March 2025

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? – [Juvenal Satires VI, lines 347–348]

It isn’t so much the loneliness that catches at your heart but the emptiness. Coming home after visiting the nursing home finds a house full of spaces and air and coldness. I can manage the loneliness, the little routines, the coffee and magazines at 11 o’clock, the shopping, lunch in front of the TV. These things were almost always solitary pursuits anyway but they had a presence in reserve, hers – and now that is gone.

And always in front and behind you, just suffered or about to suffer, are the visits to the home, the short drive along the twisting cost road to the little village of Aldan and then up the winding road – not a road really, rather a path between the houses that has been tarmacked over – to the top where the place sits like some sort of monster squatting on our lives. Then the sitting hand in hand as she sits with her eyes shut and dreams whatever it is she dreams, whatever dreams are left. It sucks the juices out of you and leaves you anemic as if your very blood had dried up. Today I went as usual only to find that on top of the urine infection which she is slowly recovering from with the aid of antibiotics – this is the fourth such infection in four months – she had had a fit of vomiting and diarrhea. None of this I think if she had stayed at home. I was embarrassingly in tears for everyone to see. All she could do was sit there with her eyes closed and had to be returned to the salon where she could sleep more comfortably leaving me to travel home – I say home but anyway back here – to comfort myself as best I may.

She is past the point of ending which is to say that I am – we are – past the point of ending. There is the question of courage, no, of enough desperation to make it possible. There is a sense in which it is too simple to be easy. Too much for one pair of shoulders to carry. The weight of the sky is the weight of sunlight, is the weight of a failing moon, is ever present and all around is nothing – a few ‘phone calls each week, the kindness of individuals for a few minutes. The workers at the home know how to treat their inmates (is that the right word?) but have little training or inclination to deal with the visitors, the carers who come to hold a hand and share a cup of coffee. The quote above says it all!

Then home to the loneliness and the things one should be doing but have not the anima to do. Anima is a good word, the Latin for soul, that which animates you or should, but with half your soul a ten-minute drive away sitting in a room full of zombies looking into the half distance or at a television she no longer understands, the anima shudders to a standstill and wastes its days. There is indeed a difference between loneliness and solitude. I can cope with the latter but the former implies an absence which the soul yearns to end and will.

And so I sit and watch the ria – its infinite capacity for change – the cool of the evening after a hot and humid day. The scream is enveloped in silence as the night draws in.