THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND
When you reach a certain age you hit an invisible wall. It hurts. Suddenly you’ve become old. They don’t understand you. You don’t share their intelligence or their taste any more, which is somehow your fault. You’re the one that changed.
I thought my beautiful Joan was joking when she said she’d hit that wall. She was always lively and younger in spirit than her bodily age. It was what attracted me to her in the first place. Unlike me, she hadn’t even reached the three score years and ten divide. She can’t now. She left yesterday. The cancer got her. It gets everybody.
She understood me. We lived in neighbouring streets as kids. We dodged Hitler’s bombs. We lost count of how often we were crammed in down the Tube with our families. After the war, we grew up, dated, faced the austerity era and married once we had enough coupons. Joan and I had the one son, Simon, who at eight was mown down by a driver. They didn’t worry about drink driving then. It took them until 1967 to set the limits. Had it been a politician’s child, that limit would have come in sooner. As for the miscarriages… Joan would’ve kept on trying but every time it weakened her more and I couldn’t bear to see her go through more pain.
Joan coped with it all, far better than I did. She kept saying we were lucky. We survived the war. Anything after that was a bonus. Joan was my rock. Now’s she gone, I have nobody. Our niece is kind. Janine, and her hubby Mark, are arranging the “good” funeral Joan deserves. I am grateful to Janine and Mark but there isn’t the shared experience of over fifty years to draw on. They smile kindly but how can they understand? They haven’t hit the wall of old age yet.
THE END.