An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress…
W.B. Yeats
I am late for the Christmas gig at the Home. I’m never in a hurry to cross into that country. My feet drag the last hundred yards up the driveway. It’s cold but I dawdle, filling my lungs with a supply of clean air. Inside, I gag down the urge to retreat. I hear the choir
warming up down the hall and remember why we are here. I throw my coat on a chair at reception, and spread an old newspaper under
my dripping boots. Soggy lines stare up at me: “… ensuite with master, powder room on main, whirlpool and sauna, view.” I head down the
hall. The air is hot and oppressive, as if, by some olfactory Orwellian trick, the walls have been programmed to give off boiled cabbage. I catch up with the choir and file into the auditorium.
We are spared for most of the show, our eyes zoned in on the conductor, our inner eyes squinting to “see” the memorized words and notes.
Between each set of songs there is a singalong; now, the conductor at the keyboard, our eyes are free to roam over the singing audience.
...
I shouldn’t avert my eyes, I should look straight out into this community which I will not escape. I think of songwriter Eric Bogle’s
wounded soldier Willie McBride in “The Green Fields of France,” carried off the ship on his return to Australia: on the pier the crowd is
waiting to receive the blind, the lame. Here are those wounded less dramatically, their skills eroded over time, eyes and ears failing slowly,
mobility curtailed. Still, a leg gone is a leg gone. My eyes keep coming back to this one woman. She smiles as she sings, and the smile chips away at my memory.
“Venite adoremus, venite adoremus, venite adoremus Dominum,” audience and choir together sing. Perhaps it is the Latin that links me to
childhood and brings into focus the younger face hidden inside the new old one. The smile has pushed away her wrinkles and muddy make-up
and restored a woman I saw every morning of my childhood at the neighbouring church.
Then it is as if this one recognition clears my vision and unmasks the others. Familiar features now appear through the crumpled folds and
skin... identifications are coming slowly, aided by clues like a gesture or a smile, as if their personalities have outlasted their housing. Those who sit impassive remain mysteries. And now as we sing the chorus of “Angels We Have Heard on High,” a man in the front row suddenly perks up and joins us.
...
The songs are sentimental. We’ve been singing “Merry Christmas Past” but the merry seems ironic. And now it starts. The well shored-up self, the one who believed herself prepared for this, starts to give way – the lyrics of the song, the faces, the apparatus of suffering are edging in on my resolve to get through this. Don’t look. I’m melting. I’m at exactly that moment in life where old age stops being a concept and becomes the place where everyone is – Old Age lumbering towards me, every year more familiar faces in his cart.
It’s stuffy here. Open the window, one of the sopranos mouths. More, others indicate with brisk nods and the tall, slim alto, standing near
the high window, reaches up again. We will all pass out, the whole choir will pass out. We’re on this road together, the road of ancient parents with all the moral, human, even financial issues, the decision making, the transfer of power, of natural order, of who’s taking care of whom. We’re all on the path, those of us with parents here, and those farther back in the line but on their inevitable way.
“I remember Christmas past,” we sing, “’round the Christmas tree. Funny how those mem’ries last, they come back to me.” Lines that were too
sentimental in rehearsal are now too tough to sing, lines about “when we all believed.” Suddenly the song is too much – for it is less about the joy of Christmas than it is about the memory, as if Christmas exists only in anticipation, and in the past. The song snatches even children’s happiness and turns it into retrospective pleasure.
Never can return somehow, mem’ries have to do, Younger hearts are learning now Christmas joys we knew;
All the little children seem to grow so fast, But, come December, they’ll remember Merry Christmas past.
We are fated, all of us, to be servants of memory.
Christmas: mad traffic, line-ups, excess of
food, too much drink. Families mingle, divide,
divorce, and throw new faces into the mix.
Christmas when hostilities and bitterness are
stuffed under the surface long enough to get
through the turkey; by the time the pudding is lit,
tempers, too, are flaming. Christmas with its
evaporating expectations, its residual emptiness.
Christmas, when a year’s worth of family life is
squeezed into short harried days, the family
dynamic exercised rigorously...
“Busy…”
“…..busy……………….”
“……………busy……………”
“………………………….busy.”
Time chased, pursued. Time parceling himself
out in small packages, stingy Time, always
shortchanging us and leaving us wanting more,
until we arrive at this last stop. Here, where time
moves in, settles down, and mocks us. Here,
where a sign on the bulletin board last week
announced that the choir would come.
“Tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow, Cissy.”
“The next day?”
“No, my love, not this week.”
“When?”
“Next week. Thursday, the 19th.”
“Not tomorrow, nurse?”
“No Cissy, not tomorrow. The choir comes
next week.”
Cissy scuffs back to her room in baby steps to
begin the familiar eternity between breakfast and
lunch.
...
Where are we? My neighbouring alto saves me.
Four pieces left, I tell her. Four times three
minutes a piece. That gives us twelve minutes
more to not look, not think, not feel.
Some have come in mobile beds and specialized
chairs. One elderly woman near the front is sitting
up in a complicated chair-bed. A younger woman
sits beside her, puts her face so close to the old
woman’s cheeks they must be touching. She looks
like she is whispering, but she is singing directly
into the old lady’s ear, pulling back every few
seconds, watching for a response. Forward singing
into the ancient ear, back to observe, forward,
back, she is creating a rhythm of her own. There is
such love in the gesture, such joy in the younger
woman’s face when she sees a glimmer in the old
eyes. I am singing to them now, they are my
private audience until I’m distracted: two rows ahead an old man
is trying to clap along with a song but his hands never
quite meet.
Across the sea of
white hair, with patches of
blue and patches of bald, I see a
man in his forties sitting with one
arm around a frail elderly lady. With
his free hand he holds a drink with a
straw, offering her small sips. And now a trim,
energetic woman steps up in front of the choir
and begins to dance. Her rhythm is exact; she is
precise in her movements as if she’s just arrived
from aerobics class. Another woman, less lucky
in old age, begins to wave her hands, making
large loose gestures like an unruly sign of the
cross. Suddenly we realize she is conducting us,
mirroring our director.
And in this room of the aged, the bare aged,
perhaps there is relief at the release from girdles,
buttoned shirts and ties; loose ankle socks
welcomed, maybe, where tight stockings used to
be. Here, we are beyond the campaigns to persuade
us into believing we can purchase immortality with
jars of creams and pills. No one torments the
elderly, who have less buying power than their
teenaged grandchildren. This crowd is left alone.
I swear off every year. I will not go back and
do this and yet somehow we know collectively it
is the most important thing we do. Later we will
tell each other which song beat us down.
“‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas,’ that’s the one
that gets me,” says one of the sopranos.
“White Christmas,” says another. “We had
that Bing Crosby album -”
It’s the only bit of music they get, we tell
each other.
“Still, next year,” one woman brings us up
short, “I’m not wearing glasses. I’ll come, and I’ll
sing, but I don’t want to see anything.” She’s still
recovering not so much from her father’s death
here, as from his last years.
I need to share my news, but can’t seem to say
it: soon, I’ll be buying the black marker to label
my mother’s clothes.
We wrap up: “We Wish You a Merry
Christmas.” I’m hurrying – aiming for the end of
the corridor which will lead me fast into the pure
night air. They’re in their doorways, willing us to
stop, as if they’ve waited all day for someone to
come by, someone with time. At one doorway a
well-dressed man in his sixties gives a small kiss to
a frail crone. She looks at him, willing him to stay.
He glances at his watch.
“I gotta go, Mother. I’ll be in Christmas Eve.”
He waits for some release.
She reaches for the sleeve of his jacket and
tugs him back.
“Don’t grow old, Paddy, my son. Don’t
grow old.”
I look at the guy, wondering if he got it, the
love she’d just thrown.
Up ahead, four rooms away, a tiny woman
with tight blue curls is eyeing me. Even from
here I can see her keen expression.
What excuse will be good enough to say no to
this woman who, on the day I was born, was as
old as I am now? What lie to convince her that
five minutes of my time is too much to give, to
her for whom a week, a day, an hour are equal in
the new math of the aged where numbers don’t
matter much.
And as I walk the corridors, I am a child again,
tagging along with my mother as we made the
Christmas rounds, delivering gifts of stationery,
chocolates, and smelly soaps. The last stop was
here, at the Home. I had the child’s horror of hard
sights: the legless man who travelled the corridors
on a low wooden platform on wheels, the woman
whose tongue flapped in and out of her mouth as
steady as the wheels of a locomotive, the only
strength left to her lodged in involuntary muscles.
If we were lucky, Miss T. would come out to the
small visitors’ room at the reception. If not, we’d
have to penetrate the Home farther, down those
corridors, avoiding eye contact with the lonely,
refusing to hear their hellos, shrugging off their
attempts to reach out and touch. I was cross-eyed
from looking first this way, then that, refusing to
admit the images creeping into my peripheral
vision. After the old woman’s degeneration, worse
again: up the elevator to the sick floor.
She was tall, thin, had a full head of dark
curly hair, and sat erect in her wheelchair. She
was soft-spoken, and had a tender smile never
returned by me, the frozen kid counting the
seconds to get out of there. Her hands were
gnarled, as if they’d been clenched in anger when
the wind changed. On the top of the bureau was
a black typewriter, and I would paste my eyes on
it, focusing on the word Remington.
On the way out, my mother would always
make the same remark.
“How she gets those fingers around that
keyboard, I don’t know. It must take the whole
day to type a few lines.” But I paid no attention
and only years later found in our bookcase a slim
orange volume: Autumn in King’s Cove and Other
Poems by Bertille Tobin. I remember one line: Our
brief life here is only night, at close of which will
dawn a day with human weakness passed away.
Now, ahead of me, the exit door comes in sight,
promising my life back. A minute later I’m putting
on my coat and boots when I hear music from a
nearby doorway. I peek in and see an old woman.
She’s alone in a far corner of the TV room,
hunched over a piano, trying to marshal the
necessary forces. The crumpled right hand tries to
widen itself to make the reach, inching its fingers
apart as if each one is pushing Sisyphus’ stone.
The unruly left hand refuses to be reined in; it
hovers over the keyboard like a hunting fish-hawk
then drops with a weak crash. Unwanted sharps
and flats wander in. Eventually the sounds
unscramble and a melody pokes through the
cluttered notes. There is a book of carols propped
up in front of her, but her eyes are focused far
beyond this room. She is playing “by heart,” “from
memory,” and the phrases take on new meaning.
I listen, sly audience of one. The carols carry
us on separate secret journeys, wordless travels.
In time, I steal away, lifting my booted feet to
exit silently.
