Only connect!
Today is the First of July, halfway through the year, a time for cricket, tennis, football, if you can bear to watch; and a local carnival and beauty queen. Yesterday we went on a picnic with old friends. It was a hot journey getting there, and Anna called me a bastard. One friend commented about talking with Anna: 'Such a difficult mixture for her of sadness frustration and irritation. While I was sitting next to her she turned to tell me that something was clearly rather disturbing – she said, it was very bad; then she said is it forever? I said it is sometimes scary and frightening. Then I said, and we will go home soon. Then what? she said.’
Our friend thought at that moment there was a dreadful recognition and sadness and anger. Is this what happens when carers are too quick or in a hurry or when Anna says, as another friend to help her with a shoulder strap, 'you are just doing it for you'.
Thinking about it, I would also like to have comments on my thoughts here.
I say that, but do I mean it?
Yes, of course, but –
It’s like the phone calls. Like everybody, I suppose, we gets calls all the time, and they are friendly, introducing themselves by name and wanting to talk about windows or mobiles or whatever. We have registered to stop them but they come anyway. Like the salesman who rings at the door, selling rubbish. Sometimes they ask for Anna – would she like Sky television? I think not, somehow.
Often it makes me angry – if they wake Anna or make her restless – or if I am feeling pissed off anyhow – when they serve a purpose, like a punchbag, as I sock it to them with some choice invective. 'I have windows already. Do you think we live in a hovel?'
I once swore terribly at an old friend and colleague, who was only phoning to ask me out for a drink – but the background noise of the pub sounded like the globalised cackle of an Indian call centre, and it was the third call in an hour.
I don’t mean to be unfriendly. Living with dementia, we are isolated enough as it is. So, as I said, I would like to have comment. I would be interested in the links that people make in your own minds, the thoughts and feelings from your own experience, which may be similar or very different from ours.
If you click on the word 'comments', you can leave your comment, chose to give a name or be anonymous, and then click on ‘login and publish’.
Please don’t worry about the statement, ‘comment moderation has been enabled.’ It only means I get to look at the comments before they are published. We just don’t want to be sold any more dodgy Rolexes. If a blog is like a message in a bottle and thrown out to sea, then it seems it is likely to get washed up with all kinds of detrituis, like used condoms and plastic rubbish that won’t degrade for thousands of years, so this is a way of trying to keep the beach clean. I think anyway that the random connections that are made possible by the internet are a warning about how we all may be talking a lot of the time without listening. The times we really listen are rare enough, like two old friends perhaps at a picnic.
Only connect! is a famous quote from E.M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End. The connection he is talking about is between the prose and the passion. That seems right.
So, if you have sent a comment before and it got lost, I apologise. I will be looking carefully.
And if I swore at you on the phone, I’m sorry too. Sorry, Deirdre. It is another lovely day for a picnic. Or to go for a drink.
Specially if England win the football today. Or if they lose.
Whatever happens, I will be shouting at Rooney: Only connect, you bastard!
posted by Tim @ 12:05 PM
1 Comments:
The picnic was, of course, fraught with difficulties not normally associated with the familiar activity of taking prepared food out into the open air on a beautiful day and finding a pleasant spot in which to share both food and company with old friends. But as I watched you helping Anna out into a world from which her illness increasingly excludes her, there were things which I might normally take for granted coming at me with a different resonance. It was lunchtime on a Friday and we were surrounded by the noise of schoolchildren: laughter, insults, friendly abuse, excited chatter and the occasional interjection of a Voice of Authority or the blast of a whistle trying to retain a semblance of order in their play. There were children of all ages; some with parents, some with teachers, others just out having fun playing volleyball in a bouncy castle. And I hoped, realising that Anna was responding to our own presence, our own voices, whether with pleasure, irritation or anger, that the noise of the childrens' play must also have been reaching her and I hoped that it might be something that was giving her pleasure. Occasionally one of the children would see our group, notice that we were different in some way. Would notice that as you helped Anna to walk she was finding it difficult to deal with the texture of the ground beneath her feet; that she was finding it difficult to put one foot in front of another, perhaps because the memory and security of one step was forgotten as quickly as it was experienced so that each and every step was like a first step into an unfamiliar world. And I wondered what a child's mind, pausing for only a fraction of a second as she passed on her busy way, might take from such an observation. She would surely have seen that Anna was having difficulty with something that was simply second nature to her, something she never even had to think about. She would have seen the support and care with which you were helping Anna on her incredibly difficult journey. She would have seen the four friends, either watching your progress with inner anguish or perhaps in some way trying to help by taking Anna's other arm. And in that very public place, on an absolute peach of a day, she would have glimpsed a moment, a fraction of a second, of adult love.
I hope this is not wishful thinking. Perhaps it is simply me projecting my own hopes and fears onto other players and bystanders and passers by. But it did make me feel that the effort you had made in bringing us all together for that — and I use the word with some trepidation — 'memorable' picnic was certainly not wasted and that it sent ripples through us all and on out into the wider world, ripples I hope, above all, that might have bounced back from the wider shores to reach into Anna's mind and heart. Chris.
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