Still,some people can recount the past with such conviction its glories and affairs are briefly resuscitated. For some the past is the only place that makes sense and there are people who have made it their daily task to reconstruct vanished worlds for them,to bring the dead to life,to raise fallen houses,re-romanticise failed marriages,reunite fractured families,and resurrect spaniels and daughters.
A friend had a husband in aged care in an inner suburb. He had Alzheimer’s and his world slipped away daily,reappeared,and was gone again,a perpetual strobing between clarity and nothingness. She was talking to her husband and to the man who had forgotten he was her husband by turns.
Anson CameronEddie Jim
During the pandemic she wasn’t allowed to visit him inside his facility,so she went,every day,to its little garden and carers wheeled him out onto the first-floor balcony above. He smiled down on her and she smiled up at him,blowing kisses as she began her daily narrative.
Reading his face she soon realised truth was more painful to him than pretty lies,and that he had no way of telling what was real anyway. Why offer up a mournful reality when she could lay out a palette of happy invention? What virtue has reality in such a circumstance?
So she told him their house still stood,though it had been demolished and replaced by apartments. She told him his dog,Dusty,still slept at the foot of the bed with her head on his shoes,scenting him,dreaming of him,waiting for him,though Dusty had been put down. She led him to believe their daughter was still happily married. On their grandkids she bestowed degrees in architecture,engineering,law,and education,though they were riven with sloth and had never broached a campus. He would be home soon,she said. They would go to Noosa again and see Tony and Barb.
Every day she went to the garden and spoke to him on his balcony and constructed a happy world in which people never died and marriages never failed and the tomatoes were plump on the vine. Though his delight at her tender untruths was evident,she couldn’t help feeling guilty. The lies came hard. If you’re not averse to lying to those you love there’s something wrong with you.
So,she consulted geriatricians and aged-care nurses about it and was reassured that there was no point breaking old folk out of whatever comfortable world they’d found. She soon observed that lying was the modus operandi of the whole aged-care sector. Tell the inmate what they want to hear. Tell them the softest,most soothing lies that occur to you. What’s the point of alarming them with the truth of their circumstance? Tell them they are going home tomorrow. It seemed both shockingly wrong ... and perfectly right.
At first it was a daunting task,daily refashioning a happy world out of the muck she had to work with. But once she saw his delight at each new invention she began to enjoy it. She became an author,imagining the smile lifting his face tomorrow as she told him their daughter had been made a partner at her firm.
After her visits,during the course of the day,his newly renovated world would fall away piece-by-piece. Their marriage,their children,all gone by supper. Even the intuitive task of spooning food from bowl to mouth was forgotten. He was that cognitively bare. So how was the past to survive?
By constant retelling. He spent his last few years with the chapters and splendours of his life erected daily,briefly,like a circus come to town before moving on. She performed this kindness for him using a mix of memories and lies,and as a balcony amour I think it makesRomeo and Juliet look cheap.
The folk at the writers festival think they are singular fabulists. But each day in this town there are thousands of storytellers setting out to aged-care homes to spin pretty tales for their darlings,to take them back to how it was,but better.
The best of Good Weekend delivered to your inbox every Saturday morning..