It's really good to get a varied message like yours on New Year's Day 2019 - it's good to feel a part of a community. Your observations are so clever, knowing, newly-minted but on the right side of the good heart. Being in feels secret and cosy, and how we are a part of the hippest gang in the world. I am looking forward to seeing where this goes. Here is something I wrote recently, to start things off, hoping it's appropriate and welcome
My Father on Christmas Day 2018
My Father was in hospital on Christmas Day 2018
He'd been there for 11days, due to be discharged that day
But the pain in his back persisted, so they kept him there
It wasn't clear what the problem was, but he said it could be his kidney
I got there about 5pm, and he stared at me as at a stranger
Until he realised who I was, and said my name
He was in a bed by the window, high up over the ground
Looking across a wide expanse of sky and a town effusive with lights
We sat and talked for 3 hours but at one point it got so warm
That I dozed off, and he apologised to me as I started when he spoke
I kept watch outside while he shaved, he wanted me there in case he fell
He said the drug he was taking hollowed his bones
He had osteoporosis, and a fall would likely break his bones
He liked to be cleanshaven, he said, for when the Consultants came
As they were due to the next morning. He said they appeared like Angels
From Heaven, and I realised he wasn't being complimentary, but sarcastic
And I laughed which made him laugh. There were 3 other men in his ward
One of them talked about how when he died soon, he would be skin and bones
Another one was grouchy, and waiting to unleash his ire at Nurses
The third was stoical and patient, and lent his spoon to my Father
Advising him to wash it first, like Lear reeking of mortality
I mobile-connected my Father to two women he loved, and he enjoyed being courtly
Deriving real pleasure and joy from speaking to these two who
Treated him like a substantial man still, contrasting with the impotence and weakness
He was made to feel by others, the loss of his power, the loss of his utility
He told me about how in 1979 he had helped the mother of a young man dying of leukaemia
Go to the Consultant to ask him to help her son who was stranded at Bombay Airport
Waiting for a staff-discounted flight but had then started coughing blood
The son had gone back to India to say goodbye before he died
The family he had been travelling with had been given flights and he had to wait alone
The Oncologist had contacted the British Embassy who arranged for a priority flight back
A few days later, the son died in hospital on the day my Father returned from pilgrimage to Fatima
My Father is facing Death himself; he is terrified; he is angry; he abhors extinction
Extinction of self, his thoughts, experiences, feelings, his memories, everything
The idyllic childhood, the wedding and honeymoon, the birth of children, being the king of your self, making hygge
How cruel this way of being and living that we are all perforcedly time expiry-dated
With no option around that finality. It makes me abandon my bed for fear I will choke
Stop breathing; so powerless and borne down on, so unable to do anything to prevent it. T
here will come a time when I cannot see my Father, when I cannot speak to him, I will want to but I cannot He will not be there, extinguished, and the memory will falter and fade with time despite myself
And I cannot do anything, helpless again, as I was when newly-born and he took me in his arms
Smiling and compassionate, walking down that sunlit equatorial walkway to our flat at the end
Of the block at the end of a working day, handsome, young, with the future still before him
All those years ago, where did we all go, what became of all our promise and our best selves?
I asked him in which of the countries he had lived had he been happiest.
I expected him to say “Malaysia” or “India”. He said he had only been in India for 19 years of his life.
It was England where he was happiest, but he gave as the reason the availability of free healthcare
And I wondered if he was allowing his present circumstances to overwhelm his accurate assessment
He said that my Mother could only have gotten the healthcare she needed here in England
And I could see that he did love my Mother, despite the loss of the woman he knew to Dementia
And his weakness and powerlessness to help her because of his own advanced age
I'd told him that she had insisted on coming to see him but we had firmly declined; he said “Well Done”
I could see that he worried how she would cope and continue after him, alone after all the years
Then my Father pole-vaulted the usual; gave me an image I would never have known, something new and wondrous
In microcosm the rerun fable of giving me life, that opportunity to learn and experience
He told me that these days high above the ground in his hospital ward he awoke at dawn for medication Early dawn, the moon still there, (there before him, there after him), he would look out his high-rise window
And as the sun intimated a luminous pale orange, he would see queuing in the sky after the night-time curfew
Tens of planes from all over the world heading towards Heathrow. “They come from all over the world” He said with real wonder in his voice, that boy he used to be still there after all this time, at 91
All the things he had seen and felt, awaiting extinction but still humanly noble in a wearied way.
As I left, we shook hands formally, and neither knows whether for the last time on this Earth
But both know that something of moment passed between two generations, however unworthy the particular representatives