III

Old people are the most sacred people of all. They are treasure troves of words and imagery: living time machines to the past. The measure of a society is in its treatment of the elderly, for they preserve our ethic, our values. These values, whatever they may be, serve us in the long term. The elderly very often are our most direct contact with the first-hand experience behind these values.

Perhaps Milan Kundera is right about love being about sleeping next to a girl. But I think I fell in love with her, when I saw her affection for her grandparents. Their house had that eternal fifties aura to it. The echoes of the past rang through the hallway like unseen ghosts. She had grown up here as a child.

My wife was talking to her grandmother who was bed-ridden, and I was treated to world war two stories from her grandfather, Charles: Hunting Nazi U-boats while negotiating waves as big as mountains in the North Sea.

Charles’ own father was an immigrant from Germany before the war, but would tell me no more about that. There had been ‘terrible conflict’ in his family. At that time many families in South Africa had internal conflicts, as the echoes of the Boer War, and The Great World War repeated themselves through the generations. My family had similar issues at that time. Charles had joined up to fight Hitler at age sixteen, two years younger than he should have been. His uncle had signed for him.

I was then introduced to her grandmother. Thin and frail, she was only half-coherent. Sometimes clinging and friendly. It seemed sad that she needed daily care from a live-in nurse. She had wild and excited eyes, and at times became very happy, but over-aged and gaunt for someone hardly seventy. She reminded me of my great grandmother who had lived well into her nineties.

I had been contemplating starting a masters degree in Psychology, specialising in neuroscience, and I noticed that the old girl did not have the mindset of most old people. Not old and doddering at all. Similar, it seemed, to someone who had taken too many drugs. I wonder what her prescription was? My own late grandmother had suffered terribly as she had been given contra-indicated medicines by various doctors.

I pondered to myself the state of neurotransmitters in her brain. Her Dopamine and Serotonin levels must be abnormal. She had wide staring eyes. It was interesting that her particular brand of dementia was more animated and extroverted than any I could recall from life or from text books. Wildly alive, confused, switching between coherent comments that were quite slurred, and incomprehensible sounds.

The old man is tired so we don’t stay too long.

“No matter what happens” says Charles to me, as we leave with the most earnest of expressions, “promise me you will do your best to look after my granddaughter.” He says this in a calm and protective tone. I had the feeling that I could trust him instantly.

“Yes. I will, and you look after the old girl.” I say. And immediately I can see the look of helplessness in his eyes. How he had tried everything. How her illness did not seem natural at all. And although I regretted that last remark a bit, as he clearly had looked after her his whole life; when I looked into his eyes, I saw the depth of care and feeling he had for her. And I saw the helpless hurt at observing her degeneration.

“Thank-you for visiting them with me - I’m sure its boring for you.”

“I’d visit them anytime. They are really friendly people.”

“Someone is trying to murder them.”

“What? What makes you say that?”

“It’s the nurse. She has put her photograph where mine was on the bookshelf.”