- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - 28/Jul 07:13

‘The past is never dead’

I FIRST came across this quote, from William Faulkner, in Andre Bagoo’s essay “Naipaul’s Nightmare,” published in his book, The Undiscovered Country, a collection of essays. I usually like coming across notable quotes, but I wish I had never seen this one. That it was in the context of the writer who wrote A House for Mr Biswas, my favourite book ever, made it 100 times worse. Such a tender story from such a wounded man. (Mr Bagoo’s essay looked into VS Naipaul’s childhood trauma, which included his being sexually abused as a little boy, and how it might have impacted his life and writing.) Since I started practising geriatric medicine about three years ago, I have had the chance to hear about many people’s pasts – not the past five years, ten years, or even 20 years, but, almost always, well over the past 40 years or so. I’ve heard it from patients – who not infrequently have dementia – and their not-so-old children, who tote around their own past decades. The quote would creep up near the bedside every now and then: when I heard about the army veterans with dementia having flashbacks of the battlefield; when I met the daughters who resented their fathers for what they had done to their mothers, and to them, and for what, today, these men showed absolutely no remorse – in fact, dementia, it seemed, only made their callousness worse. But yet, the daughters were still there, haunted by their fathers’ past more than their fathers were haunted by their own pasts. “The past is never dead.” Not even dementia, it seemed, could kill it. But the stories of the past have not all been dark and haunting. I always look forward to meeting centenarians. I don’t know if there is anything more delightful in this world. I think all of the centenarians who I have encountered so far have all had delightful stories to tell: stories about love, family, food, their gardens – the simple things. Those who I’ve met all had smiles on their faces. Nobody smiles in the hospital or doctor’s office – centenarians do. I remember the centenarian who was featured on a BBC programme saying the secret to living past 100 years old was chocolate milk. Delightful. But I’d be lying if I said the delightful stories outweighed the dark stories. At least at the time of writing this, it does not feel so. Actually, I think the dark stories outweigh the delightful ones by far. As I said before in this space, I have a biased view: I see old, sick people who are not thriving well in the community, and they usually don’t have fairytales to tell. Estrangement. Death of a spouse. Death of a sibling. Death of a closest friend. Death of a pet. One death after the next – and then, just like that, she was the only one remaining, her children scattered across this massive continent. Loneliness. Isolation. Poverty. This is the lead up to the old person who is sitting in the geriatrician’s office, who was referred for recurrent falls, cognitive decline, medication overuse. “The past is never dead.” Recently, it’s as though the cases that I have been seeing are not the outcomes of unhealthy lifestyles – poor diet, lack of physical activity, things that we doctors like to ask and preach about – but instead they are the outcomes of a cruel world. “The world is what is,” Naipaul wrote. But contrary to what some people might think – especially some in healthcare who walk around in a kind of delusional, blind state, choosing to pretend that the people who they are treating are not old, when all of them are actually very old, but they are unable to recognise them because they watched too many foolish medical TV shows – geriatric medicine is not dark and depressing. Yes, it is heavy, at times, but not depressing. One reason that tipped me toward doing geriatrics was a comment from a nephrologist who said he had never met an unhappy geriatrician before. I was sold. But yes, as a geriatrician, the quote haunts me. At the end of the day, though, I don’t feel haunted. Perhaps what I hear and see are not dark stories of the past, but stories of survival. “The past is never dead.” But we have to keep on living, my patients reply. Taureef Mohammed is a physician from TT working in Canada E-mail: taureef_im@hotmail.com The post ‘The past is never dead’ appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.