Another day, another clanger…

“What do you say when the old person you’re visiting says to you, ‘All my family and friends are dead, I can’t walk, see, hear or get out of bed to pee, and frankly I don’t see the point of being here?”

This morning I went to a conclave of community visitors, whose (volunteer) job it is to go see some lonely old person and cheer them up. Or something like that, although the gist of the morning’s pep talk was that it was ‘to help them find spiritual meaning in their lives’. Afterwards we went to lunch together and were discussing the sometimes difficult task of getting your visitee to talk. Understandably, stuck in an old person’s home, there’s often either nothing to talk about, or the person has dementia, or, because they’re depressed, they have nothing to say. Except…that. So anyway, one of the ladies at my table made the above remark.

So I said – pursuing a line of thought I’ve had for quite some time – “Well the problem is our lack of control over death, isn’t it? We’re basically saying to old people, we can’t kill you, and you can’t kill yourself, so no matter how bad it gets, you just have to put up with it.”

At which point my friend sitting next to me started to wave frantically – basically a signal to shut up – so I added, “Not that I’d say that, of course,” and let the subject drop. It is perhaps true though that there are two choices for the unhappy elderly, and one of them isn’t. To stay on the merry go round and make the best of it (find spiritual meaning, cheer up, stay drunk all the time…) or to get off. Personally I’d really like to have a pill in a locked cabinet so if I felt like it at any point I could just quietly leave the cinema. Maybe I’d have to have a brief interview with ChatGPT first, to confirm that my decision wasn’t simply the result of a bad day (‘Oh bugger it the dog’s peed on the rug again and my herpes has flared up!’). Also, personally, if I said something like the above to my community visitor, I’d like him or her to reply something like “Yeah, I hear you. It sucks.” Not, “Well there’s always God…or bingo on Wednesdays?”

The lady who was giving the pep talk was an Anglican priest and so she kept dropping in stuff like, “And I think religion is hard wired into all of us, isn’t it, even though we may not believe…”, or “We are all spiritual beings…” Being an argumentative atheist, I got quite cross about this and later said to my lunch companion, “What IS spirituality? How do you define it?”

Is it believing in something supernatural above and beyond humankind? Is it having a higher purpose, the ‘we’re all here for a reason’ thing? Is it just finding meaning in whatever it is one finds meaning in – the delightfulness of dogs, the joy of slamming down a winning point at the dinner table, being able to laugh at your siblings’ expense because you love them? Or – and this is completely irrelevant – should there be more hallucinogenic drugs handed out in nursing homes?

For what it’s worth, my lunch companion didn’t seem to know what spirituality actually consists of, but seemed quite attached to the concept anyway.

Here are some free books, among them my new short story collection City of Stone. I recommend Michael Martin’s The Rainmaker in particular – I’ll be posting a review/rant about that soon. It’s about a brilliant young female engineer’s attempt to save the starving masses of a fictional African country through irrigation, and female friendship and…well, like I said, I’ll write about it soon.

Photo by Nate on Unsplash