Assisted living wasn’t all perfume and roses. To their surprise, they rarely made the trip back to London even in the early years, and after a while they didn’t return at all. Something about the enclosed, hermetic atmosphere of Journey’s End made the city seem vastly further away than it looked on a map. Moreover, back in the days when they both beavered hither and yon—popping in the supermarket after work, swinging by B&Q to pick up tiles for the eternally unfinished conservatory, giving Hayley a lift to netball practice—a state of constant motion was the norm. When shopping, cooking, cleaning, and laundry were all seen to by oppressively helpful minions, the most minor exertion came to seem like too much trouble. Apparently the less you did, the less you cared to do—an irony that inexorably accelerated until you sat all day, every day, in a chair.
Within the facility, Kay was unsurprisingly the more sociable of the two, which sometimes entailed submitting to a digressive, hour-long explanation of the “just in time” delivery of parts in the automotive industry—for these particular care-home residents were rarely people she’d have chosen to befriend. Living at Journey’s End was a cross between jury duty and summer camp, save that the trial would never arrive at a verdict, and it was never time to tearfully exchange phone numbers and hit the back-to-school sales. Worse, given the nature of this cohort, new “fast friends” were often just that: suddenly whisked to the grimmer end of the facility after a coronary and never seen again by the healthier residents, or carried off on a stretcher and never seen again by anybody.
Despite remaining physically active and passing on the dining hall’s chocolate cheesecake, both spouses were still subject to the steady medicalization of life that now tyrannized even the old and fit. Along with a growing mountain of tablets to be choked down multiple times per day, ceaseless check-ups, blood tests, urine samples, colonoscopies, hearing tests, eye exams, weigh-ins, stool smears, ECGs, and MRIs were the apparently mandatory price of overstaying your earthly welcome. Whilst professionally they’d seen tens of thousands of patients, in times past they’d both gone for years at a go without seeing a doctor themselves. The only medication either had taken for decades was multivitamins, and even those they ditched when research verified that the supplements were worthless.
By contrast, nowadays Kay’s vacillating blood pressure was proving fiendishly difficult to control, and physicians were constantly tweaking her prescriptions, each of which came with a new raft of odious side effects. A steroid injection in her right shoulder provided relief for only a couple of months. She would have to opt for surgery or resign herself to chronic pain—and after Cyril’s only partially successful spinal surgery at seventy-four, followed by a full year of exacting recovery, the optimal choice seemed anything but obvious. The arthritis in Kay’s toes first kept beach walks short, then ruled them out. From the moment they left their house in Lambeth, Cyril’s vigour had palpably waned. Though the referendum had seemed to get his juices running again, once the country left the European Union in early 2020, his former piss and vinegar drained right down the plughole. He blamed his irascibility on his back, but the problem was more global than stenosis.
Strictly speaking, the couple achieved Cyril’s prime purpose. They’d planned for the future. Financing their care privately, they were not a drag on the public purse and solely burdened hirelings handsomely compensated for the imposition. No younger workers would have their pay packets taxed to peanuts in order to repair a certain old lady’s rotator cuff. The NHS might have been teetering on collapse, but no one could justly have claimed that this precariousness was even fractionally the Wilkinsons’ fault.
Kay put a brave face on it, because that was her nature, and she probably resisted the entropy of end-of-life institutionalization better than most. But there was no getting round the fact that they were both irrelevant. They had sidelined themselves, perhaps prematurely. The grounds were landscaped, the buildings hygienic, the staff compassionate, but Journey’s End still constituted an exile—like one of those open-air prisons for white-collar criminals convicted of insider trading. Whilst they were technically at liberty to leave, freedom was tantamount to incarceration if you never took advantage of it. Indeed, the infectious agoraphobia of the care home’s culture induced a kind of locked-in syndrome: with the best of intentions, Kay had buried them alive.
After making a stab at writing his memoirs, Cyril abandoned the project fifty pages in. No one would ever publish the wandering reflections of a doddering old coot, he said, and Kay never thought she’d see the day when she’d feel nostalgic for her husband’s grandiosity. She sometimes posited that they had prepared for decline too well. They’d given in to the same crazed prudence of arriving at the airport five hours early, where there was nothing to do but suck on sweets that furred your teeth, order coffees that would make you pee, and try on glasses you weren’t going to buy at the Sunglass Hut. Perhaps her own game plan for old age and Cyril’s more dramatic exit strategy were not so different—except that Cyril would have had them die cleanly at a cliff edge, whereas Kay had them die by degrees down a long messy slope of scree.
It was darling of Hayley, Simon, and the grandkids to occasionally drive up, but there was agonizingly little to talk about, and both parties were relieved when these halting visits concluded. As the hysteria over COVID-19 gathered speed, their family seemed a bit too eager to avoid contact with elderly relatives “for their own protection.”
Belonging to the cohort at the greatest risk of a lethal response to the disease, their fellow residents were petrified. Before visitors were disallowed altogether, every grandchild or local plumber was soon subject to the full-on folderol
