Caring for our loved ones: a view from the inside
I walked into a room that smelt of stale air, with a sense of lost hope circulating the atmosphere. The face I saw bared the resemblance of what I can only perceive as defeat. Their eyes looked like the light had been locked behind the dark corners of their mind. It seemed as though the life-long fight for remaining hope had battled with degradation of physical self and lost. “Hello Sir” echoed in the chambers of their hearing as yet another task their mind was dying to respond to, but their body simply could not endure. “Let’s walk today” – another request that seemed so simple, so human, so taken away from him. “I can’t” doesn’t suffice – I’ll just ask again. What will work? What will explain his sheer inability to get himself out of the bed, to sit, to stand up? A task he has been completing effortlessly since age 2, now a notion so far-fetched it isn’t even worth the attempt. What can he say? “Go away”, “not today”, I can’t”? I don’t accept that, I only accept “I can”.
He turns over and falls asleep. Through the subconscious dreams he sees himself waking to the sunrise, jumping up and dresses himself. He grabs a surfboard from the corner of the room and rushes to put it on the roof racks of his car. He drives to his favorite surf spot and climbs out his car. So easy, so life-filled. He sees a woman pass him, beautiful, young, light in her eyes. He smiles and she smiles back – hope of what can be, hope for a future that seems never-ending, he is invincible. His feet enter the water, he runs in, feeling the ankle strap offering him the only safety net he thinks he will ever need. He ducks under the waves, steering himself towards the purist bliss he will ever know to have – flat water and the hope of catching ecstasy – a wave that will guide him back to shore, so that he can go back and do it all over again. He dressed himself, drove there, pulled a board off the roof of his car, strapped it to his ankle and dived into the ocean – owning pure natural grounding power beneath his simple board. He drove back home and cracked eggs into a pan – sunnyside up – just the way he liked it. He ate his breakfast knowing that the rest of the day held nothing but hope for the future. He relished in the never-ending time as his life was about to unfold.
He woke after this dream, dazed from sleep and turned over to reach for his phone to check the oncoming swell. Only he couldn’t turn himself, and he didn’t have a phone – his children took it away when it was frustrating him that he didn’t understand how the new technology worked. No one wants him to get upset. He called for help because he wanted to sit up, why couldn’t he? He needed to go catch the sunrise – it was fading. Why can’t he sit? He lay in his bed, immobile, chasing the fading sunrise that now only exists in his dreams. He knows he is young and full of life, there is so much life to be lived, but he cannot grip it. It has faded from his hands. The hope, the sunrise, the freedom to run into the open world and take all the hope it has to offer him. He awakes to the stak realization that he is 91 years old, alone in an old-age home, awaiting a future that has passed him by.
He remembers all the years that he has lived. The years that he has loved and lost, cried and laughed, the grief, the joy, and moments of pure bills and the times of deep sorrow. But why can he still feel all of these human emotions and not express them? Every time he tries to speak it doesn’t come out. He stammers, he can’t remember the words, no one is listening to him. How can a life once so full of hope have turned into a locked cage of four walls and an inability to stand himself out of a bed he doesn’t recognise? A room he doesn’t know? A touch he no longer receives, a look he no longer gets from a woman who thinks he can conquer the world?
He has aged. Everyone around him knows it, but how can this be? He still searches the corners of his mind and sees a man full of life, lust, and an ambition to conquer the world so strong that he can feel it in his weakened pulse. “Why can’t I get out of bed”? Why can’t I do everything that came so naturally to me in all the decades that have passed?” “Why does no one understand that I am still me, still in here, but that my body can’t do what I am asking it to do?”
Aged care is not a person who has given up, it is a person that is screaming from the inside out that they are dying for life, but dying from the outside in. They want, and feel, the fullness of life, but are trapped inside a body that can no longer offer this. They can only look from the inside out, they can only depend on memories passed, they can only live vicariously through the visitors that provide the remnants of a past that once came effortlessly to them – but now feels like a physical trap they cannot achieve.
He feels himself wondering where it all went wrong. Why he gave so much of his physical health to a 9-5, to people who didn’t see his value, appreciate his time. Why he sacrificed decades of his life, his health, to a society that replaced him with the next best thing. He is wondering why he stopped surfing when his job got busy, when he was trying to provide for his family. Why he didn’t gym in his 60’s, because it made him too tired to perform a full day at the office. He is wondering where all the people he spent decades trying to impress are now, why haven’t they come to visit him in the moments he cannot lift himself out of bed. What was the point of him sacrificing decades of his health – to society – to people – to family that only visit once per month?
He is all of us, just at a different age than we are. He is human, just as we are. He wants more – just as we do. He is forgotten, after giving his life to society, family, social validation and societal norms. He is a 21 year old surfer, with his entire life at his feet – trapped in the body of a 91-year-old man in an old-age home that cannot lift himself out of bed. He matters.
He is all of us, just not yet. I cannot emphasize the importance of leading with kindness – from the person in the old age home to the person who seems like they have it all together who passes you on a sidewalk. We are all fighting a silent battle no one knows about. Society is not a kind institution to any of us, and it treats us all in the same way at the end.
I cannot stress the importance of being kind to one another enough. We are fragile beings. More-so, I cannot stress the importance of knowing that YOU mater enough. You are more than your job, more than the people you are trying to impress, more than the moments you skip caring for yourself to appease society. YOU MATTER. Act like it. Exercise, keep your legs strong. Climb that mountain, eat the protein. At the end of it all – it is only you that would have saved yourself. We have an entire life to spend with our bodies – let’s keep them strong, let’s keep our minds at peace, and let’s make sure that when it comes down to it – we have lived a life that is meaningful to our true self – so that when it is only the memories we have to look back on, it isn’t with regret, but with a life so fully lived that we can only bask in it’s glory.
