Cul-de-sac - Elsa Joubert

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or less sixty of us residents. Our average age last year was eighty-eight. We celebrated the hundredth birthday of an old lady, the place provided cake and tea and she sat up straight in her seat of honour behind the table, a bit scared, the hair a bit out of place. The staff sang to her. She clung to her carer’s hand, tugging at it as if she wanted to go back to her room. She died three days later, in the night, but it was only two days after that that the death notice was put up in the lift.

      Although we are all here to die, death is handled so gently and in such an unreal fashion that we forget about it most of the time. Once when we were taking the big lift down to the dining room (the small lift closer to the rooms had got stuck on some floor), an old deaf lady declared in her shrill voice: ‘That’s why we have this big, long lift, to take out the coffins at night, when we’re all asleep.’

      We all went silent. In our lexicon that was a faux pas. That’s not the kind of thing one mentions in conversation.

      We’re not only survivors, we’ve sailed through the rocks, how many times, we’ve survived births and operations and replacements and deaths, we’ve nursed and buried our parents, raised our children, buried a spouse, we are not to be pitied.

      A dining room assistant clearing the tables while a few of us are still sitting chatting announces to us: ‘You must have looked after your parents very well, I know my Bible, it’s written in the Ten Commandments: Honour your mother and your father that your days may be long upon the earth. I know my Bible.’

      Now that’s a novel approach.

      * * *

      Since we are all on the threshold of the hereafter, you’d expect a steady procession of preachers, as heralds of the hereafter, perhaps a little creaming off from the estate for the Church, even a substantial creaming off, but no such procession materialises.

      Now and again a church elder with a little book. Once, just before Christmas, there was a young minister here with a few shopping bags full of snacks and food, but he must have had the wrong old age home on his address list, because the recipients were embarrassed rather than grateful. The food parcels must have been intended for the underprivileged and were declined with thanks. How vain we humans are. Not for us the food parcels.

      There would, though, be scope for ministering, and interesting variations at that, because we have people of all faiths: for rabbis, for the Dutch Reformed, for Roman Catholics, for Anglicans, Methodists and Reformed. The tai chi classes offered on Tuesday mornings in the dining room prepare the way for Buddhists, Zen. Oddly enough no signposts to Islam, although a woman in a burqa was our receptionist for a few years.

      But in spite of our communal destination the subject of the hereafter is taboo as far as the talks offered to us are concerned. Talks on investments, on diet, on hobbies or on Adapting – very important for old age, Adapting – are sometimes held in the dining room, usually with meagre attendance. We didn’t come here for talks, did we? And the investments have certainly been wound up. And our hard-of-hearing ears hear nothing when the speakers mumble as they do.

      * * *

      We came here to ease the path across the divide a little, perhaps to postpone it by a year or so. And not to be a burden to our families. Perhaps we were just too scared to live on our own in our big, empty houses. Perhaps the electronic buttons and panic buttons and burglar alarms and garden gate intercoms just confused us a bit. It’s terrible when you forget your dog in the house and all the alarms have been set and his passage through the house sets off the alarms and he is so bewildered he doesn’t know what to do. Once I returned from shopping and found the armed response men sitting outside in the car, wary of the dark, moving mass behind the window panes that had hardly lain down when he’d get up again and the alarm would start wailing all over again in his ears.

      The path across? At present the path across is mainly to the hospital across the road. It’s a busy road. The cars speed downhill from the Kloof Street side, from Buxton and Rosmead and even Molteno Road, it’s so steep, stopping isn’t easy. There’s a zebra crossing in front of our gate, but can our ageing souls, sceptical from bitter experience, believe that the crossing will stop the speeding demons? With a sturdy nurse holding us by the arm we are braver. Just cross the road with us. Then we’ll manage, thank you.

      Awaiting us are the corridors, the steps, the confusion of rebuilt floors, the sheet topography of the hospital. You name it, we know the way. We shall master the wide, bewildering passages, the sections radiating from the central axis, sometimes with shiny-clean black-and-white tiles as guides: ‘Many thanks, if I can just get to the black-and-white tiles, yes, the new section, I know the way from there.’ We are brave; sooner or later, we shall cross the road again with our large, square envelope under the arm, with the X-ray photographs (requested by the specialist) that will proclaim the news, good or bad, to our GPs, and that we now bravely bear as if it were a new dress or shawl, festively, and the hotel porter (I mean the hospital porter) will come forward to escort us home. He will walk across the zebra crossing, whether there are cars approaching or not, and flail his arms and plant himself in the middle of the road so that the cars stop with screeching brakes, front tyres just touching the white line, as if to shout: Stop for the crown of creation, the jewel of society – the old person. With a light tremor of our lips we shall attain the other side, lean for a moment against the fence; the gates will swing open and we shall enter. Desperate for the bathroom.

      A bigger adventure, but only in times of crisis, is the MRI, the scan in the tunnel. For that, a family member or an ambulance or David Klein is required, to transport us to the other hospital in the city. To deposit us right next to the driveway in Loop Street, to go into a room that looks like a cellar, and the door is wide open so that you peer in at the white monster incarcerated there like the enormous, shiny white barrel of a cannon, into which you have to crawl, which reminds me of the cannon in Pagel’s Circus from which the clown would be fired. Or rather, you have to lie flat on your back and then you are reeled into the tunnel. Just don’t look around in the tunnel. Keep your eyes shut tight. And recite a hymn. Then recite another hymn.

      And nowadays the envelope-bearing is no longer necessary, because the doctors inform one another electronically about our infirmities and we’re hardly back in the bedroom when the telephone rings and the GP wants to talk to you.

      * * *

      And a heart-to-heart talk with a bosom friend over a cup of tea in her apartment? Not that easy with a stranger. A blessing from Above if there is somebody from your old life living here already, or when an old friend from outside, when she is also left on her own, moves in.

      As is to be expected, because we are all old, illness is much discussed in the passages and on the verandas.

      It’s a perilous path you have now set foot on, a narrow bridge over a precipice. But if you can manage to cross it, something beautiful may await you.

      It’s actually only to be expected that you’ll have an illness in your past. But a conversation I cannot have, from which I recoil, is one about never-ending physical pain. You can read pain in eyes. There are two things I can read in eyes: a woman who is newly pregnant and doesn’t know it for certain yet, and a woman in pain. Of the first capacity there is no longer any need where I live, and from the second I shy away. That pain that runs with the clock, in shifts of four hours or, if the pills are very strong, six hours. Day in, day out, night in, night out. I want to prostrate myself on the ground before her, kiss her feet.

      * * *

      An older person just falls silent with pain. A child thrashes, yells and cries till the tears stream down his face when he has pain. A child ‘performs’, yells louder, squeezes out the tears because he wants relief and will get it; there are many kinds of relief – sweets, a toy, caresses, kisses, promises. And for lasting pain there could also perhaps be relief. But the older person no longer has the strength to cry or yell, and has long known that there is no lasting relief to be had. And that the pain must be accommodated. To learn to accommodate many things is the condition of growing old. I don’t like the word ‘adapt’, ‘be reconciled with’ is perhaps better, but it indicates something continuous, without end. In the word ‘accommodate’ there is hope, it’s temporary,

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