I’M not the only one who visits Geoffrey.
He has family who see him, albeit more infrequently than Wanda and I.
I’m really not sure his brother takes the time to wipe the drizzle of baby food from the corner of Geoffrey’s mouth though, before indulging the same story told last week and the week before that. Maybe they do.
Last week he introduced me to a friend he regularly introduces me to, yet on this occasion there was an odd twist. His friend started telling Geoffrey’s favourite story – something about hitting a crow from a branch during a golf game.
They call where he lives a “facility”; overly clinical for my liking. Regardless, it got me thinking that Geoffrey and his friends in the dementia wing must sit telling each other the same stories ad nauseum, like groundhog day with a shortened timer.
The crow and the golf ball probably went around so many times that the others have picked it up as their own.
It’s hard to look at a man who puts his pants on back to front, forgets his false teeth and can’t for some reason I’m unsure of eat solids.
I don’t mean he’s hard to look at per se. I really don’t mind helping him reverse his pants, and I bought him a set of those metal straws which he finds easier for ripping into a blended mash of canned fruit than he would a spoon, although I did see him one day trying to suck in a clump of mashed sweet potato that hadn’t quite pureed its way into a soup.
What I mean is that it’s hard to look at Geoffrey and think he might actually be happy, that he’s comfortable with his forgetful friends, and that he really doesn’t feel inconvenienced when he spits his latest demands through a grid of clambering gums.
I’ll leave the serious issue of loneliness – one of society’s emerging problems – for a column in future weeks, but let’s just say it doesn’t seem that Geoffrey’s world of perpetual deja vu is a problem of isolation.
It won’t stop me visiting, but it will stop me worrying. Yes, I see this might be an evaluation which stinks of self-benefit.
“He’ll be right, Wayne. No need to worry your pretty fat head about your friend because he’s living blissfully in a world of utopian ignorance that suits him just fine.”
Maybe he is. Maybe he isn’t. I can only ponder and think about the psychologist who told us when he entered the home that he’d be living with others in the same condition and that he’d be alright, just as long as he didn’t find his way out the front gate.
Because that’s what happens. Each week the supermarket staff have to put a call into the nurse to collect a lost body who’s tried to jump the till with a couple of packets of Tim Tams they’ve no way of paying for.
Isn’t it astounding how people can forget what they said five minutes ago, yet they can remember the good things in life. Even more reason to think Geoffrey’s world, while desirable to nobody, is in the present quite okay for him.
