Why She Walks

I am really angry right now. I’m hoping that writing about it will help let some of the steam out of my head. I was supposed to leave on the 5AM train from London to Paris to meet Waqas for a relaxed, wonderful holiday. However, after a massive electrical failure that left 2000 customers stranded in the Channel Tunnel for over 12 hours, Eurostar has cancelled service indefinitely.

I’ve spent the last several hours frantically rebooking my journey, which will now involve a coach to Dover, a ferry from Dover to Calais, and a train from Calais to Paris. Total travel time is estimated to be around 11 hours, and it’s going to cost just as much for the one-way trip as my original roundtrip ticket cost on the Eurostar. WTF. I hate undeserved chaos.

I’m trying to tell myself to remain calm and to be grateful that I wasn’t trapped in the Chunnel for half a day without food and water, but I feel really frustrated. The coach to Dover leaves London’s Victoria terminal at 7AM, so I’m not going to get any sleep. I feel like I should just try to write about some of what’s happened over the last weeks and (hopefully) work my way out of this mood.

The cold, wet London winter

The last several weeks have largely been devoted to developing interview methods for my project on aging and sexuality and conducting a few pilot interviews to generate preliminary insights. Things have been going well, luckily, and I’ve managed to produce a preliminary report that I’m quite proud of. This last week, I presented my findings thus far to my colleagues and external reviewers at the Helen Hamlyn Centre, as well as to our project partners at Age UK. Everybody has been very supportive, and I’m really looking forward to returning to the research in January after the holidays.

While I’ve certainly discovered a lot about older people’s sexuality in the last several months, the single most interesting insight I’ve gained from the research thus far is that priorities shift with age, but needs do not. This quote from a 57-year old female respondent about her changing relationship with her husband illustrates this point well:

“In terms of sexual activity, that diminishes, unfortunately, because he’s also got health problems. He takes medication now that doesn’t help his sexual functions. That has changed. I think for him, that’s more of a regret than for me. Probably to men it’s more important. He’s still very demonstrative. He’s not always attacking, but if I’m sitting there he’ll hold my hand or he’ll put his arm around me or kiss me or something. It’s about being intimate. Not necessarily the act. It’s more about the cuddling and the touching and the holding.”

An interview with one of my respondents

An exercise we developed to assess older people’s intimate needs

For this respondent, emotional intimacy is far more important for her relationship with her husband than sexual intercourse. This idea was consistent throughout her responses: she indicated that one possible reason for the increase in STI’s among the over 50’s population might be attributed to sexual risk-taking resulting from a combination of poor sex education and the unsatisfied need for physical and emotional affection among older people who have been recently divorced or widowed.

A second respondent I interviewed, a 75-year old single female, confirmed these ideas. Susan hasn’t been in a relationship for a while and actually values her independence. She noted that if Mr. Wonderful came along, she’d certainly have sex with him, but that that’s not a priority for her right now: she doesn’t want to go back to doing someone else’s laundry. This however, doesn’t mean that she no longer needs companionship and affection; in fact, the need for closeness only increases with age:

“I think we all need affection and interaction. I think we all need physical contact. My mother was on her way to some form of dementia. We’d always been a very huggy, tactile family. She got to a point where she wasn’t really much letting me kiss her. Nobody put a hand on her bare skin any more, and I think she – I think we all need that. I thought: ‘Papa’s dead, I’m not giving her hugs any more. She’s got a carer looking after her, but that’s a different kind of relationship.’ What I arranged to do was set up appointments with an aromatherapy masseur, and my mother loved it.”

The Helen Hamlyn Crew at the RCA Christmas Party

We as human beings are constantly striving to reconcile this set of seemingly contradictory interests. On the one hand, we value our independence: from a young age, we try to assert ourselves as self-sufficient individuals in command of our own destinies. As we age and lose a sense of control over our own bodies, the fear seems to be that we lose a sense of place in the world. On the other hand, we are governed by a need for companionship and intimacy: as children, we need to be cared for and long for physical displays of affection. This doesn’t really seem to change with age.

Early last week, I was walking home from work in the blistering cold after a long, exhausting day. I happened upon an older woman sitting outside a bakery, trying desperately to get up off her seat. She was clearly in pain, wincing and crying as she tried to prop herself up onto her precarious wooden cane. I asked her if she needed help, and she shook her head no. As I walked away, she motioned for me to come back and grasped my arm with her wrinkled hand, holding on with all the strength she had left.

As we inched along the 500-yard journey towards her home, I found out that Pamela had been stranded outside after she’d spent the entire day getting to the bakery. Between gasps of “Oh Mother” and “Can I make it?”, she relayed that she was 99 years old and lived alone. She had carers, but she didn’t want to spend the time she had left with them. We crept along slowly, pausing every two steps so that Pamela could recover. She told me repeatedly that I should just let her walk on her own: “Just get me to that next lamppost. I can go the rest of the way.” It was clear that her dignity was very important to her, but I refused to leave her, afraid that she would collapse if left to herself.

The doorstep of Pamela’s home

We eventually got her home after about 2 hours. She told me that her carer would come to see her in the morning. I didn’t realize until I’d gotten home myself that my hands were stiff from the cold, and that the arm Pamela had held onto was sore from her grip. I began to think about why Pamela walked all that way on her own to begin with, even though she knew that her body was too frail to withstand the journey. There’s a certain sense of pride at being able to do the things you’ve always done the way you’ve always done them. This is why we are so easily wounded when we feel helpless to control our own fate.

It’s been a few hours now from the time I began this entry. I’ve calmed down somewhat. I’m still peeved at having to endure an unexpected turn of events, but I’m grateful that I’m going to be able to spend Christmas in Paris with Waqas. In many ways, Pamela had it right that life is about getting to the next lamppost, and that in our times of need, we need to hold onto whatever we’re given and to keep walking, even if it hurts our pride.