22 July 2010

Elders

The Royal Hallamshire Hospital, Sheffield
Paul was only sixty two but this week I found myself sleeping in a room with three men all over eighty. There was John who once ran two successful off-licence businesses with his wife and made enough money to plan a comfortable retirement on the east coast near Bridlington. They even bought the house and stayed there at weekends but sadly she died before the retirement plan could come to full fruition.

Quietly and in intricate detail he described how he had cut his lawns for the first time, making neat parallel lines up the slopes - just like Wimbledon - then filling thirteen black plastic bags with grass cuttings. After relating this tale, he shuffled to the lavatory holding an aluminium walking frame with a support worker holding up his green pyjama bottoms. He laughed when I told him to stop running.

Albert lay in another bed. Five feet tall with devilish blue eyes, this wiry little fellow had been a joiner for fifty years and in that role had served with the British army in Singapore and Malaya. He had eight children and several grandchildren but oh dear - he was losing his marbles. There was the battle of the locker key. "One key! There's one key!" he kept saying. It was gripped tightly in his right fist and he wasn't letting anybody else have it even though another man's belongings were in the locker. Later he seemed to suspect a staff conspiracy against him. "They're all acting as one!" he confided. But he took a shine to me and acceded to some of my requests for him to lie down or take his pills. The staff were grateful as Albert seemed to soak up far too much of their precious time.

Then Sammy strolled in in his chinos and sandals with a stripey shirt and a shoulder bag. He was eighty three years old and had lived in northern California for twenty years. He had loved it there - "Oh! Yosemite!" - but his Sheffield-born wife was homesick so finally they returned. She died eight years ago. What a lovely man he was. His face was full of sunshine. He sat by the window without reading glasses, engrossed in Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstein are Dead" and he kept engaging me in conversations about Sheffield's history, the existence of God, California, the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkeagaard and his "lovely girl" - the wife he had lost.

If only our Paul had made it to eighty. Another eighteen years at least, like these men. All so different. Different pathways. Different results. Heading so differently for death's exit doors. I promised to take Sammy out in August to show him a couple of historical sites that he had never heard of in this Un-Californian city - assuming of course that, like me, he survives hospital.

8 comments:

  1. Are you ok? sounds like are..hope so. How kind of you to engage with your fellow patients with such patience!

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  2. No if you'd been in Barnsley District hospital, I could have asked Kathy to pop in and see you.
    Hope you are OK.

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  3. Elizabeth7:37 pm

    Oh, YP...it obviously wasn't your sense of humour that they operated on, but I'm so sorry to hear you've been poorly. I do hope you're feeling better soon - take good care of yourself. x

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  4. LIBBY - Thanks. I'm okay now - on the mend. The other guys were interesting characters who had of course lived full lives. Sammy arrived in San Francisco in 1965!
    JENNY With some of the cheeky comments I leave on your blog, Kathy might have taken some kind of medical revenge!
    ELIZABETH Yes getting better thanks even though the hospital staff were "working as one"!

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  5. Oh. I am behind the news... I'm glad you are on the mend YP.

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  6. Gracious. I just noticed you've been blogging for more than 6 years. Well done!

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  7. KATHERINE You may be a talented artist but your arithmetic sucks! 2010 minus 2005 = FIVE years!

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  8. Is there anything Sammy would like to see? Maybe I could take a drive and snap some pictures.

    I had an elderly roommate in the hospital 3 years ago. She had worked in the White House on the diplomatic corps since Harry Truman's days. She was 88 and still much brighter than I am. She could snap a doctor in two with a couple of well-placed words. What a treat that was!

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Mr Pudding welcomes all genuine comments - even those with which he disagrees. However, puerile or abusive comments from anonymous contributors will continue to be given the short shrift they deserve. Any spam comments that get through Google/Blogger defences will also be quickly deleted.

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