“Never again, brave glorious morning.” Elizabeth had been out of sorts of late and offered lines from one of her favourite poets to explain it. “What’s wrong, dear?” asked Dottie, the ex-librarian.
“Nothing in particular,” Elizabeth said slowly, “just a sort of encircling gloom.”
“I get that,” Cecil muttered, “it’s like an endless mental hangover.”
The conversation that followed revealed that this was a common experience among my older companions. As it was an unease with which I was also familiar, I decided to interrogate it, to explore my own angst. My early inquiries suggested that I and many of my companions were experiencing what might be described as pre-traumatic stress disorder. By the end, however, I discovered an alarming possibility – for myself at least – about dementia.
I started from the premise that crumbly life is a process of disconnection. I could see that I was well into that process. I was losing touch with the world. I no longer understood its language. I could not operate its technologies. I was disqualified. “OK,” I thought, “that goes with the territory, so get over it.” It may hurt my vanity, but it was inevitable that there would come a time when I was no longer fit for purpose, because in all honesty I had none. I was becoming invalid and that is a dangerous word.
The trouble was that it went beyond disqualification. I was unwelcome. In public, I was in the way: I blocked the doorway, held up queues at the checkout, caused tailbacks on the road, blocked beds in the ward. In private, I screwed up the logistics of life, as I lost keys and glasses, struggled with socks, acquired a new ache, missed appointments, left the taps running, forgot the washing, mixed up medications. In company, synapses had begun to misfire and I was alienating my neighbours and confusing my friends with my social dyspraxia. These memento moris of my growing frailty lay in wait to ambush me throughout my day and were reinforced with the increasing frequency of attendance at the interment or combustion of my companions.
The world beyond my front door offered no comfort, the corridors of power inhabited by an unholy mix of neanderthals, clowns and fruitcakes, misspeaking a post-truth language of alternative facts, where we have become consumers not citizens, commodities for the marketplace, conscripts in a permanent war, and where finally we will choke on an affluence built on poisoned water, tainted air and eroded soil.
The world has become too much for me. Sure, for the elderly, it has always been going to hell in a handcart, and the times have always been a changing, but this is different. It is not just the speed at which it is doing so, or its apocalyptic odour. The crucial difference is the length of time we will be imprisoned in Elizabeth’s “encircling gloom” of longevity.
This gloom feeds the mind and won’t leave me alone. It seems to have a life of its own. And, like some of my companions, full of woe, which it insists I share, “Showing me fear in a handful of dust”, my mind is becoming an enemy. I want to be free of its mental tinnitus, to escape its counsels of despair.
The experts tell me dementia can take as many as 200 forms. I’m sure they are right, but I can foresee a moment when, overwhelmed by this cerebral tsunami of bad news, my personal selfish gene will exercise a final act of independence – or cowardice – and disengage from that part of “me” which gives nothing but grief.
