Last Man
In the unit,
there had been good days and there had been days that were not good. I never
saw the bad days, he was so sweet and gentle when I visited, in a way I hadn’t
remembered him for a long time, and it took me back to when I was a boy and he
played with me. So special because they hadn’t happened often. He’d taken to
one of the nurses in particular, of course. I believe he thought he was the
ward doctor and he was there to administer to the folk around him. The poor
confused old folk, he whispered. Some of them don’t even know where they are.
The unit door was secured of course, and often as you buzzed to get in, someone
would be waiting, hopeful on the other side, enough clarity to try to seize the
moment to make a last bid for freedom but never with quite enough conviction or
pace to get past you. That would really tug at the heart. He never asked me to
take him home. Thank god.
-
Heart
racing, stumbling and scuffing over the rough stony path. The path was good here
but the light was starting to go. Sun slipping away. Regardless, I stopped from
time to time to note down thoughts for reference later. Reading them back later,
they made no sense. Half sense. Haikus and nonsense. But my mind was whizzing,
my feet were racing and I had no clue why. Racing, chasing. What exactly I was
chasing was unclear at this point. A thought process? The daylight, the sunset?
A daydream – more likely. That white strip of sand in my sights, still. Surely
only a couple more miles. I had been thrashing my way towards it for over an
hour, though it hadn’t got me any closer. Mind playing tricks, my notes say
’mirage’. A mirror.
It was a
couple of months now since my Father had passed away. The troubles and
upheavals that his final few years had stirred were all still swirling around
the family. Some things had got better since, some things had got worse. There
was upset, still, and that upset tinged the sense of relief that we had all
felt, secretly or publicly. Just how long he had been slowly slipping away was
only now dawning. Years. Perhaps ten years. Maybe more. When I stopped in my
day to think about him properly, I felt a jolt of guilt for not noticing. But
the process had been so gradual. He faded, got quieter, and smaller. Eventually
he would barely surface at all, it was a silent mist that he hid in.
-
When he did
finally slip away, there were a sudden rush of practical details to be busy
with, a moment to take charge, feel some control return, and draw lines, sign
papers, close accounts. Then beyond, after – nothing. A drift, a gap where the
person once was. It was at some point in this drift I took myself off to a remote
corner of Wester Ross, with no real timetable, just me, a tent, a camera, the
standard escape plan. I had walked to this bothy before, I had slept there a
couple of times, alone, spooked the first time by a scribbled note to ‘beware a man calling himself Jim’,
visiting bothies to steal and get up to wickedness. I remember I had wedged the
attic door with my tripod and slept fitfully that night, an axe beside my
sleeping bag. Morning came with no badness in the night and I had felt foolish.
Sure enough though, there was a presence in the bothy, I didn’t feel it for
sure until I made pictures in the morning, but there was something there
alright. The pictures became an Elegy For a Deserted Croft.
So, now, two
or three years later, was this somehow a timeslip of the same presence that I
found myself chasing? Walking on from the bothy at Erradale to the tantalising
white beach that was just at the edge of my vision, I was chasing. Chasing
what? Time? Not a soul to see or speak to the whole walk out but I was
following something sure enough. Then – a small movement up ahead - did I see a
head bob on the path? I tried to speed up, clumping in big boots with the
ridiculous oversized rucksack. Cameras, bedrolls, film, waterbottles – I was
weighed down and tiring. When the path faded and I lost it I would pick up a
sheep track through the heather or just head for the edge of the coastline and
pick out a new line. No need for a map, follow your nose. It was familiar
though I knew I’d never walked this way. Half-track, part remembered…
-
Dementia,
Alzheimer’s – speak the words. There’s no shame, it will come to so many of us.
One in six, at the minute. And counting. It will very likely touch you, your
family, reader. Seep quietly into your life with no big alarm bells or fanfare.
Like me, you may not realise for years – just that the person you love is a bit
quieter, not joining in. It’s maybe just an off day – for sure enough they’re a
little bit more themselves the next day. It took years to realise what had been
stolen. There’s a pang of pain, of realisation and some anger mixed with the
guilt. The person is still there, but shrunk down inside. When did that happen?
Why did no-one notice? Why did I not notice…
What I was
chasing on that path was the past. I didn’t know it but that beach was a beach
we had visited and loved on one of our many family holidays to the North West
Highlands in the 1970’s. Redpoint. We had just called the beaches Redpoint One
and Redpoint Two. Visiting from further north, by road, we parked up and walked
south. Now, some thirty years later, I had started south and was walking north
– without recognising and without realising, I was walking back to the past, to
my childhood. Exhausted, I slumped onto the grass at the edge of the beach. The
early autumn sun shifted and filtered through the low cloud then spilled golden
and warm onto the pebbled beach. My heart felt so much peace. A wave of
acceptance. I was here.
He was here too, with me, in this place.
