kagablog

We are a long-lived species. Compared to us, the life of a bird is fleeting, transient. We must appear to birds as mammoths, wading through a swamp in slow motion.

It’s difficult to know where to draw the line, in processes which take a long time. If you are lying in bed on a cold winter morning and your bladder is full, you know that the coldness must win, because the bladder pain will only increase. You can delay the decision, but eventually you must take it.

But getting old is a different matter. You might think now, while you are still relatively healthy, that you would never allow yourself the indignity of being unable to survive without a handful of pills a day, the pacemaker that ensures your heartbeat never goes over a certain rate, your caretakers who bring you meals and change your sheets. Having a piss has become something you dread, it’s an agonizing process that can take over half an hour. If the wife leaves you for even a minute, panic sets in because you can’t remember how you got here, even if you have been here a thousand times before. You can’t hear or see or digest properly. Nothing makes sense in the outside world and you can’t follow a movie plot on TV; nature channels and classical CDs are your only solace.

You might ask a friend while you are still in your forties or fifties, that should you get to this stage, won’t they please come and blow out your brains with a twelve-bore shotgun, end the agony, the senselessness, the burden of it all. But where do you draw the line? When which senses fail? When you can’t run, can’t walk far, or can’t walk at all?

Historically, it couldn’t have been easy for the Germans in the 1930s, watching the gradual erosion of the human rights of the Jews and the slowly increasing attitude of aggression to neighbouring countries, then the rest of the world.

At what point do you leave the comfort of your home and work to head out for an unknown shore? My father left what was then Rhodesia, the country he absolutely loved, when, in a 1970s ‘election’, the whites voted resoundingly for Ian Smith yet again, squashing any hopes of conciliation or real change. His brother only left last year, by the skin of his teeth. He judged it finely. The money he got for his house was worth what a simple operation cost another relative, who stayed.

Since the election of Zuma to the top position of in the ANC, many so-called whites are discussing with added zeal the possibility of emigrating. At what point does anyone with the means to, decide this is no longer the place they want to bring up their kids? When rapes go from one every six minutes, to one every three minutes? When power outages occur not once a day, but twice a day, as they already do in Nelspruit? When the press is openly muzzled? How much do you let yourself get used to?

A study I did on battered women revealed that the final straw, which made them decide to finally leave the abusive partner, could be almost anything. It could be that hubby hit the kids, or was drunk again for the thousandth time, or simply forgot to pay the maid. The decision was based on past events and the accumulation of resentments that suddenly added up, and needed only this or that catalyst to spark a new chain of events and actions, which resolved the situation for once and for all.

The mammoths chew their cud slowly, plodding forward together. The sound of cud-chewing mingles with that of the grass brushing their limbs, and those of their fellows, reassuringly. Where to turn now, for better feeding, they wonder? The collective mind answers: there are no correct choices, only better or worse ones.