An inkling of insight

There are times when I have wondered what it must be like to get old, but until recently, I've never had any real insight into what it must really be like. Last night I had a dream that my sister took my place at a reunion of sorts of some of my old friends. I was in a 'fly-on-the-wall' position so I looked enviously on, wishing I had been there. At some point I realised that as well as my friends, there were some of our relatives too and that was when I realised that this mythical reunion must have occurred several years ago because two of the relatives had been dead some time.

I woke up with a sense of unease, not at missing seeing my friends (in fact by then I couldn't even remember which friends they were) but at the realisation that so many of the adults I knew as a child are no longer around. It was at that moment that I realised that a stage of life I have yet to reach is that of being one of the oldest generation. I try to imagine how my grandma must have felt. From when she was born, the youngest of six, she was the baby of the family - and was happy to be so. She was close to her mother and really didn't want to leave home. In fact she and my grandad started married life living with her parents, and later moved to a house down the street. For the first forty years of her life it was thus. The war changed everything of course. They had to leave Walthamstow because of the bombing - her parents went one way and she went another with her children. More changes occurred in the next twenty years - she lost both her parents, her brother and her oldest sister, but she still had most of her contemporaries and was still the youngest in her generation. I suppose at that time, she too realised that all her parents' contemporaries were gone, but she still had her older sisters, husband, children and grandchildren.

Having always been the baby of the family and been well cared for, I wonder how she felt at being one of the oldest generation. Perhaps she didn't feel that she was that old. During the early 1980s her world was turned over when she lost her remaining sisters, her husband and elder daughter and it was at that point that suddenly she found herself with no-one to look up to, no-one who shared her memories and no-one of her own age. Surely that must be the hardest stage of life altogether.