Maybe I actually died in that accident on the 4th of January. It would explain a few things. It certainly would explain how it’s half way through February now and I haven’t seen anyone, no visits, no phone calls, no emails, no text tales, not even a chance encounter. Hmm, what ever happened to them? Chance encounters I mean.
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First part of your life they happen all the time as you sail through the ever shifting archipelago of relationships and perspectives in the non-tidal waters of schools and college, university perhaps, first, second jobs, dole. Fashion de rigueur in the Thatcher years. Then you get your main job, meet your main partner, settle down, and have kids perhaps. Not so much, gliding through the archipelago now, as being one of the islands. Relationships and perspectives become more constant, chance encounters become less likely. The exception, not the rule.
Maybe we go through the three stages of matter. Solid, liquid, gas. We start off gaseous: energetic, chaotic, speedy little molecules. Free but contained, forever trying to stretch that containment, stretching the body and the rules, looking to be the exception, probing the limits of being.
The second stage is liquid; more constrained than the gaseous, but in the freefall of the raindrop, the waterfall and the tumult of the fast flowing river there is a sense of freedom beyond anything felt in the earlier gaseous stage. This is partly delusion, but it is also to do with the oncoming recognition of the social and physical restraints, that we learn how to move freely within these constraints. You have to know the rules to play the game. In the gaseous stage, everyone is moving fast, so relatively speaking, no-one is. This would explain why young couples with young children, a mix of gas and fast flowing waters are positively effervescent. In the liquid stage we feel and accept the contours of containment as the river feels the rocks it flows over, the bend it turns, and yet, we see well beyond these contours as the peaceful loch reflects a star-filled sky.
The third stage is solidification. The waters slow to a stop and things begin to silt up, the arteries thicken, and the whole system just gets more and more sluggish. One good thing about this model is that we can now say that everyone has a condensed life story. So have I solidified? Have I become too, too solid?
Maybe I’m in Limbo waiting my turn to cross the waters of Lethe, wash out the too much accrued solids, liquidate the memory. So what do I remember now? I remember family, friends, workmates, lots of facts and things, so, no, I couldn’t have died on the 4th of January. I just know too much. Had any calls of late? Well, no. Maybe that’s the way it works, maybe we remember loads of things but what slowly withers away are the connections. Life is about making connections, so maybe Death is about losing them. So, as the connections go we cease to be able to skip from that thing to this and this thing to that, we lose that metaphoric malleability of the mind and the facts begin to feel lonely, unvisited, disconnected, islands in the archipelago where the boats no longer go. Now, that’s a fact, used to lead somewhere but no more, it’s just a single connection and nowhere to go. In the end we just become quasi emotional blobs holding on to our most familiar lonely little fact unable to go anywhere else because this fact is warm and ok and anyway there’s nowhere else to go, so you linger there until this final connection breaks then you float through the water of Lethe to where?
Connections come back, not always in a nice way. I’m alive, still in meandering river stage, but my dad’s got Alzheimer’s. I knew this of course, just decided to avoid it for a while, but my dad is in hospital now. Then it hits me. I’ve not been thinking about death at all, I’ve been thinking about Alzheimer’s. I’ve been thinking about my dad. I’ve not been avoiding it at all. Yes you have. You even adopted a petulant, whining tone of nobody calls me anymore to cover it up! Yes well, we do live in the age of avoidance you know, avoidance being a crucial part of Western culture, or lack of it. This is something that needs to be written about: elsewhere. Somebody needs to write The Avoidance Strategy, a trilogy perhaps, in two parts.
The last words I heard him speak were ‘I’ve got dementia son’ on the phone, quite brightly in fact, like he had a new suit or something. So, it’s my dad who’s losing the connections. He did have some practise at that mind. He would always fall asleep in front of the TV at night, though there wouldn’t be total disconnection at these times. The right hand never fully disconnected, it would hover over the remote control even when he was asleep until, suddenly, connection, a finger stab, a change of channel, mayhem. What you doing? We’d all cry out. He’d waken in total consternation. You changed the channel you! Changed the channel, who has? You have. Rubbish, I was asleep. Well, what’s that remote doing in your hand then? Channel changed back, peace re-established, Dad back to sleep until the next finger stab.
Then there were the trips out in the car back in younger, effervescent days. I was navigator, the map man. We’d often go to the Trossachs just below the highland line. So, we’d plan our route, decide where to go, and off we’d go. We’ve got to turn left just up ahead so I say we need to take the second road left here, and he’d drive straight by. Where you going? What? You’re supposed to turn back there. You could’ve said. I did. No you didn’t. I did do too. Every trip out was a mystery tour. Still, in a sense, every trip is a mystery tour.
I speak with Jayne, a friend, about the situation, tell her that there’s no hope, no remission, no reprieve in this situation. It just strikes me as pointless keeping a body alive that has lost almost all semblance of consciousness. I feel guilty about this of course but I still feel it is pointless. What do you do? I’m effectively arguing for the death of my father. I never thought I would get to a place like this. This mystery tour has a bad destination.
I feel like my Dad is a long lost conversation looking for a full stop in a darkened room, I tell Jon. He’s just withering, and hell, what’s this doing to my mum? They should give him a massive shot of morphine, light up the room, then, he can cha-cha his way to that long sought-for full-stop. At least that would be positive. Careful what you wish for.
Mum calls. They’ve stopped the food intake, she says, she’s tearful, as am I, but I’m also angry as hell. They’ve stopped the food intake. They’ve stopped feeding him. They’re going to starve my Dad to death. I’ll write that again. They’re actually starving my Dad to death.
You ever been hungry? How do you deal with it when you can’t satisfy it right away? You do some job you’ve been putting off, go for a walk, make a phone call. What you do is you take your mind off it. My Dad doesn’t have a mind to take off it and he probably doesn’t even know what it is. Yet, even if he is a quasi-emotional blob floating near a formerly familiar fact the degree of pleasure in this association is
plummeting. This is the bad dream plummet down the slopes of mount purgatory to the opposite of pleasure: pain. Since when did you need consciousness for that? Is this how far the human imagination has soared since we left the forest?
Next day I’m browsing the internet, heading for a download site, looking to get some comfort downloads, watch films for a few days to take my mind off things. I drift down to the music section and see Ani Difranco has a new album. I’ll take that. It’s called Reprieve. I go to Ani’s official site and there it is. The cover shows a blasted tree, half-dead, half-alive. One half cannot connect; the other half still seeks the sun. There’s a familiarity about this image, feels like I’ve seen it before somewhere, then I see there’s a link for the story behind the image, so I take a look. It’s the Nagasaki tree, of course it’s familiar. This is the tree that survived the atomic explosion. I see that this site, remembering Nagasaki, is under the general umbrella of a memory site, this is just a part of it. I skip through there and there’s a list of various memory themes as links down the left-hand side of the page. I drift down, and then I see Alzheimer’s. I click, I double click. It doesn’t connect.
He held my hand right to the end my mum says. Probably reaching for the remote. We’re at the reception after the funeral. I see now as the connections of the family to my father cut loose they reconnect with each other stronger than before. The survivors migrate to the living part of the tree, but like the Nagasaki tree the memory is retained. My cousin David is saying that maybe Alzheimer’s is like formatting a hard drive, everything still there but no addresses. That’s the one thing he did know though, my mum says, ask him where he lived and he’d come right back with it, phone number anything like that. Familiar facts. Well, maybe not addresses then, says David, but he lacked a map, no directions. No navigator either I thought.
Some weeks later and I’m travelling up to Scotland, heading to a cottage in the highlands that I’ve rented for a fortnight. It’s a long way so I’m doing the trip over two days. The idea was to skirt round Glasgow and head north to Fort William, but I find myself driving towards Stirling now. The Fort William option begins to recede as the Inverness option drifts into view. Mind made up. The A9 to Inverness is just up ahead when I see a turn to the left for Fort William and, as if by magic, I’m back on track, and this route takes me through the Trossachs. Mystery tours indeed.
There are memories everywhere here, the Trossachs being a national park area doesn’t change much, and, as I drive through I’m continually caught by familiar views where the present and the distant past seem to collide in a not unpleasant way. I have to stop a few times, not so much to take in the view, more to demist my eyes and try and find one.
I spent the first week at the cottage alone. The cottage is in a beautiful area of lochs and mountains, rivers and forests, waterfalls, gardens, and star-filled skies. The following Friday, a couple of friends, Andy and Jayne came up for five days. We go off on our excursions during the day and then go back to the cottage for food, wine, and conversation. Andy and I end most nights looking at the Milky Way. The next Thursday, the day after they went back I received a text from Jayne: Hi jimbo feels strange to get up and not look at maps and plan trips. Indeed.
I’m the driver and the navigator now. Do I know where I’m going? How to get there? Sure, but sometimes I miss turns too, sometimes I go on short mystery tours myself. In the long run it’s all a mystery tour anyhow.
Many years ago me and my granddad on my mum’s side escaped from the rest of the family as we were wont to do on occasion. This particular day we were in Aberdeen and we made our way to the square at the end of Union Street where the busses were. We got onto this bus marked Mystery Tour. The driver eventually got on and looking at the passengers rubbed his hands in front of himself, then, splaying them apart, said, well, where you want to go? Everyone laughed. It’s funny, but, I see now there’s more to it than that. Sure, everybody laughs, but no-one replies. They never do.
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