Dorothy

Earlier today, I attended the funeral of my wife's aunt, Dorothy, here in Welgemoed, near Cape Town. She was 70 and on Saturday morning lost her battle with cancer. The dominee who preached, related a poem that I need to look up but was similar in vein to that famous 'For whom the bell tolls': he spoke of how when a person dies a whole small world dies with them: the knowledge of the experience of their first crush, their first kiss, even their first fight. I was struck when it occurred to me how often I get impatient with elderly people as they seem to waffle on about past events, to which I cannot relate - often because I didn't know the other people in the story. And yet - it seems that this is precisely why they persist in repeatedly telling the story: looking for somebody to really hear that story with all that it contains -spoken, unspoken and all that cannot be put into words - a meeting of hearts so deeply that it almost becomes a shared memory. It isn't the whole story, I know, but surely human loneliness at one level is the absence of a memory held in common with at least one other human being?