In peace of the still evening, 96-year-old man though it was time for his usual bath. He limped in to the bathroom, switched on the taps, and began to fill the tub with warm water.
As the water overflowed from the tub, he positioned one foot to hover onto the edge in preparation to get into it. At that point, his mind went blank, and he wasn’t sure what he was required to do.
With a grave frown, he looked around in the misty room and exclaimed out of the bathtub, “Was I getting in or out of the bath?”.
His 94-year-old brother sitting quietly in the living room heard his tone drifting down the hall. He gave a deep sigh, got up, grimaced from the effort, and yelled back, ‘I don’t know’. I’ll come up and see!” Reading those words, he started climbing the stairs.
But after the halfway mark he stopped abruptly on the landing, gripping the handrail in a curious face. And pausing a moment to gather breath he blurted out “Just a minute—should I be going up or coming down?”
In the kitchen, their ninety-two-year-old brother was seated silently holding a steaming cup of coffee, his eyes on the commotion and he smiling faintly.
He nodded slowly to himself, muttering, I really hope I don’t end up like that. To seal the thought with superstition, he reached over and knocked on the wooden table for good luck. All of a sudden, a knock was heard from outside.
He leaped to his feet and shouted like a bull “I’ll be right up to help both of you once I check who’s waiting at the door!”
Despite being fully fictional and comical, this story lightly points out the common and sometimes funny relationships between aging, a memory problem, and ties among family.
