A new addition to the internet. Nobby is to be connected. His family in the US are buying him a laptop and he is to get an account with Virgin next week. I am to be his tutor. I’ll show him ome of the more weird and wonderful sites. Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?
Nobby is weak, trembling, unsteady on his feet. Yesterday I met a neighbour in the City Centre. A neighbour known as motor mouth because of her penchant for incessant gossiping. ‘Nobby’s not going to be here much longer. Not now that Freddi’s gone,’ He had been abandoned by the state, his family and now, even little Freddi. Please don’t think I am judging the family because I am not. I am in no position to judge them. I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to my own grandparents. Not even while they were dying. But I regret that and I am afraid that Nobby’s family will come to feel that way too.
Nobby has grown frailer but he is as strong willed as ever. Not that this resolve has been properly tested (lately). There are no officials lining up outside his door offering him help. In my mind he is a member of an oppressed group that very few people give a toss about – the elderly (or ‘pensioners’ or ‘seniors’ – whichever term is en vogue.)
There is only me and I am afraid. ‘I don’t think I can handle this,’ I told my mother on the ‘phone. ‘I’m not strong enough.’
‘Oh, you’re strong,’ my mother said, ‘Not always in the right way but you are strong.’
When I told her about my fears for Nobby’s future she said: ‘Don’t talk like that.’ As if not talking about it will make any difference.
I believe they call what I am feeling ‘anticipatory grief’.
…Freddi is dead. His son took her to the vet’s on Friday morning. In a nutshell her lungs had simply stopped working. She was in great pain. Nobby’s son telephoned him from the vet’s and he consented to have her put to sleep. When I spoke to Nobby in the afternoon he could hardly get the words out. ‘How is Freddi?’ I asked.
‘Freddi…put..to…sleep.’
I don’t think those around him understand what this had done to him. He is ninety one. He has lived through a war. He fought in Italy in a Special Services Reconnaissance Commando Unit. He has seen men blown to bits, trapped in tanks, burning to death and yet none of that affected him as much as the demise of ‘a little white dog’. It’s like Freddi was an anchor, tethering him to the earth and now she has gone there is no reason for him to stay. He is broken. There is a wall between us. I don’t know what to say to make it all better. Why are we given things only for them to be snatched away?
When someone asked me if I had had a ‘flutter on the grand national’ I directed them to this link.
So Sick of Drowning 
