Three Things About Elsie

by Joanna Cannon

“Oscar Swahn won an Olympic medal in his seventies,” he said. “Fauja Singh ran the London Marathon at ninety-two. History is littered with people who achieved great things in old age.”

I could tell Elsie thought it was a completely ridiculous suggestion, but she still went along with it. It’s one of the best things about her.

I have my routines. I read my Radio Times by the window, and my book in the armchair. I buy one pint of milk on a Monday, and it lasts me five days. I live my life around habits. When your days are small, routine is the only scaffolding that holds you together.

in the corner was a tower of back issues of Dementia Now! because no one knew how to cancel the subscription.

I sometimes wondered if you were supposed to think more as you got older, and so the lines were there just to make it easier for your face to fall into a thought.

“Some experiences are like that.” I heard Jack from the front seat. “They affect you so much, you can’t remember what life was like before they happened.”

I’ll have all these leads attached to me, and the wires will travel to a machine that bleeps and counts, and dances with lights, and I will watch it dance, because it’s soothing to see all the things that matter about you held together on a screen.

Sometimes, you go through an experience in life that slices into the very bones of who you are, and two different versions of yourself will always sit either side of it, like bookends.