An interesting conversation
Took Home Communion to 97-year-old Em. She couldn’t hear a word I said as her hearing aid was out of action.
“Could you look at it?” she asked hopefully. “I can’t get the battery in.”
No wonder. She’d somehow managed to jam the battery into the top of the hearing aid rather than into the battery compartment. With technical expertise (a hair grip) I managed to unjam it, put a new battery in the right place and off we went. Well, at least she put the aid bit into her ear. The bit that goes round the ear was dangling from her hair, but that, she said, was how she liked it. Hmm.
Anyway, then she told me that Edna, her next-door-neighbour had been dead for ten days and nobody knew. My eyes bulged. Visions of a decomposing body lying on the couch next door, in this quiet Norfolk village. Followed by headlines in the Press screaming, “Why didn’t the Church do something?”
But it wasn’t like that at all. Apparently Edna used to pop in to Em quite frequently, bringing shopping and just making sure she was alright. Then it suddenly stopped. Em never saw Edna again. It seems Edna’s husband beat her up to such an extent that he hospitalised her and after that she went into a residential home, where she recently died.
Edna had developed Alzheimer’s and the husband couldn’t cope. Got so frustrated at the same questions and comments over and over again, and Edna not being able to remember where she’d put things and so on, that he lashed out. They’d been married for 63 years.
The even sadder part is that the family now refuse to speak to father and won’t go near him. Nigel the Curate is taking the funeral, but the family have told him that father won’t be there.
So father is still living next door to Em, but increasingly a recluse. Never goes out, never sees anyone. And he must be well into his eighties. Nigel asked the family if he could go round, but they said, “He’ll only slam the door in your face.”
Aren’t there tragic things going on, under cover of idyllic village life?
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