Light through a door

July 10, 2021, 8:24 am , by Newsroom

AND HOW CJ FINDS HER GROOVE

Richard Lutz views a road map to the morning

That’s the morning light from the old back door. It pours in, bounces off the floor and the white walls and spreads through the kitchen.

Then, and only then, is it time for a cup of coffee. Always….always with cream. Not black or with milk. Then the radio goes on. Then I check the US baseball scores. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it starts.

Routine grows in importance. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s akin to a handrail on steep stairs or a rope on a wet rock face. Maybe it’s a map I don’t understand, a route that gives sense to a day. It’s the careful road my mother in law CJ is slowly now walking down. She’s 88 and when she needed sheltered housing, the perfect place was found. She slowly bent her way out of the car and cast a sharp eye on her new flat. It was too new for her, too unknown. But she laughed.

Her new home is the Old Street Development in, inevitably, Old Street. ‘Got me figured out ‘ she said and went in to look around her new place.

She finds a route through fractured confusion…

She was out of sorts for the first few days. Simply, her routine, the route of a person coming towards the end of her ninth decade, was turned upside down. Or vanished. That roadmap disappeared. That handrail had gone. But slowly, she’s now found a routine, her routine. She learns that she’s fed regular meals, that night staff checks her in the evening, that her room is tidied by others and, as her mental fragility quickens because of lockdown, there’s a safe face peeking in to help her distinguish between the tv remote and her cordless telephone. She finds, in her own elderly way, a routine in the fractured confusion.

She slowly discovering that pathway, her routine. Family drop in- children, grandchildren, great grandchildren. She always offers us a cup of coffee or a glass of juice and there is the roll out of photographs to grapple with (‘Is that Sean or Robin?’). Tv sport emerges as a friend on a flatscreen: snooker, football, tennis. Funny enough, as long as the game has angles or geometry she is engaged, even if she doesn’t recognise the athletes or their names.


A car trip down to Sinkie’s by the sea is now obligatory for a sausage sandwich and vanilla ice cream. With raspberry sauce. And down the road, there’s the continual trip to a village charity shop (‘Have I been here before?’). CJ has found her daily groove, her routine, her own personal safety rail even though many times with a guiding hand.

Quickly, too quickly I think, memories of her last home haven’t survived. If anything, a vital part of her mental routine, the light through the door so to speak, is now a soft trip back to her childhood on the Isle of Man… back when her father returned from wartime naval duty; back to her brothers and sisters; and, back to songs from her past, songs that are the music of her life: Oh Danny Boy, Show Me The Way To Go Home and an eyebrow-raising risque rendition of My Body Lies Over The Ocean which she joyfully belts out.

CJ’s routine is now a fading light through a morning door. Every day. But at least there’s a route for her to follow and, with that, her aged life still makes sense in her fading world.