Waiting for the Last Bus. Richard Holloway
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annoy me, but the glacial way they move can induce bouts of sidewalk rage in me. The day will come when I’ll walk more slowly too, but I’m still fleet of foot, so I get angered by those who hold up my progress along the street or through the aisles of the supermarket. I mutter to myself that they shouldn’t be allowed out after the age of seventy unless they can pass a minimum-speed mobility test. For God’s sake, why can’t they get a move on? If I can have those terrible thoughts about the old in my eighties, I wonder how the millennial generation feels.
Worse than losing your hearing or your mobility is losing your short-term memory. Those moments when you can’t find a name or forget what you were just about to say to someone. My wife and I joke that we have one good memory between the two of us. That’s the best way to handle the ageing business – with a sense of humour, the blacker the better. In his nineties, my father-in-law stopped buying green bananas, because he didn’t think he’d live to see them ripen.
Apart from humour, another source of consolation in old age is that vanity and self-consciousness fade away. In his memoir, the American novelist John Updike mused on how embarrassed he used to be by the hats his father wore when he was old. Then when he reached that time of life himself, he found himself wearing the same battered monstrosities. I too have a shelf full of embarrassing lids that I fancy give me a jaunty glamour. My wife tells me they just look daft. Well, daft it is. I shall embrace my inner scarecrow and agree with the Irish poet W.B. Yeats that:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing . . . 7
It is possible to say a rueful ‘Yes’ to our fading energies and begin to appreciate the humour and understanding that old age can bring.
***
Much more difficult is giving up the prospect of the future. Not so much my own as that of my children and grand-children. Not to be there to see them make their way through life. And not just to see them. To be beside them when they hit sorrow, as they will, for no one misses it. To be someone they talk about, no longer someone they talk to. That’s what the English poet Philip Larkin most hated about death. He described it as:
. . . the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.8
Nothing more true, certainly, but why should it be so terrible? After all, we won’t be there to know we’re not there. When you’re extinct you don’t realise it, so it can’t hurt. The Greek philosopher Epicurus said that fearing the not-being-there that follows death is as silly as regretting that we weren’t here before we were born.
But it is not the thought of being dead that troubles us; it is the prospect of leaving and losing those we love that grabs us by the throat. And we already know something of what that feels like. Life has given us many anticipations of our dying. We only have to recall the memory of other separations to realise how wrenching the last one is going to be. The frail figure watching our car disappear round the bend before turning in at her lonely door; the moment in the station when we can’t say goodbye because our heart is filling our throat, and we clutch hands and turn away.
Someone is waving a white handkerchief
from the train as it pulls out with a white
plume from the station and rumbles its way
to somewhere that does not matter. But
it will pass the white sands and the broad sea
that I have watched under the sun and moon
in the stop of time in my childhood as I am
now there again and waiting for the white
handkerchief. I shall not see her again
but the waters rise and fall and the horizon
is firm. You who have not seen that line hold the
brimming sea to the
round earth cannot know this
pain and sweetness of departure.9
Painful as these partings are, there may be the promise of future meetings to console us. And there are ways of keeping in touch with people we love that can compensate us for their distance. In dying, we face the final and absolute separation not only from those we love but from ourselves. Dying not only kills our bodies, it kills our future. I look at my grandchildren now in all their vivid promise, knowing I will miss seeing where their lives take them. And a quiet sorrow touches me. It doesn’t overwhelm me, but as I gaze at them with pride and wondering affection I hear a distant bell toll. And I know it tolls for me.
In old age, this kind of rumination can make us feel sad about the future we are going to miss. But that shouldn’t be the primary emotion we feel at the end of a long life. It should be gratitude. We won a rare lottery ticket when we were born. There must have been something in our DNA that beat the odds against fusing the sperm with the egg that made our particular existence possible. Millions did not make it off the wasteful assembly line in the great reproduction factory of life. We got through. We made it. For that at least we should be grateful; and even more grateful for the world that received and nurtured us; for the fact that it was there to receive us. I have known people who have died in a mood of absolute gratitude for the life they’d had and the love that was given to them. They were sad at leaving the party earlier than they hoped, but grateful for the good time they’d had while they were there. Their last days became an act of thanksgiving for what they had received.
There’s an illuminating moment at the end of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel, The Line of Beauty, which is set during the early days of the AIDS epidemic in Britain. Nick, the hero of the novel, has just had an HIV test. He knows the result will be positive and he’ll die soon. Hollinghurst tells us:
[Nick] . . . dawdled on rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed . . . The emotion was startling . . . It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn’t just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.10
As death approaches, there will be sorrow for what it will take from us. But that is a mean and grudging way to greet it. If we let it, death will reveal the beauty of the world to us – the fact of a street corner at all! Maybe we have left it late. Maybe we wish we had noticed it before, paid it more attention. Push that thought aside. Don’t fret. Look at it now – so beautiful – and be grateful. And maybe you can arrange your death bed looking out on a street corner you know . . .
II
LOSING IT
In his most famous poem, the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas advised his dying father not to give up without a fight:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.11
It is the rage of the old that I want to think about now. And not just the kind Dylan Thomas was talking about. That was rage at dying, at being dragged away from the party before you were ready to leave. There can be something heroic about that kind of resistance, and it is why some people, almost without being aware of it, fight hard against their own death. I have sat by the beds of many who were dying and marvelled at how long it was taking them to leave. Their relatives would be worn out sitting beside them day after day as they battled the