by Amal Awad
For some people, such easy communion with life cycles beyond our control is far from achievable. My best friend, Jo, is one such person. She has difficulty coming to terms with the finality of life. She feels overcome at the idea of death – the reality of never being able to see someone again, to hug them, to speak to them. To Jo, ageing equals dying. ‘I’ve always been that way,’ she tells me one day. ‘From the moment life begins, it’s ending. It’s a countdown. I’m so aware of being here, but is when you go predetermined?’
I think of Gawande’s similar, stirring observation in Being Mortal: ‘There’s no escaping the tragedy of life, which is that we are all ageing from the day we are born. One may even come to understand and accept this fact.’
I only discover, in the process of drawing out Jo’s thoughts and fears on ageing and all it entails, that her realism about life, her sense of endings, is a pervasive worry.
‘My favourite song is “Forever Young”. I cry when I hear that song,’ she tells me mournfully. ‘Do you know the one?’
We’ve always been silly together so she freely begins to belt out the chorus. I join in: for-ever young.
As it turns out, Jo does want to be forever young. The morning sunrise brings with it possibility and enthusiasm for the day ahead. Sunset extinguishes her positive mood. Another day gone, fading away. She is emphatic in her response to whether she’s afraid of getting old. ‘One hundred per cent.’
I talk to Dr Naganathan about people’s fears around death. I tell him how the vast majority express little direct fear around their demise; that their anxieties float in a sea of worrying possibilities: a life of dependence on others, a low-quality life, a life that isn’t the one they have come to know and cherish.
Dr Naganathan smiles at this. He has some insight on how old people who have disease view death. ‘When people are asked, “How do you want to die?” everyone says, “I just want to drop dead in my sleep.” But you know … statistically … it happens to less people. Actually, people end up with lots of diseases at the last stage of their life.’
He also wants to address the question. ‘I suppose I’m prepared for that at some point in my life. If I live long enough, that probably will happen.’
‘Does it scare you? Seeing it every day?’
‘No, no, I don’t think so. No, I don’t think it scares me. And I don’t think for many people it scares them … how it influences people is that they probably know the importance, when they reach a certain age, of setting their advance care directives and planning and talking to people around them … people in health probably are more aware of the importance of doing that, I think.’
I did speak to one woman who described what could arguably be termed a ‘good death’. Ginger, a social justice journalist, who faced her own mortality when she had cancer in her thirties (and nearly died due to a hospital error), was there in her father’s final moments. She says she has done a lot of reporting on death and dying. ‘Why do we deal with it so badly?’ she queries, before reflecting on how some cultures view death, perhaps more positively. ‘Like, if you think about the way the Irish deal with death, historically when they’re keening they’ve got the body there for days and everybody comes, and they tell stories about the dead person and it’s very much a part of life.’
Ginger points to ‘the real deep, the kind of entrenched discomfort’ humans feel about death.
For an award-winning radio project in 2003, she gazed at death from different angles. She prepared a body with a mortician, she visited a hospice and interviewed a dying woman, she spoke to the volunteers, and she watched a body being burned at a crematorium.
‘Just fun stuff, right?’ I say lightly.
But Ginger says there were a lot of funny moments in the radio project. ‘I interviewed this amazing gravedigger who was probably one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. The thing was about it, it was so full of life, it was so beautiful.’
‘I love that. A story about death was so full of life.’
‘It was just so human, and it taught me so much about being alive. The people who worked with dead people every day, or dying people, they had an indescribable humanity about them, and so looking through that lens it’s hard to understand why we’re scared, and why we’re awkward around people who are incredibly ill or dying.’
Ginger says that her father’s death was actually ‘the most beautiful experience’. ‘We stayed with his body for a couple of days, and that again was so much medical kindness.’
He was in a small regional hospital, but he wanted to be at home when he died, on his property, which featured a native garden he had spent years cultivating. The hospital called for an ambulance, but Ginger says they expected he would die in the hospital. ‘It was the most beautiful hospital because on the ground floor there was all wind blowing through it, so it was really full of air, and he was rasping and rasping and we thought he was going to die here in the hospital and we wanted to get him home.’
When the ambulance turned up, Ginger’s mother apologised to the paramedics and told them to go back – she felt it was too late. ‘Those ambos said, “No, we’re going to wait for you, we’re going to wait.”’
Another kindness followed when the head nurse came in and, placing a hand on the shoulder of Ginger’s mum, said, ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through.’
‘And it seems like a really small thing, right? But because I’ve been in big hospitals – and I nearly died in a big hospital because of mistakes that were made there – that moment of compassion is so rare … and important, and I thought, she probably sees this every day, but she’s taken this time to say this.’
Ginger’s father picked up the tiniest amount, prompting the paramedic to say, ‘Okay, let’s go. We’ll get him home for you.’
I think of how many people wish for a quiet death, a peaceful exit in their own bed, and how rare it is.
‘They put him in the ambulance and they gave him quite a lot of oxygen, and that was amazing too because I thought it serves no other purpose than getting him home to die.’
They delivered her father home, and put the hospital bed beside his window. ‘He was in front of his amazing garden and we said to him, “You know Dad, it’s okay, you’re here, you’re home, you’re in front of your banksias, you can see them all, you can die now.”’
He died on the day of the Melbourne Cup, while the race was on. ‘It was kind of amazing because he loved the Melbourne Cup. We just all sat around with him … in this very beautiful way, telling stories about him, talking to him, holding his hand. My daughter had been taken out of the room, because she was two and a half, but she came and gave him a cuddle. We explained that he was dead, and that his body was broken and he wasn’t going to get better again. It wasn’t scary, it wasn’t morbid. It was actually the most wonderful goodbye.’
Ginger’s father loved wine, so the family retrieved a bottle out of his cellar. We both tear up as she recounts the story. ‘It lasted a long time, so it was sad, but it was happy, you know? It’s incredible that we got him home, and we only got him home because of that medical kindness.’
8.
RETIREMENT LIVING
Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies advises: ‘Fill every beat with something’. It’s a cure for writer’s block, but sometimes it feels like a guide to life.
Friday
In my parents’ yard, Dad’s plants thrive. The large lemon tree of my youth is long gone, but the row of hydrangeas down the side of the house blooms each year. A small rosemary bush remains, as do a variety of pretty flowers and the lattice of vine leaves my dad occasionally picks for Mum. There are new additions: a herb garden, corn stalks and pot plants.
My dad tends his garden in his going-out clothes. He doesn’t dress appropriately for the earth work of a gardener. He eschews the need for gloves and is puzzled when he suffers a cut. And he gardens in snatches – on his way out the door; on a quiet afternoon after he’s done exploring his city. Sometim
es I’ll be in the driver’s seat, warming up the car, watching as Dad bends down to snatch out weeds from the ground, ripping out the old to make way for the new.
Dad was a gardener and landscape designer in the early days of his life in Australia. He speaks of those days often –the beautiful gardens he tended around Sydney; the people he met, not always friendly to him when they discovered his heritage. The way he managed to travel to jobs on a Vespa, transporting a minimal amount of equipment on the back of it. Ten dollars a day for gardening work, riding from the eastern suburbs over the bridge to the north shore.
I try to imagine Dad zipping around on a white Vespa, Mum in her trendy short dresses and heels sitting behind him, clutching on for dear life. My parents were once young and cool?
They had the Vespa for five years, until a thief relived them of it. (Just as well – Mum was pregnant.)
My father isn’t a man of hobbies. He’s a man of hard work. But he loves his garden, so it blooms, and I document it. Every summer I look forward to the majesty of the fig tree that stands in the yard outside my former bedroom window. Every year I monitor its progress. Every year I try to pluck the figs before the birds peck at them. Every year I fail. Last year we tried hoisting a giant net over the tree. The birds still managed to swoop in and feast on the fruit. Mum doesn’t mind. She used to feed the pigeons so well, they grew too fat to fly. Eventually she stopped.
This year, I buy Dad citrus trees for the garden – mandarin and lemon. Alex buys him a portable shed, and Mum rolls her eyes to the heavens. Where to put it? Dad won’t use it. Et cetera, et cetera. How does anyone do Christmas?
Mum as curator has lost the battle over the greenhouse, but she draws the line at the fishing rods also purchased by Alex and his family. Dad has been known to buy things that never get used. We chuckle about the rods ending up with the violin he acquired years ago, now gathering dust. Alex finally persuades Dad to buy a nice camera, because he likes to take snaps on his phone. It’s sitting there, still unused.
Dr Naganathan, the geriatrician, warned me that older people don’t change in the essentials, and that the hope of a parent taking on fulfilling hobbies might be more detrimental than helpful if they’ve never been the sort to do this. A ‘conflict of expectations’, he called it. ‘Dad wants this; daughter wants this.’ It’s partly about guilt. He runs through a common scenario. Father and daughter come in. Father has medical problems. He’s a widower. The daughter beseeches Dr Naganathan to have a word with her father – urge him to go out more and go to men’s clubs, though her father isn’t interested.
‘I have a chat with him, and ask, “Did you go out to clubs and to the pub [in years before now]?” and he’ll say, “You know what? My wife liked doing all of this. I never particularly liked it, and I’d only do things with her anyway. And I did it to please her, and … I didn’t mind going with her. But I’m not the kind of guy who ever went and hung out with my mates and did that. I really like my own company.”
‘So I then take the daughter aside and go, “You know what? People reach a certain age. You don’t suddenly change your personality. Is part of this that you’re feeling bad that your father’s alone, and you’re feeling guilty? You realistically can’t be expected to go and be there the whole time for him. Mum’s died and so part of it is your own [guilt].” And it’s daughters who generally want to be more helpful to Dad. There’s a real strong bond between daughters and fathers. I’ve observed that. Daughters want to help their dads. I think that’s a very natural thing. But [sometimes] it causes conflict. So I would like to think I’m being helpful when I point that out.’
The other common issue is when kids believe that their parents going out and using their brain will help stave off dementia. A classic example: the daughter shoving crosswords on to her father who is forgetting things but has no interest, and never had any interest, in crosswords. A desperate daughter looking to unverified solutions.
‘What I say to people is the evidence that doing crosswords will somehow prevent dementia from getting worse is [scientifically] weak. But more importantly, I’d hate to think that [the] father–daughter relationship has degenerated to this,’ Dr Naganathan says. Sure enough, upon further enquiry he almost always discovers that this insistence is leading to fights. Dr Naganathan tells the pair that as these activities aren’t going to make a difference, why not just enjoy each other’s company?
It’s not difficult to travel mentally, in conversations like this, to my experiences of similar challenges. My relationship with my father grew more peaceful when I accepted that he’s not a person who values hobbies. It wasn’t fair of me to expect him to be anyone but who he is. I could not take it personally when he didn’t blossom anew based on my advice.
I think back to a conversation with Mum one Friday. ‘Ask your father what his personality should be like in your book,’ she tells me. She clearly has her own ideas about this but we both know what will tumble out of Dad’s mouth, and he doesn’t disappoint.
‘Hard working,’ he says, and nothing more.
Dad’s currency has always been work. And when he could no longer work, he felt emptied out, lost. He never longed for retirement. He has always been a hard worker, and without that as a purpose he feels frustrated and aimless. So many people say their fathers were the same. So many stories echoing each other, bumping up against invisible, nameless forces.
A lot of things begin to lose their shape and structure with age. Health and vigour diminish; perhaps people feel less needed, no longer a valued employee in a workplace; families grow but often apart. Older people may view themselves through a lens of decline rather than growth and achievement. They have peaked and now it’s a downhill slide.
You may come to understand what fuelled a person, where they held their self-worth, by how they age.
Everyone has their stories; rarely will they merely travel through life as an observer, or professional, a fixer. This is evident with every interview I do, including those with medical professionals. They all willingly share personal stories – their parents’ ageing process. Their family relationships. A doctor and I compare notes on having fathers who love work.
‘He had to have a trial-run retirement, because it didn’t work for him and he had to go back to work,’ he tells me.
‘What does a trial-run retirement look like?’
‘Oh, he retired and he was so stressed that … he found he was looking at job ads, and then he just decided to go back to work.’
‘Was he too young to retire? Was that it?’
‘He probably was, and he probably couldn’t set aside his own expectations, or I think he just – like you’re suggesting –he identified too strongly with the person who worked, and he couldn’t really see himself as the person who didn’t work.’
Dr Naganathan makes another important point. Sometimes fathers, or older people in general, just want their kids to hang out with them. ‘The funny thing is, certainly with the men … they don’t particularly want to talk. They’ve never been particularly chatty with their children. They want their children around, they want to know that they’re all right, because that’s still the father instinct. Sometimes more with their daughters. But the children don’t particularly want to just sit there, and so they are coming with the expectation that this is going to be good, quality time …’
But quality time is a concept of this generation, not necessarily of the previous generation, says Dr Naganathan. This strikes me as a reasonable observation. I’m reminded of Dad telling me he wished I could have breakfast with him and Mum every day. Of how relationships become more important as we age.
‘It’s about being needed, not needing’
Chiou See Anderson calls me ‘little one’ and acts like a big sister. Despite the affection in the nickname, she’s the tough-love kind, who will give you a kick up the arse rather than sympathy if she senses a deluge of self-pity is imminent. She’s the kind of manager who cooks lunch for her staff to ensure
that everyone is eating well. And her philosophies on life trickle into the management of her retirement village in Queensland, Elements Retirement Living, where she wants people to live big, and in their truth. ‘We have big apartments because we don’t want people to live small,’ she tells me, as we tour a model apartment. It’s spacious, new and beautifully furnished. Chiou See happily decorated it herself.
Despite the resistance many demonstrate to the changes our ageing bodies impose, at some point difficult decisions must be made. Moving house is never easy, particularly for people wedded to the hope of ageing in place, in a home they may have occupied for decades. But a day at a friend’s retirement village reveals to me that adaptation and an open mind can yield positive results in the right hands.
At Chiou See’s village inclusiveness and community spirit are important. She fosters an environment of respect for differences – and she lectures her residents on that. ‘One time I had two ladies come into my village and they go, “Oh, do you have Muslims in this village?” I said, “You know what, I grew up in Singapore and I have a lot of Muslim friends, I have Hindu friends, I have all sorts of friends. If that’s your attitude, then this isn’t the village for you.”’
Chiou See interviews all her applicants. ‘If you open your mouth and say, “I hate Muslims” or “I hate Chinese”, then it’s game over. You cannot come in … because you’ll just create trouble all the time. Why are Muslims any better or any worse than the Baptist people?’
I’ve known Chiou See for several years. We met at a retirement living and aged care conference back when I was an editor on a property industry publication. We were in a room packed with property people, mainly men, and she stood out –a brassy Asian-Australian woman with a sense of humour and a no-nonsense approach to business. We immediately hit it off.
It was around 2012 and the property players were peering into the collective future of Australia’s ageing population, assessing where the value propositions lay from an industry perspective. A distillation of sorts was occurring, as was a seeding of new possibilities when it came to getting old and being taken care of. How to pay for our ageing population to live well? To be cared for in facilities when needed? How to create profitable industries that served community needs? What role, if any, could industry superannuation funds play in the establishment of facilities for the ageing?
