Oldenland – A Journey in Search of the Good Last Years is written and has seen the light of day, published a month or two ago. My children and grandchildren read the book, and I await their comments on my understanding of life in old age. But I am taken by surprise at their interest in some of the detail – about me, about my life, the frailties of body and mind. A grandchild, now two years past her qualification as a medic, comments that she learnt more about my health from the book than she had from talking to me. A son says it is my gift to them.
In the book I reflect on my father’s life – he lived for fourteen years after my mother’s death, to 101, the last five in a residential home where he wanted to be. He was in Torquay, I was living over 300 miles away in the north of England. I would like to revisit those times, to understand anew with my 83-year-old perspective.
There was a time when it became clear that he was finding it difficult to manage at home, and whilst he had a short stay in a transitional care centre, we planned support services back at home. He made clear at a review meeting that he wanted to go home – and we set up a programme of meals, a taxi to take him and his hearing guide dog, Lucky, to the supermarket, a cleaner. The arrangements soon fell apart: he tried to send away the meals, though the staff refused to take them back, never used the taxi, he became depressed.
I visited, and he and I talked to a social worker and decided to look for a local residential home before he moved to live near me in some sort of specialist housing. He loved the home, wrote that I was never to move him from there – and so he lived the last five years of his life in Torquay.
I can see now that the certainty, his and mine, that he wanted to go back home from the centre was based on overriding ideas of independence and ‘home’. The aim, we have absorbed, is to keep going. I think that his stay at the transitional care centre had made him appreciate being looked after, and that he had come to realise that the struggle of home life was too much.
I picture him in the home, spending most of his time in his own room. He never went out, not even venturing into the garden, unless with a visitor. He went down to meals, but participated in little else. I come across notes that I wrote at the time in which I ponder what he thought about his life, how he saw those last years. I mused then, I muse now, on how I would respond in the same circumstances.
After his death I look at the entries he had written in a Bible and hymn book – he was a Methodist minister. I see now that writing was his way, particularly after he became very deaf, of reflecting and holding on to his life. A passage from my book:
The notes in the hymn book seem like a conversation with himself about the fundamentals of his faith, his values and beliefs. ‘God’s grace is for all,’ he notes. There is another statement: ‘Don’t settle for anything less,’ before drawing on lines from a hymn, ‘Till we become the place where the Holy Spirit dwells.’ Reading all of this in a way I have not done before, I note the quirky asides: Spike Milligan supposedly said, ‘Jesus is my hero,’ or Tony Benn talking of, ‘Prophets with a social message of righteousness, not kings with power.’ Quiet in his room, inactive as I thought, he was thinking about himself and the world, and his way of living with his aloneness in the fourteen years after my mother’s death. Once more I see myself in him, as I tap out words.
Since the publication of the book, I have talked at literary festivals and been interviewed. One theme that has been picked up on several occasions has been the expectations of adult children about what is most important for a parent in their last years. There has been a recognition of a time when the child looked to find events or activities, to create an interest, and surprise that their parent had not much enthusiasm for such an enterprise. In the same way as I reflect on my father’s life, the people I talk to wonder whether there had been a coming to terms with an ending of one’s life, a letting go.
I cannot, of course, check this with my father. But I have an inkling for me in the time I have left of wanting to come to terms with, to be at peace with my living.
And in ways I had not expected, the book allows, maybe encourages, a richer understanding between children and parent of the impact of 80 plus years on my body and mind, and of a life stage when there is not so long left to live.
I muse on the relationship of adult child to Oldenlander. Parenting describes the activity of readying children for their lives. Eldering is a wonderful way to describe the activity of having an interest in, a concern for, and, to a greater or lesser extent, looking after someone who has parented you. It avoids the worryingly simplistic terminology of carer, which, even when there is a lot of activity which might be described as ‘care’, seems to override all other aspects of the relationship that has been built over a lifetime. Eldering – being beside a parent as they walk in Oldenland.
Roger Clough is Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University and former Chief Inspector of Social Services with Cumbria Social Services. His new book, Oldenland: A Journey in Search of the Good Last Years – written over 25 years and innumerable journeys – is a unique and moving companion to the experiences of old age, and how to make it count. The book has been warmly received, with thoughtful reviews in publications including The Telegraph and Country Squire Magazine, resonating strongly with readers navigating the later stages of life.
