It’ll come to us all if we are lucky – old age that is. When it does we need to be ready for it, for the change it will bring to us, but also to those we love and who love us.
It’s frustrating, infuriating and exhausting as we have witnessed first hand. Their body refuses to do what those who are aging want it to, or what they feel it should.
This week after 2 months being moored up we are on the move once more – on a jaunt to Liverpool and back. And we are together again. It’s been a time for us to get back together as for the past month the Skipper has been living with his mother (now 93) and Boatdog and I have been living on the boat. A strange, not easy but necessary temporary existence.
Following a series of eye operations his mum needed support and she’s been hugely lucky to have 3 children who have provided that unfailingly. The bulk of that care has fallen on her two sons because of geography but her daughter flew over from New Zealand for a month.
This 24/7 need for help was a rapid progression from the weekend stay every two months month, then every month or three or two weeks which the Skipper has been doing for the past few years. From wherever we’ve been he’s made his way by bus, train or car to the North West. Our cruising schedule built in the need to be near transport or to have it with us. His brother at that time was a full time carer for his wife although ‘the boys’ shared supporting their mother before that.
The amount of time and effort they have given and continue to give willingly with so much love is immense. I have been in awe of their capacity to put their lives on hold. For their mother, she’s had to relinquish her fiercely held independence for a while, but now as her sight has improved and various aids are helping her regain independence, the next phase for everyone can begin. What that will look like in detail we don’t yet know, but it will allow Mum to regain more control of her life.
For us, as we cruise to Liverpool this week in a determined effort to get on the move again it makes us realise that even just an hour or two cruising on the waterways can reset our lives whatever has or is happening. The calm, the slow movement, the sights of nature all around us – a heron lifting off beside the boat and slowly flying ahead of us down the canal, ducks, coots, moorhens and geese shepherding their youngsters of varying sizes and ages around us, all these bring our lives back into kilter.
This recent need to consider ageing has given us food for thought. We’ve been looking at the boat with new eyes this week. How can we make it more efficient to live in? We have many years to go until we reach our 90s and maybe we won’t be continuous cruisers by then but we are considering ways we could make our boathome easier as we age. Reducing the need to lift a tonne of coal each winter onto the roof and off the roof into the boat as needed being one necessity! A diesel stove would remove that weightlifting but would perhaps necessitate an oven as well. Maybe we could get rid of gas so we’re not lugging cylinders? That means new batteries – a chance for lithium perhaps, and that would require a new alternator! Gulp all this makes us wonder…maybe (and perhaps I should whisper this) maybe we should change boats? A bigger boat with more space, with central heating and a diesel stove?
We shared locks with a boat that caught our eye earlier in the week so maybe a narrowbeam Dutch barge would be the answer – with a wheelhouse to keep us dry as we cruise in what we are told will be increasingly wet weather… but we’d have to do all the narrow tunnels and narrow canals first or that wheelhouse would be up and down with alarming regularity!
Pickingupducks 