One hundred-and-one books make a reasonable reading list.
‘We could start a book club,’ my new friend said. ‘That way we’d get to read a lot of different books.’
‘Good idea,’ said another friend.
‘We could each invite one other person to join,’ I suggested. ‘That way we’d meet new people, too.’
That was eleven years and one hundred-and-one books ago. Continue reading “One hundred-and-one books”
My sister-in-law, Lois Hunt, is planning a trip from Perth to Launceston to spend Christmas with one of her sons, her daughter-in-law and three grandsons. She’s just come back from a week’s holiday at the beach in Busselton.
‘I’m ready to go,’ she says. ‘My plane fare is booked. I’ve bought and wrapped Christmas presents for my four sons and their wives, twelve grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.’
Nothing remarkable about that, you may ask?
Nothing, except that Lois is eighty-four and has impaired vision. As well as that, a cerebro-vascular accident (stroke) seven years ago left her almost completely paralysed on her left side. Oh, and she lives in an aged care facility – in a place we used to call a nursing home.
In all my years as an aged-care nurse and later as an advocate for residents in aged care facilities, I never encountered anyone like this woman. She is a model of ageing gracefully, and sometimes not so gracefully, in extremely adverse circumstances.
Enjoying her retirement and holidaying in Sydney, Lois was unconscious when she was found, slumped across the bed in her hotel room. Had her plight been discovered earlier so that she could have received more urgent treatment, she may have made a better recovery. (See below for signs of a stroke.)
Although initially devastated,, when she was sufficiently recovered, she decided not to let a stroke beat her. Always a determined, woman, she made up her mind to live fully, in spite of her disability. Fortunately, she has retained her mental acumen and her speech is unaffected.
A large circle of friends and family (including her grandchildren who adore her) take her to dinner in restaurants and their homes; to the theatre; on shopping excursions and to football games. She organises holidays at the beach and has become an inveterate phone shopper.
Every week Lois attends a church service in the chapel of the facility; another day she has her hair done by a visiting hairdresser. When she’s home, she joins the other residents in the dining room for meals and the activities room for whatever is planned by the occupational therapist for the day.
Our visits to the facility are interrupted. Women in wheelchairs stop by Lois’s room to exchange local neighbourly gossip. Other people, visiting relatives, come to say hello and greet Lois and her visitors like friends. Staff members on errands stop to chat.
Seated in a wheelchair, this remarkable woman presides over a pleasant, homely room full of family photos, mementos and flowers. Residents of aged care facilities have tenure over their room for life. In practice there are restraints relating to housekeeping and safety which dictate what furnishings and belongings are acceptable. But Lois cheerfully ignores requests to tidy her room.
‘This is my home,’ she says. ‘This is where I live.’
SIGNS OF A STROKE REQURE URGENT ACTION
| Face Drooping – Does one side of the face droop or is it numb? Ask the person to smile. Is their smile uneven? | |
| Arm Weakness – Is one arm weak or numb? Ask the person to raise both arms. Does one arm drift downward? | |
| Speech Difficulty – Is speech slurred? Is the person unable to speak or hard to understand? Ask them to repeat a simple sentence, like “The sky is blue.” Is the sentence repeated correctly? | |
| Time to call 000 – If someone shows any of these signs, even if the symptoms go away, call 000 and get the person to the hospital immediately. Check the time so you’ll know when the first symptoms appeared. |
Always a prolific writer, she clocked up over fifty books that included short stories, memoir, non-fiction, plays, essays and poetry. But she is best known, and loved, as a daring novelist who experimented with a variety of forms including realism, fantasy, science fiction, space fiction and even the paranormal.
Over her long life, she explored deeply a range of concepts and philosophies that included communism, socialism, psychology and psychoanalysis, Sufism and feminism. Attempts were made to brand her with descriptions which included eccentric, but she steadfastly rejected the labels with which people tried to saddle her.
Her writing reflects her many enthusiasms and passions; her versatility and depth won her a large following of dedicated readers, of which I am one.
One of Lessing’s perhaps less critically acclaimed novels, The Summer before the Dark, (1973), deeply affected my own life and writing. I still have the paperback copy, bought many years ago, for which I paid $2.95. Like most of the Lessing books on my shelves, it is well-loved – battered even. Today, when I picked it up, it fell apart in my hands. I remembered once before, in a hurry, crudely repairing it by pouring glue down the spine and pressing the pages into the mess.
Almost forty years ago, when I was newly divorced and struggling to support six children financially and emotionally, this book burst upon my consciousness with the force of a meteor. Until I read it, I had been only vaguely aware that a life different from the one I was living could be possible. Gender politics and feminism were for me still vague, unexplored notions.
The Summer before the Dark tells the story of a middle-aged woman, Kate Brown, who has been an exemplary wife and mother. With marriage and motherhood, she has acquired many virtues including adaptability to others needs and wants. But when the novel opens, her grown children and successful husband all have exciting engagements, and she will be home alone for months. She embarks on a summer of exploration, freedom and self-discovery.
The novel can be enjoyed on many levels, but Lessing uses a number of devices which add layers and depth to the story. Over the summer, Kate has seven dreams of a large, black, wounded seal which she must carry over rocks to water. These psychoanalytic sequences that involve Kate’s personal bête noir (her helplessness and vulnerability) refer obliquely to the seven seals of the Apocalypse.
Lessing not only references the Bible, but also TS Elliot’s poem, ‘The Journey of the Magi’. In the poem, one of the travellers, now an old man, reflects on the difficult journey he undertook to see the Child Jesus in Bethlehem. This man, like the heroine of The Summer before the Dark, was also in transition between one life and a new. He reflects on what he has seen on the journey – a white horse and a black one; men under the vines betting with thirty pieces of silver and three trees on a hillside, all images from the Book of Revelation.
What they have seen and experienced will be but faint memories when the travellers return home. But they are profoundly changed and so was I when I first read this book.
Thank you, Doris Lessing – an amazing woman and writer.
Celebrating age
In recent years, I’ve enjoyed my first ride in a helicopter, learned to sail a yacht and spent a weekend helping in the sheep yards on a farm during shearing. At sixty-five, I went back to university as a full-time student; another year, I published my first book, a memoir, Other People’s Country. At seventy, my best friend and I escaped from our respective families. We married in secret in a very lovely ceremony, and then honeymooned in Paris – my first trip to Europe.
This year, after a shaky start, I’m blogging.
A search for blogs about ‘ageing’, ‘old age’ and ‘growing older’ turned up sites devoted to residential aged care, dementia, incontinence and depression. It also found sites devoted to research into some of the more dismal aspects of old age. I know a bit about all of those through my work as a nurse in aged care facilities. As well as that, before my retirement from full-time work, I was the chief executive officer in a non-government agency that advocates for people who live in residential aged care, as well as those in danger from elder abuse.
There is another, better narrative about growing older. People in their late sixties and seventies are often still in the workforce. We travel; contribute generously to our families and communities; attend the theatre, concerts and festivals; vote; exercise our bodies and minds; learn and grow. We are indignant about the poor treatment sometimes meted out to older people, and not afraid to speak our minds.
Stories about ageing gracefully (and disgracefully) are the ones I hope to celebrate in my blog.
Thank you for visiting!
