All the way to the hospital, through its various wings, and along its warren of corridors, I hope that my grandfather is dead, for his own sake. But as soon as I push open the door, I see him at the end of the ward sitting up in the narrow bed looking right at me. He is bruised around the face and hands, but behind the sticky residue of his glaucoma drops, his eyes are bright and follow me keenly as I make my way to his bedside.
“You had a little accident, Joe,” I observe.
“I fell down the stairs.”
“Which stairs?”
Joe lives in a two-bedroom ground floor apartment in an assisted living community that had been owned by my father’s friend and then run by his daughter Janet, who I knew from school way back, until she retired and handed it off to her two adult children. Now even her children are getting old. Everyone is so old. Two years ago, my own father, Joe’s son, died in one of the rooms on the top floor at 89 years of age after a long decline into dementia. Despite outliving his son by decades, Joe is still in one of the flats they’ve built at the bottom of the steep garden for people who need to be adjacent to care, rather than in it entirely.
“The steps, I mean. The steps down to the village,” he says.
“You were going to the village? In the rain?”
“I needed cigarettes, Mark,” he says impatiently, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
At this point in his life, Joe is like a pregnant woman long past her due date, doing everything she can to induce labor. Strenuous walks, spicy curries, vigorous sex, anything that might precipitate the arrival of the baby. Joe’s version of this is to drink more, take up smoking for the first time, and make ill-advised and unnecessary trips down steep slippery steps.
“How are you feeling?” I ask. “Will I take you home?”
I’m feeling generous with my time. I didn’t show up to work this morning and sent Louise, a petty tyrant who owns and manages the mediocre restaurant I work at, a short text to which she replied with several much longer texts that I haven’t read yet.
Joe nods and is beginning to slowly swing his legs out of the bed when the door flies open and Jackie walks in, his face obscured behind a large bunch of petrol station flowers. He is wearing a heavy DJ bag slung low across his small frame, the bag itself banging awkwardly against his hip. He begins speaking immediately, saying, “He can’t go home. He has to see the doctor, yeah.”
My cousin insists on being called John, the name he was christened with, but the family insists on calling him Jackie, his nickname since childhood. He proudly claims to be a congregant of multiple faiths (“I worship at every altar”) and adheres to a complicated schedule of services at churches, mosques, and synagogues. He has been working on a PhD for eleven years, broadly related to comparative religions, and is the basis for my strongly held belief that the bedrock of further education is nothing more than persistence. Although he is undoubtedly a better person than I am, he is not an easy one to get along with. He treats Joe with distant love and respect and regards him as something between a saint and a meal ticket. I think, in fairness to Jackie, he believes that our grandfather has been ordained by God in some way, he just doesn’t know why, or what it means.
He looks at me and says, “How is he, Mark?”
“Lovely to see you, Jackie. Ask him yourself,” I reply.
He makes a face, registering whatever criticism is implicit in my response, not necessarily a criticism but I’m making some kind of point, needling him.
He turns and says loudly, “How are you, Dada?”
Jackie’s side of the family has called Joe ‘Dada’ for as long as I can remember. They called their own father, ‘Father,’ while we called ours, ‘Daddy.’ Neither of our fathers called their own father anything but Joe, which is a tradition I stick to rigidly. Joe himself doesn’t seem to care what anyone calls him.
“Well, Dada”, Jackie repeats loudly, “You fell down the stairs!”
“I want to go home,” Joe says.
“Of course you do. We all want to get home. You just need to see the doctor, yeah.”
“I’ve already seen the doctor.”
“There’s another doctor,” Jackie says vaguely.
Joe gazes out the window at the car park and we wait silently while Jackie arranges the flowers in a scuffed plastic water jug.
A little time passes until the door opens again and two men come in. The younger one introduces himself as Doctor Allen and says, “Hello, Mr. Ryan,” and then to us, “The oldest man in the world,” as if we don’t know. He turns to his companion and exclaims, “He’s a survivor!” The other man is immaculate in an expensive suit. He smells of cedar and has had a manicure recently. He sits down beside Joe and says, “Lovely to meet you, Mr. Ryan. I’m Doctor Horgan, the gerontologist. I heard you were here, and I had to come and see you. You’re a celebrity.”
Gerontologists love Joe in the same way paleontologists love an old Tyrannosaurus rex jawbone that’s been dug up in the middle of nowhere. They are obsessed with him, but it’s clinical to the point of exploitation. I suppose there isn’t much excitement in gerontology, stewarding people towards the inevitable end, keeping inventory of their slow collapse. A man like Joe who just keeps getting older and older is a miracle to them, something to study, and he certainly makes for a break from routine. Once when I lived in London and was still a functioning member of society, I had the boiler replaced in my flat. Upon opening it up, the young plumber respectfully asked if he could post a picture of the existing boiler to a plumbers’ WhatsApp group that he was part of. “I’ve never seen one as old as this. They won’t believe it,” he said, with an enthusiasm for the subject that even now I look back on with some envy.
Joe doesn’t react but I have the sense that Doctor Horgan has a thick skin when it comes to recalcitrant old people. He has another go, but this time louder. “Good morning, Mr. Ryan,” he roars in the direction of my grandfather’s huge ears, like the leaves of some wild plant on an exotic jungle floor. Joe smiles and replies, “Good morning, Doctor. You can call me Joe.”
“Well, you’re some man, Joe. Some man. I tell all my patients about you. They say they’re too old for it and I say, ‘What about Joe Ryan, still living his life and the age of him!’”
“It’s not much of a life, Doctor,” Joe says evenly.
Doctor Horgan is momentarily taken aback and says rather impotently, “It’s the only life you have, Joe.”
Joe looks him square in the face and says, “Be that as it may, I wish the Lord God would take me.” Doctor Horgan lifts his arms in a gesture of surrender before picking up Joe’s chart. He flicks the pages performatively and says, “Apart from the fall, you’re as healthy as I am. Heart, lungs, blood, brain, all going strong.” Joe puts his head in his hands.
“Joe Ryan,” Dr Horgan says, reprising the first doctor, “The oldest man in the world.”
I once asked my aunt, “Who would want to live to be 100?” and she replied, quick as you like, “Someone who is 99.” She died suddenly of a heart attack at 81, in bed reading To Kill A Mockingbird, so she never got to test her theory. Joe describes hers as, “the perfect death.”
I’ve been planning Joe’s eulogy since I was a teenager. I assumed that I would be the one to do it, or perhaps Jackie, though I know Joe would prefer it to be me, even if he would never admit it. As time passes, I’m beginning to wonder if it will skip Jackie and I entirely and fall to the generation after us, or even the succeeding one. Will Joe outlive us all? I used to plot the speech out in my head, imagined standing at the polished mahogany pulpit in front of my grandfather’s remaining friends looking young and vulnerable and chic in one of Joe’s own suits as I delivered a perfect summary of the great man, and all that he accomplished during his long, but normal, life span.
Now, nearly forty years later, with my own parents dead and buried and all of Joe’s friends gone, the sheer exhaustion that surrounds my grandfather and his longevity is pervasive. Joe was never a person to give up, and for a long time he had relished his position as a medical miracle and a man whose stories became more storied as each week and year passed. As he aged, there was more and more interest in how he was managing to stick around. First from the medical community and then inevitably from the press and media. As each anniversary came and went, Joe was the person they went to for a quote, and I worked with him to try and find original or wise angles on Brexit or Covid or the reunification of Ireland, whatever it happened to be. Of late, the medical attention has intensified while the media attention has waned, and as Joe has become more and more of an aberration, like a gay man in New York in the ‘80s or one of those soldiers who came back from the front without any of his comrades, the atmosphere around him has become more awkward. No one likes a person who stays too long at the party.
They started doing news pieces on Joe in his early hundreds. At 110, it began in earnest. There were other oldies, but often they were extremely diminished. Joe was in such rude health that he became a story about triumph. I have a theory that you can gauge the state of the world by the number of pieces about Joe reaching another birthday. When things are bad, he tends to get endless requests to appear on news programmes, often the final positive story after a series of hopeless ones. There is still a lingering sense that growing older is a positive thing, a celebration. This year we have been inundated with asks which I assume have much to do with perilously low birth rates in Europe, multiple wars, water shortages even in Ireland, and a never-ending series of deadly global heatwaves.
Joe had always been a doer and in the news items, he made sure to be the kind of old man who expressed joy at the wonder of life, making exaggerated thumbs up gestures to the television camera, reassuring us that being old is not so terrible. As the years have crept by though, his anxiety has increased. I don’t know if it’s because the world is objectively worse than it was or just that Joe has lived too long, seen too much, lost too many people. Now at this great age, Joe absolutely hums with anxiety. His eyes are still blue and bright, but the crumbling edifice of his face is never in repose. His mouth works constantly in a combination of worry and age. In his lap, his hands hold a handkerchief that he works between his fingers, so that it is frayed and worn away at the hems.
I don’t think anyone would disagree with me when I say that the world has gone crazy. Joe certainly wouldn’t. Everything is changing so fast. It has already changed. I can’t keep up and I’m less than half Joe’s age. During the summers now, a warm wind blows in off the Irish sea, unheard of during my childhood, when even on the hottest July afternoon, the sea breeze was cool. Every day brings another superlative – higher tides, record breaking storms, inflation, increasing poverty, Joe’s birthday.
It has always been a popularly held belief that the upper limit of the human lifespan is 120 years. Joe passed that milestone seven years ago and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. No one knows why Joe is the way he is. There have been countless tests and many theories, but the reality is that he just keeps going. The next oldest person in the world tends to hover at around 107 for some reason. He is way in the lead, not that it’s a competition. Joe himself has become disinclined to speak about his long life. He is a kind person, eager to please, and for years he tried to help, offering theories about daily exercise, swimming in the sea, getting enough sleep, a pint every evening. Eventually though it became clear that there was no reason, or at least none that would present itself, and so Joe stopped suggesting, and people stopped asking.
As the dead piled up around him, Joe turned in on himself, and his Catholicism intensified. He goes to mass most mornings and spends much of his time keeping track of a seemingly infinite number of anniversaries which he celebrates in all kinds of small ways. Forgoing meat every year on November 2nd, the anniversary of my vegetarian grandmother who died in 1995, watching football as a way of remaining close to my brother who died in an accident just before he turned 25. There are countless others, more than I can keep up with, and he occupies his time sitting quietly and walking the dead in his mind.
When the doctors have finished, Jackie gives me the flowers, and I drive Joe home in silence. He speaks for the first time as I pull into the steep driveway of the nursing home and stop outside his place. “I wish God would take me.”
“God seems to be making an exception for you,” I reply.
“I want to die.”
I sit looking straight ahead through the drizzly windshield. “So you keep saying.”
“Maybe it’s time to give nature a helping hand,” he says with conviction.
He turns to look at me and his eyes are so old, like mountains or deep time.
The best I can come up with is, “It seems really offensive to get this far and then throw it away.”
“Offensive to whom?” he asks.
Just shy of my fiftieth birthday, the child inside me keeps saying, “When I grow up,” but then I remember that life is lived, and the decisions are made. Looking back, I try to pinpoint the moment when my aversion to responsibility tipped over into something destructive, began dismantling the life I had built. I had a relationship no better or worse than the ones around me, but I couldn’t seem to graduate to a place where I took on my husband’s problems as my own, and I see now that a relationship split in two halves cannot sustain. It wasn’t long before the same desire to be free, of what exactly I find hard to remember, infected my career such as it was, and I turned my back on the idea of knowing where I would be or what I would be doing in six or twelve months’ time. In the short term, being the bartender in a local restaurant is as much as I can manage, and as much as I am comfortable with, because it’s the same thing night after night. The future is always frightening, but the reasons change. When I was younger, I was afraid of the unknown, the uncertainty. Now it’s the notion of marking time endlessly. If this is me, I wonder what must poor Joe be thinking? Just because the stakes are low, doesn’t mean it’s not terrifying.
When my father’s dementia got too far along, he moved into this nursing home and wasted away for two years before finally dying. Joe and I were at his bedside. An old man being seen off by his father and son. Towards the end, I was at a party in London and got a little upset talking to an acquaintance, a television producer who had made a lot of money in reality formats and now spent her time attending parties and decorating her country house in Dorset. I was drunk and spoke too frankly and for too long about my father’s protracted passing and aging parents in general. After listening politely, she patted my hand and said, “Oh, it’s awful when the big trees fall. When you’re in it, it feels like it will last forever, but it doesn’t. You look back and realize it went by in a flash.” This turned out to be true not only of my father’s messy final years, but also of my own life. For Joe however, it really feels like his life is going on forever, and it is. The television producer is probably dead by now, and I’m putting excessive years on the clock myself. Genetics are kicking in, and I’m prescribed the same glaucoma drops as Joe.
The next morning, I watch Joe consume three boiled eggs one after the other. I can’t eat myself as the sight of the yolk disappearing into the maw of his mouth makes me feel sick. His enormous appetite has never waned, and his dreadful table manners have only worsened. Rather than lean into his fork to meet it halfway over the table, he sits ramrod straight and brings it all the way to his face, a long and perilous journey that usually means losing at least some of its load along the way. After a meal the floor around his chair is scattered with crumbs and debris from the table. I watch as a glistening lump of egg makes its way tremulously towards Joe’s face, his pink tongue rolling out to meet it, and then falls at the very last moment from the spoon to the floor. I relax my focus and rework the opening paragraph of his eulogy in my head. Eventually, Joe says, “I don’t want to continue.”
I struggle to hear him over the radio blaring in the background. “Pardon, Joe.”
“I don’t want to go on. I want the Lord to take me.”
My own soft-boiled eggs will be hard, by the time I’m able to eat them.
“We’ve discussed this, Joe, the Lord doesn’t want you. He must have plans for you here in the mortal realm.”
Joe ignores me and says simply, “I want to die.”
Of course he wants to die. Why would he want to keep going? Something prevents me from saying this out loud, although I’m not sure what it is. I can feel myself being drawn in, wrecked on the rocks of responsibility for this new phase in Joe’s life, so I fall back on levity as a response.
“Maybe you should stop eating. Isn’t that how old ladies die? They stop eating and then all of their organs shut down.”
Joe gives me a withering look and says, “I would never stop eating. You need to kill me.”
I have been taking care of Joe to some extent for as long as I can remember. Not that he needed much, but he was always special. His age conveyed status. People would crowd around him after mass, and he needed someone to lead him to the car. The nature of this care has changed over the years, and I’m happy to do it. The small things at least. Groceries and lifts and helping him work his remote control. But if the last phase of my role as carer is going to be about sending him on his final journey, I’m really not in a position to take it on. I can barely look after myself.
I get up to make more tea. At the kettle, without looking at him, I say hopefully, “I remember Audrey’s uncle put all his affairs in order and then went down to the garden shed and hung himself from a beam. He didn’t say a word about it to anyone.”
“I can’t do that. You must do it for me. Do it to me.”
“No way. Ask Jackie.”
“Jackie would never do it.”
“One of the others then.”
Joe has great, great, great grandchildren. All on Jackie’s side of the family. Mine seemed to shed members over the years without replacing them. My brother had died young, and though I had flirted with the idea of having children, it had always seemed like too much trouble and expense. Not to mention the absence of someone to raise them with. As my side emptied out of people, Jackie’s seemed to fill up effortlessly.
“It wouldn’t be fair on them,” Joe says. “They have their whole lives ahead of them.”
The significance of this last line is not lost on me. Joe doesn’t necessarily mean anything by it, but ever since my own suicide attempt Joe has treated me differently, sort of like how if you’ve crashed a car, you never really drive the same car fast again. You lose confidence in it. My attempt to kill myself hadn’t been all that serious, just working too hard and drinking too much and using drugs, but nevertheless I have never managed to get back to my old life. Joe came to get me from London and brought me back to his cottage at the bottom of the hill, the cottage that I still live in. I hadn’t intended for that to be it, but just the idea of going back to my former job in television made me physically shake, and then years passed, and it became impossible for other reasons. But I like making drinks, I’m good at it. I’m single with no kids or responsibilities and a history of making bad decisions so it makes sense that Joe has chosen me. I get it.
Joe breaks the silence, “It needs to be fast. I don’t want to suffer.”
“None of us want to suffer, Joe. What about how much I will suffer if I kill my own grandfather? How about assisted suicide? You can do it in a single afternoon in the UK, no questions asked. We can make a trip of it,” I say with more energy than I feel.
‘Not at all’, he says dismissively, “Imagine how much it would cost, and all the hullabaloo, and I don’t want to solve my problems in England. And sure, suicide is a mortal sin. Assisted or not.”
I can’t think of a response. I’m still enough of a Catholic to follow his logic.
“You do it,” he says, “But do it properly. I don’t want to be writhing around on the floor in agony.”
When I was young, assisted suicide was a contentious subject to varying degrees depending on where you lived. The United States for example was an early adopter of the practice, and in those days ‘going to Switzerland’ was a euphemism for taking one’s own life in a controlled manner. It’s still illegal in the EU and Ireland, one of the many subjects that the beleaguered member states can’t agree on. The countries that are struggling most with poverty and demographics are very pro it, but there is still no consensus. The UK, on the other hand, a nation that has slid into an increasingly dark moral vacuum, has embraced it and is now a world leader. Instead of young women crossing the Irish sea for abortions, it’s the elderly going to die.
Joe gets the last word on the subject. “And I don’t want people to think I killed myself so make it look like an accident.”
As I’m taking this in, Joe’s phone beeps. He reads the message slowly and says, “Jackie is reminding me about the TV crew. She wants to make sure we’ll be ready.” Joe bends his head and replies quickly. He is remarkably good at messaging. He learned on WhatsApp, and has kept up as the technology has changed. He is a quick study in the politics of the various group chats that include family members scattered around the world. He sits down every few days and replies to his messages the way a Victorian lady might attend to her correspondence. I recently commended him on it, but he was in a bad mood that morning and said, “Everyone I want to message is dead.”
I want to do it for Joe. I can see it’s the right thing to do. When I think about how lonely my own life is in middle age, my heart breaks for Joe, totally isolated at the very upper register of longevity. I have enormous sympathy for being trapped in a life. I attempt to summon some kind of moral objection from within myself, but can’t find anything in my head or my heart that doesn’t understand his desire, and support his right, to call time.
Later as we sit in mass and I watch Joe shuffle up to communion, I think of all the different ways I could kill him, or put him down as I’m framing it in my head, like an emotionally invested vet. I don’t want to be caught. I want to be the stoic grandson who found him lying peacefully in his bed, not the cruel grandson who extinguished his remarkable life before its natural end. Also, crucially, I do not want to go to jail. Life is difficult enough without being in jail. I wonder about smothering him with a pillow. They wouldn’t be able to prove anything, or at least that’s what I understand from movies. Perhaps an overdose of painkillers. One thing about being so old is that Joe’s tolerance is way down. All he has to do is look at a Xanax and he’s loopy for hours. Or we could revisit the option of the steps. This time I could give him a good strong push, but someone might see me do it. It’s a shame there aren’t any stairs in his flat that I could push him down away from prying eyes. I watch Joe return to the pew and as he sits back down beside me slowly, he hisses loudly in my ear what has become his refrain, “I want to die.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I whisper back.
Joe reaches over and grips my thigh with surprising strength. He looks sideways at me and says quietly, ‘Have mercy on me.’
The next morning, while Margaret chats to the PAs and helps them set up on the little square of grass out front of Joe’s flat, I go around the bedrooms and bathroom hunting down all the pill bottles I can find. There is a surprising amount collected over the years – pethidine and Oxys, diazepam, Xanax and even some morphine. I’m suddenly overwhelmed by a wave of self-pity, so intense that I well up and cry for a moment in the tiny utility room.
Jackie has been contacted by RTÉ about pre-recording a report to celebrate Joe’s birthday which will fall in two days’ time. He jumped at it of course and is now inserting himself into proceedings. I can hear him outside speaking loudly to a cameraperson called Mary in a patronizing tone. It seems the young woman doesn’t know why she is here or what she is filming. Jackie patiently explains, “He’s my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather?” Mary replies, clearly flummoxed by the notion of Jackie’s grandfather being anywhere but six feet under the ground. Jackie is my senior by some years, and looks even older. The young woman is obviously trying to imagine ravaged Jackie having a parent alive, never mind a grandparent. I hear the producer and reporter arrive and the conversation descends into a babble.
I go into Joe’s room. He is sitting on the side of the bed wearing a shiny green tracksuit and a Breton cap.
“Jesus Joe, who chose your outfit?” Joe gestures out at Jackie and then says with some solemnity.
“I don’t want to live to see another birthday.”
“That makes two of us, Joe. I know, I know, I have two days.”
The news piece is bizarre by any standards. The sky is low and dark. Joe is clearly not giving them the cheerful-old man-enjoying-life-to-the-end energy they want, so for an establishing shot they ask him to walk around the garden with purpose. The editorial vibe seems to be Joe as a very active man, indefatigable despite his years. He is given two five pound free weights and placed in the background behind Jackie while he is being interviewed by a frantic woman I recognize from the television. The producer directs him to flex the weights slowly while Jackie suggests that love is the reason Joe has outlived everyone. For some reason Joe is wearing a huge pair of geriatric sunglasses despite the gray clouds behind him and the visible drizzle. The reporter doesn’t seem to be concentrating as she allows Jackie to veer off topic wildly. The last thing I hear my cousin say before I move away is, “If you replace the word Love with the word God, you’ll see exactly what I mean. God Is In The Air, When God Comes To Town, Can’t Buy Me God, the list is endless.” I sit on the curb and wonder how this piece will land when it airs. What will the viewing public conclude from a short soundbite of Jackie and a non-synch shot of Joe looking like an ancient robot malfunctioning in the rain?
As soon as the camera crew wraps, Joe takes to his bed still wearing the green tracksuit. Mary is packing her kit and shaking her head in disbelief. She asks no one in particular, “How old is he again?”
“127,” Jackie says proudly, “He’ll be 128 on Friday.”
“Fuck me, I would have killed myself long ago,” Mary says with great certainty.
Jackie gathers his coat and tells me he has a French conversation class in twenty minutes but will skip it if I need him to remain. I feel more disposed to him knowing that he is about to leave, “Don’t worry. I’ll stay over and keep an eye on him.”
“Sure what else would you be doing?” Jackie says with brutal honesty, and then rattles his car keys at me. “I’ll call you tomorrow, yeah. God bless.”
I check on Joe who is lying on top of the covers, eyes closed, face and ears twitching like an old dog. I pour myself a huge drink and spend the evening brewing a lethal potion out of all the various drugs I gathered while continuing to update his eulogy in my head. My mind is elsewhere, purposefully staying clear of the why and wherefores, but I’m certainly working towards a goal. I turn on some music and find a playlist of songs that I liked when I was young. By my third drink, I’ve got to comparing the particulars of Joe’s eulogy to the paucity of my own.
The next morning, Joe will wake early as usual, still alive. His eyes will open in the watery light, and he will lie there taking inventory of his creaking body. He’ll rise gingerly and swing his legs out over the side of the bed. He’ll pause there to get his bearings, his spine bent over into a curl. He’ll visit the toilet and then step along the hall using the wall to steady himself. He’ll ignore the note I’ve written and pinned to the closed door of the spare bedroom, “Don’t come in here. Call Jackie and ask him to come over. I’m sorry.” He’ll walk into the room and put his hand down to touch my cold head. He’ll notice the empty glass with the crusted residue of tablets and pills and stand quietly for a moment to bless himself before going into the next room to ring Jackie.