is immersed in hot, soapy water, I feel. As the water cooled and the suds dispersed, I finished his Counsels and Maxims, with its sage words on youth and age, and life and death: '...I should point out how beginning and end meet together, and how closely and intimately Eros is connected with Death; how Orcus...is not only the receiver but the giver of all things...Death is the great reservoir of Life. Everything comes from Orcus - everything that is alive now was once there.'
He was a likeable fellow, pink dome with fluffy white tonsure and sad eyes, who had interesting things to tell me about the early years of tv broadcasting in this country. Caring for him was a pleasure, until he suffered a major stroke. After this, he was unable to use half of his body, and neither could he pass the time reading. He had to have weekly visits from a speech therapist who helped him regain most of his former verbal/vocal ability. Helping him was now a painful thing: it would require two staff to move him while washing the shit from him and manhandling him into his slacks, inco pad, shirt and cardigan, during which he would inevitably curse and then weep freely in his pain and frustration. His default expression was now one of terror. Jesus Christ I find myself blinking furiously and swallowing hard just remembering him. I tried to make him laugh sometimes but my rare successes usually ended up, as did any kind of emotional display, with Tom sobbing, tears rolling down his effort-reddened cheeks. I am ashamed to report my means of dealing with these developments was to gradually disengage from Tom as the person he was and think of him and treat him more 'professionally'. Towards the very end of his life his wife's visits to the home were of course more frequent. She was a sweet, birdlike lady with big, curious eyes and a frizzy cloud of hair dyed pale brown. I greeted her in passing one particularly hectic shift. No time to stop and ask why she looked so anxious and confused; of course, the condition of her husband of some fifty-odd close and faithful years was deteriorating fast but for the first time she looked more like one of our residents, a little fearful and uncertain as to where she was, and why. Her lipstick was unevenly applied and a good amount coated her teeth. I wish I'd stopped to talk to her that time. Another regret.
Tom died, and that day I stood looking out the window of a bedroom beside his, at the red tiles and grey slates, the peaks and dormer windows of the rooftops of our bit of South London, where traffic lights continued to change and folk came and went on a somewhat overcast afternoon, the world altered not a fraction of a whit by the death of a good man in ignominious obscurity. I thought of his wife, alone now, and how things would be for her. I did nothing to find out. As well as the duties they are there to perform, Social Services act as a necessary but unconvincing salve to our conscience in these our busy lives.
It's nearly five months since I last wrote anything here, and I have to come up with this gloom and angst? For shame, and me with a beautiful baby girl to renew my spirits? Why can't I write on some happier subject (just as typical of my journal as the foregoing death-trip) that's happened since we were last here? My sister's Loch Lomond-side wedding, perhaps? The Arcade Fire gig at the SCC which was me and Mo's first night out since the Bean was born (the last night out before the birth being the same band's show at the Barrowlands)? My new mania for the novels of Cormac McCarthy, or the excellent Kevin Drew/Broken Social Scene album and gig? The cheering prospect of a dazzling-looking movie adaptation of the first part of the wonderful His Dark Materials? Or even giving out like fury at my new job?
Well for one thing i was on the beer last night. Electrelane, my favourite British band, played King Tut's and, as the hard-rockin foursome are calling it a day after this tour, this was a show I couldn't miss. (They played a blinder as usual). While I didn't get pissed, I did not, as the festive booze adverts advise us so mealy-mouthed, 'drink responsibly', ie I fired several pints down my neck with no thoughts of consequent head pain or hangover gloom. Both came a-callin, unused to getting em in as I have become.
The band are going their separate ways and eras are ending, or beginning, amongst my frends, the best of whom in this town went to the gig with me. Couples are cohabiting, leaving the city. It's all happy stuff but I am ill-equipped to handle change. I will miss Electrelane too.
Such was on my mind as Mo and I tried to cope with setbacks in the Bean's sleep routines, having got out of bed with the now-usual stiff and cracking joints to wash, dress and frolic with the child. We're supposed to be trying to make room in our overstuffed flat by getting rid of old clothes etc so I had to hop over Oxfam-bound plastic bags containing shirts I still like but will probably be unable to button over my gut ever again.
I've told people that being a parent is hard work but that our daughter (when she's sleeping enough and, alas, the Bean is like her auld fella and his before him - hates the thought of missing any part of the party) is such a delight, such a funny little person, a smile from her wipes the day's record
clean of its quota of soul-sapping bullshit. But I have discovered that the boundless unconditional love I feel for her (and I didn't suspect I had the capacity for it) is double-edged. On a day like today I look at her busily pre-occupied with bright-coloured toy stacking cups, at the unutterably vulnerable slender neck and the back of her fluffy wee head, and I could cry at her fragility and at the inevitable portion of pain that awaits her. I can't find the words for what I'm feeling, really. Maybe it's too new to me. I want to encircle her and I ward off the spectres of faithless future fuckers yet unknown by intoning inwardly, mantra-like, Anyone hurts her I'll kill them but that's too crude a sentiment for what I'm truly feeling. My love for my child has permutations which can floor me with dread, and I can barely guess at how powerful her mother's like feelings must be. Actually debilitating. Mo has perceived that our society's vaunted love of and respect for family, babies and the institution of motherhood is all so much jaw music, as witness the general impatience and even hostility shown to herself, baby-buggy and precious cargo any busy November day in the city centre. This has added weight to the now-forceful, increasingly believable fact that we will slip unnoticed into history while the streets outside continue to bustle, the world all unknowing gets on with its idiot business. Whatever our hopes and fears for the Bean amount to, barring the unthinkable, we'll both have to leave her. The gorgeous little tyke, with her ponderous, serious looks leavened by an utterly irresistible grin, is unwittingly reinforcing her father's habit of thinking over-much on mortality.
But some crumbs of comfort were to be had from my weekly bath with Arthur Schopenhauer - philosophy offers that little bit more consolation when one is immersed in hot, soapy water, I feel. As the water cooled and the suds dispersed, I finished his Counsels and Maxims, with its sage words on youth and age, and life and death: '...I should point out how beginning and end meet together, and how closely and intimately Eros is connected with Death; how Orcus...is not only the receiver but the giver of all things...Death is the great reservoir of Life. Everything comes from Orcus - everything that is alive now was once there.'