Back in the day, when I was a kid, people would comment on the ‘old person smell’ and it used to be the butt of many jokes. I can remember them, but today, I notice it, and frankly it isn’t funny at all. It is just one more sign, of a person’s body decaying, coming to the end of its road.
I notice smells more, these days, and it isn’t pleasant. Changing depends, three to four times a day, is never fun, it is intrusive into the daily routine, though honestly, it is becoming more and more, part of that daily routine.
Trips to do laundry nearly on a daily basis, is part of that routine now, and unless one purchases a lot of the essentials, it will only grow.
See old people, are just that. They have issues with muscle controls, like holding it in until they can get onto the toilet, becomes a battle, not just physical, but mental. And that takes its toll.
I look at mom, and see a lady who was very independent, who married and moved from a city to a true backwards and rather uncivilized neck of the woods, all because of love. I wonder, as I watch her struggle to not void in the depends, how it must of felt, to leave the safety of family and familiar surroundings, to go to a place, that was really just a dot on the map, where the people were rough, weather beaten.
History is there, of living in an area without running water, where daily showers were unheard of, and where you looked forward to the mail order catalogues, not for shopping ads, but for extra toilet paper for the outhouse.
And now you’ve sort of come full cycle, but in a different way.
Now, the running water is there, but your body, your strength isn’t, to get you onto that toilet, to use that shower hear with all its fancy jets to soak you and massage you at the same time. Now, you use strong perfumes, not to smell pretty, but help cover the smell from the undergarments, from the urine and poop, until you can get them changed.
That ‘Old Person Smell’ isn’t funny, it is a grim reminder, that life is drawing to a close.