In 1872 in London, patients wait in the University College Hospital.
My mother died in 2001 on her 92nd birthday. I’d presented her with one of her great-granddaughters and a bottle of whisky that afternoon. The whisky fell down the side of her bed, to be recovered, unopened, after she’d died later that evening.
I’ve already lived nearly two years longer than she did. That sounds heartless and competitive, but these differences matter if you believe Gore Vidal (1925-2012) and his assertion that his generation and mine might live 10 more years than the second of our parents.
In 1872 in London, patients wait in the University College Hospital.
He called those years “hospital years,” since at least eight of them, he insisted, would be spent on non-stop maintenance.
For most of those eight years we’d be sitting in doctors’ waiting rooms. Our feet, our eyes and ears and teeth will need specialist attention. Bits of our insides will be constantly scrutinised or even removed. Other bits will be replaced. We will be asked for our date of birth about four times a week (though that may simply be a habit of our National Health Service), and a day will come when we can’t remember what it is, or anything else much.
I don’t especially look forward to what’s left of those 10 years, though I am curiously relieved to be occupying this irresponsible spectator’s view of a world that seems to be falling apart rather as I am. Our publicly funded Health Service is one of those national treasures we all berate for its imperfections.
We’re constantly reminded that several hundred thousand people, perhaps a million, are stuck on lists waiting for treatment or even attention. There are not enough hospital beds and there are too few nurses and doctors. We have qualified doctors who are unemployed because the government won’t pay for them. And it is harder and harder for nurses coming here from other countries to get visas to do so. Of course having medical care one has to wait for is better than not having any. We look across the water and see America, where 26 million people—about 8% of the population—lack the health insurance needed to get any medical care.
In 2017, Health Secretary Shona Robison, the former Scottish Cabinet Secretary of Health, tells a patient in a Scottish waiting room about her her plan to ensure “patients are seen quickly, efficiently and without delay.”
I am not one of those thousands waiting for treatment, however. I don’t know why I’m favoured, if I am: Perhaps because I’m old, perhaps because I live in Chelsea, near the Thames, on the other side of the wall of a newish hospital, where, I’m told, doctors and nurses compete to get work. The hospital is filled with contemporary works of art. The nearby general practice that looks after me, sits comfortably beside the swimming pool I visit every morning. So I really am unforgivably lucky. However, just as Vidal predicted, I do spend an awful lot of time in waiting rooms, and mostly it’s for tests. Doctors here seem to love tests. I pass most of them with flying colours, but they’ve usually got another one in store for me.
It is quite boring, of course, sitting in hospital waiting rooms, though I always have a book or a newspaper and a crossword. I don’t, as the English poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) did, allow my thoughts to be focused on my imminent death or that of the other patients waiting there.
For Larkin, hospital waiting rooms were hell’s antechambers. But so were quite a lot of other places. He never stopped contemplating his own and other people’s death. I met him once or twice. He always struck me as monumentally gloomy. Indeed, in Larkin’s view, life itself is a sort of hospital waiting room. The last verse of his poem “The Building,” compares the Royal Infirmary in Hull, built in 1967, with the looming presence of a cathedral in so many cities here:
This place accepts. All know they are going to die,
Not yet, perhaps not here, but in the end,
And somewhere like this. That is what it means,
This clean-shied cliff; a struggle to transcend
The thought of dying, for unless its powers
Outbuild cathedrals nothing contravenes
The coming dark, though crowds each evening try
With wasteful, weak, propitiatory flowers.
Too many of my friends and contemporaries are dead or dying. When I unwisely complained in mixed company the other day that I was beginning to feel abandoned by my coevals, I was boldly instructed to concentrate on younger friends. But most of my young friends are now in their sixties and seventies, and they’re already spending a good deal of their allotted time in doctors’ waiting rooms.
Perhaps, though, there is another way of thinking about all this maintenance and waiting around. After all, it’s better than occupying a hospital bed, and it suggests that we do want to stay alive for a bit, even if Gore Vidal’s eight years bear more than a shadow of decrepitude and the complicated moral choices inflicted on us by medical advances.
We cost a lot to the taxpayer and even more, I suppose, to our families. It would surely be easier to deal with most of these dilemmas if we knew that we had some control, some choice about when and how we’re going to die. A bill that would—with much legal and medical questioning—have allowed us to end our lives if we were likely to die anyway within six months, was almost passed recently. It was defeated in the House of Lords, our unelected upper chamber. Public opinion is firmly in favour of “assisted dying,” but we are a long way off from having the freedom or the right to decide the matter for ourselves, though the bill is due to be reconsidered.
My mother lived for 44 years longer than her mother, and I don’t imagine that she thought of that as something to be proud of, though she spent every one of those days painting and drawing and making prints, right to the very end. Gore Vidal allowed us those extra 10 years. So, even if we do have to spend eight of those years in doctors’ waiting rooms, there are still two years left.
Jane Miller writes the "From the Old Country" column for Barn Raiser. Born in 1932, Miller lives in London. She is the author of the critically acclaimed Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old (Virago) and most recently In My Own Time: Thoughts and Afterthoughts (Virago), a collection of her "From the Old Country" columns published in In These Times. Miller, a graduate of Cambridge University, first worked in publishing, then as an English teacher in a London comprehensive school and finally as a professor at the London University Institute of Education.
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