We’re all a bit scared right now. Indeed, if we aren’t, we should be. The tentacles of Covid-19 are everywhere and getting worse. And we are warned that health systems are under serious strain.

In England, where the new, more contagious strain has begun to predominate, the problems are doubtless magnified. We are told that in some areas, ambulances are piled up outside hospitals, because there is no room inside.

You wear a mask, you wash your hands frequently, and you do your best to avoid other people in shops or even walking down the street. Whatever happens, you know you don’t want any emergency to happen right now requiring hospital care.

But what if it does?

Seriously high blood pressure

My blood pressure, like that of so many older people, has been rising little by little over the years. Every time I attend my local health practice, they tend to check it and remark it is on the high side, but no need for action yet.

About a week ago, it had risen again, and I was advised to take a reading every day at home to see how it was doing. I bought a monitor and was duly taking readings twice a day and noting them down.

Then one late afternoon, the reading was higher than normal – just after a series of relatively trivial irritations.

My broadband connection was down, I had phoned my provider and struggled with its automatic answering system. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t find these irritating, but the bottom line came when the voice told me my mother’s maiden name was wrong. I swore at the phone and hung up.

And rising still

Taking my blood pressure shortly after, I noted the reading was considerably higher than normal, but went to have dinner. Afterwards, I thought I would just check that it had gone down, to assure myself. It hadn’t – it had gone up! According to the chart, it was at a dangerous level.

What to do? My husband exclaimed that I should in no circumstance go to the local hospital, because of fear of my catching Covid. I rang my most knowledgeable family member, and she said I absolutely needed to be in a hospital – the reading was that serious. I could have a heart attack or a stroke.

Even more tribulations

I phoned 999 (the emergency number), where I was asked some questions and then told no ambulance was available for four hours! I should get myself to the hospital by taxi, but first I should ring 111, the number for medical advice.

That number said there was no one available to take my call and I should go online. But I couldn’t. My internet connection was down.

I felt completely helpless.

Situations like what I experienced make you realise how stranded people are when there is no way to get to help.

I decided I had to be brave. We phoned a taxi and, with great trepidation, got me to the hospital.

The hospital

This is a good London hospital. I have been there numerous times and even had my second child there. But it looked bleak at 9 pm. A lady at the entrance to Accident and Emergency asked what the issue was – and they wheeled me in.

From that point on, they were marvellous. Of course, they immediately checked my blood pressure, and it was even higher, dangerously so. They then did an ECG. The nurse said they were more worried about a stroke Than a heart attack. Not good news, in my view.

I was looked after by two or three nurses, coming in and out as needed, plus a doctor. There was no sign of any people with Covid, as Covid patients turned out to be in a completely different area. The nurses wore masks and gloves of course, but no PPE. Indeed, it was very calm, like any emergency room after hours.

They immediately gave me medication to lower the blood pressure, tested my blood and urine, and monitored me for roughly two hours. The readings were duly going down. There were no other signs to worry them, and I was allowed to go home at 11 pm.

Just before I left, I asked the doctor what had happened. He said that he thought it was most likely an example of a vicious circle: my blood pressure went up, so it worried me, so it went up further and so forth. He did not think it was serious, but advised me not to take my blood pressure when I got home!

After thoughts

I was glad I had gone, and my doctor confirmed the next day that I had done the right thing. But I can’t say I wasn’t scared.

And I am hugely grateful to that family member who insisted I go.

Four days later, my blood pressure is already coming down. But I am not keen to phone my broadband provider again.

This post was initially published by SixtyandMe.com

With Covid-19, we are drowning in statistics. Every day, I see the number of new cases, the number of hospitalisations, the number of deaths. For my country and the rest of the world.

They are overwhelming, and it is hard to take them all in.

At the same time, there are plenty of human stories. The deaths of husbands and wives within days of each other. The deaths of one without being able to see the other. The very tired and over-worked health care workers and others.

All of these are powerful and moving stories.

But there is one kind of story that I simply have not seen told at all. Perhaps it is there, and I have missed it. It is also very painful ­– perhaps too painful to write about.

This concerns the people who are left behind feeling enormously guilty because they may have contributed to the death of their loved one.

The human psyche

I am not a psychologist of any kind, but I look around me, and I know that human beings are very prone to a sense of guilt.

Your husband is unhappy – is it your fault? Your child is confused and distressed – did you contribute to this situation in any way? Your mother feels neglected – is this down to you?

Especially women. We do guilt very easily. I don’t know why.

Now, we know we tend to feel mildly guilty if we accidentally gave a friend a cold, because we talked to them longer than was necessary when we met by chance.

And we feel very guilty if our actions contributed to another person’s problems ­– allowing them to drink and drive, for instance, when we should have urged them not to have that third or fourth glass of wine.

But surely, we must feel very guilty indeed if we accidentally passed on Covid-19, because we thought we were disease free when we weren’t. That is the Big one.

Covid-19 is guilt waiting to happen

There are so many ways that anyone with an ounce of sensitivity could begin to feel guilty these days. Covid-19 is passed from one person to another so easily, we must often be part of a possible chain.

Sometimes there are things we did – imagining somehow that it was safe – that look downright thoughtless in retrospect.

Did we need to make that Thanksgiving journey? Should we have gone to that large engagement party?

Of course, in each case, we meant well – to see an aging father, living on his own, to congratulate the bride and groom. But that meant getting into crowds, and we know that that’s where the virus lurks.

But the worst of it is that the people we affect are very frequently the people we love the most. We hugged a grandchild and that led to illness in the family. We visited a sister-in-law, which passed it on to all of her family.

Why oh why, we think afterward, did we not stop and think?

My personal concerns

I personally have not, to date, contracted the virus nor has anyone in my family. But my concern about the potential guilt of those left behind has certainly coloured my decisions.

It is the small children I worry most about. What if either grandson were to visit us when unknowingly carrying the virus, i.e., with no symptoms, and accidentally infected me or my husband?

And what would they feel if we died? Of course, they would be devastated by that fact in any case, but to live the rest of their lives feeling that they had killed Granny or Granddad cannot bear thinking about.

This has certainly affected my views about a potential visit. I just can’t do that to them.

There was a campaign in the UK called ‘Don’t Kill Your Gran,” which some people thought was funny, but it is very serious indeed. Not only for Gran but for the person who did so.

It cannot be much better for people of any age. Yet it must have happened many times over.

Of course, I am concerned for the health care workers feeling over-strained. Of course, I feel for all the people who died over the past nine months or so. But stop a second and think of all those left behind, wishing they had taken a different course on one particular day.

This was originally published on Sixtyandme.com

A well-known saying floated into my head recently: “The past is another country.” Interesting, I thought, and wondered who said it first.

It turned out to be J. P. Hartley, the novelist, and it is the first line, slightly wrongly remembered, of his novel (later a movie), The Go Between:

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

I began to think about whether this is right or not, in terms of my own past, but then my thoughts took a different turn. The question that was buzzing in my head was whether the same was true of the future, when viewed from the perspective of younger people.

Is Being Old a Foreign Country?

When I was young – pick any age up to 55 or so – I definitely thought that the future was a foreign country. It would be strange to me, and it would be difficult to cope with.

And they would definitely “do things differently” there. I looked around at the old people I knew, and they clearly had different interests and temperaments and felt altogether different to me. It was not something I looked forward to.

Yes, I knew that at some point I would become an old lady, but that in itself seemed an odd concept. Me – old? Surely not. It was, literally, unimaginable.

At the same time, I thought that if it ever happened, I would be a different person when I got there. I would have the same name and the same history, of course, but there the resemblance would end.

Somehow, I thought that when I was magically transformed into this strange state of old womanhood, I would be unrecognisable. I would not be the me I had always known.

It was going to be hard – I would not know how to navigate all the twists and turns foisted on me by the passage of time.

It would be a double learning problem – a new me in a new landscape.

The Future Is Here

How very, very wrong could I be! Now that I am an old lady, by whatever measure, having recently reached the age of 79, I realise that old age is not another country at all.

Yes, there are aspects of my life that are different, but I don’t feel that I am wandering in a strange land. And there is a great deal that is very much the same.

Old age creeps up on us rather stealthily, even if we don’t make a fuss of our birthdays. Only a few things happen fast, like retirement from your lifetime’s work, although in my case, I worked freelance and work just slowly stopped coming in.

But generally, it just means a few things changing each year – the hair getting whiter, the wrinkles getting deeper, and so forth. You walk a little slower, your hearing becomes slightly more difficult, sometimes you even become shorter. I could list much more.

You get used to one thing, absorb that, and start getting used to another. There are very few shocks involved, in the absence of a significant death or illness, which is another matter altogether.

At the same time, other things happen, too. Some are definitely negative – friends die or become much more ill. Your energy slowly diminishes, so you tend to be more homebound.

But on the positive side, you may acquire grandchildren, and they may become a very active and joyful part of your life. Your relationships with your adult children change and deepen. You may develop new interests and activities.

And You’re Here, Too

And, most important, as you get used to these changes, you realise it is the same old you dealing with them. For good or ill, there is no amazing transformation. Whatever your character and personality at age 30, you will be the same at 60 – or 70 – and beyond.

If you were an optimist when you were young, you will find yourself still an optimist later. Have you had a tendency to fuss over unexpected events? You are almost certainly still fussing later. If you laughed at life’s vicissitudes, you will be laughing still.

I was reminded that when my mother was about 50, she declared to my father that she had decided to become an “eccentric” old lady. That sounded a good ambition, but my father laughed. “You’ve never been eccentric in your life,” he replied accurately. “So you won’t be eccentric then. You will be you.”

And he was proved right. She never became the least bit eccentric.

Knowing Yourself

I think this is good news, although perhaps not everyone will agree. It means that by the time you reach old age – however defined – you have lived with yourself a long time and know how to cope with your own individual ways.

Some things in your life will have changed and others remain very much the same. If you liked swimming or playing bridge then, you probably do so now. Yes, there are some new challenges, but they are softened by new joys.

Growing older changes both our internal and external environment in subtle ways. But it can still be a lot of fun!

This post was initially published by Sixtyandme.com (see https://sixtyandme.com/old-age-not-another-country/)

Death. It is all around us these days. Indeed, you can’t get away from it.

Turn on the television and you learn how many people have died from Covid-19 in your country. In the US, it is now nearly 250,000; in the UK, it is over 50,000 – and so forth. And we are told that we should expect many more deaths as winter continues.

Taking in the Numbers

Do these numbers have any meaning for us? I find it very hard to take them in. Does 250,000 mean so much more than 240,000? They are both large, and they are both overwhelming. And they are appalling.

It is so much easier to understand when it is simply one person. Then it comes home in a whoosh.

The Loss of One Psychoanalyst

My cousin went to a wonderful psychoanalyst for a period of years. Because of our mutual schedules, I often met my cousin there at the end of her session.

I never used this psychoanalyst myself, but she helped my cousin enormously. I could see from just talking to her that she was very warm and full of life. And she seemed very wise. If I ever needed help, I would go to her.

From small conversations, we began to know and like each other.

Recently, I was trying to contact her on behalf of a friend. I tried her mobile number and left a message, but there was no response. Odd, I thought. I then emailed her, as I knew she would reply when she was free. But again, no response. Even odder. It wasn’t like her at all.

And then I had the idea to look on the net. Perhaps I had a premonition of what I would find. There it was – her name and the word ‘death’. And some very warm commentaries from her colleagues in the psychoanalytic world.

She had died in May after a short period with Covid-19. She was 63.

What a terrible, terrible shock. And it meant so much more than the numbers.

One Person’s Life

It is just impossible to imagine the lives and loves of hundreds of thousands of people. But you quickly can respond to the life of one person. In her case, I didn’t know her family situation, but I did know what a good psychoanalyst she was.

What a terrible loss for all her current patients, who relied on her for their well-being. Not to mention those who would have sought her help in the future, like my friend.

I learned from an obituary that she was a wonderful teacher, full of insight and inspiration. A loss, too, for those who would have learned from her.

And she, too, undoubtedly also had family and friends who would be devastated.

The circles of people affected by one person’s death are clear to see – the parents, the siblings, the spouse and, of course, the children. Not to mention both casual and close friends. All feel the real pain of loss.

When you add up all of these, the impact of this pandemic is great indeed.

Sudden Death

I was very affected by this death. I wanted this woman to be still in this world, still dispensing her wisdom to others.

And I began to realise there were two other aspects that affected me – and perhaps others in the same situation.

First, a sudden and completely unexpected death seems very unfair. No time for friends and family to prepare themselves. No time for the woman herself to put her things in order. Just wiped out at a stroke.

And second, because I was in no way in her immediate orbit, it was a greater shock learning of her death some time after it happened. My immediate thought was, “How can she be dead when I just sent her an email?”

Yes, I know that is illogical, but thoughts about death often are.

A Different Pandemic

The same thing – in terms of the overwhelming statistics – happened in the AIDS pandemic 30 years ago. Rather by accident, I became close to one AIDS activist and together we wrote a book, based on interviews with a number of young people living with AIDS, called Wise Before their Time.

I felt exactly the same then. The numbers were too big to take in. In the Preface, I noted that each day, some eight to ten thousand men, women, and children worldwide became infected with HIV (the condition that led to AIDS). A cumulative total of 40 million were expected within the decade.

Yet by presenting the experiences of 20 people interviewed for the book, the loss became human again.

People lived longer with AIDS, and they talked of the many difficulties of telling their friends and parents, seeing their friends die and trying to cope with the enormous stigma of their situation. It is “powerful stuff” as one reviewer noted.

End Note

By the time we are in our 60s, we have probably seen a number of deaths. Very likely, among those fall our parents, although not necessarily as lifespans grow.

But there will be car accidents, cancer, and many other situations which are likely to have taken our friends and family members.

Each one is significant. Our response confirms our humanity. But death in large numbers remains difficult to take in.

This was first published by www.sixtyandme.com. (See https://sixtyandme.com/impact-of-unexpected-death/)