The woman who walked in the cracks

There was an elderly woman who loved to walk. She walked double the speed of people half her age. 

She kept walking even as her mind deteriorated, as her physical body was still in good health. 

When lockdown came, and the gyms and the swimming pools and the yoga classes closed, people drove to take a walk in a secluded woodland, or had a walk in the park for a surreptitious meeting with friends, 

There were people who didn’t walk so much, and sat on the sofa more than usual. They might have put on a bit of weight, ate more poorly, and drank more alcohol from the stress of it all. This elderly woman kept walking, just as she always had. 

But there was something on the news that bothered her. Something that scared her though she could not hold the memory in her head of what it was. But she told her son on the phone, that the news was scary. 

And she kept walking. 

She walked at 2am, when that unconscious memory of what she’d heard on the news broke into her sleep, and made her restless and anxious. 

She was found by the police, and that began the end of her walking. She was put into a care home, a lovely caring place, but due to government decrees, she was kept in a single room. In the summer her son visited and spoke to her through the open window. 

The gyms and the swimming pools, and the yoga classes opened up again. And the people who had sat on their sofas a little too long gradually got motivated to make a new start. They shed their excess pounds, and ate a little better, drank a little less. 

The elderly woman found that when it was time to walk again, to leave that little room, that her limbs did not unfurl so easily. They were caught stiff, in the position that they had been for so long. 

Because there comes a time in later life when the potential for a new start is over. 

When her son came the next summer, and was allowed to take her out for ice cream, he pushed her in a wheelchair through the streets. 

She is a casualty of the lockdown, and I know there are many more. 

In all the noise of what happened her story might be lost, locked away inside a care home, buried in the mind of someone who can no longer remember. 

She does not have a voice, but her life is not worth any less, because she is not out there, shouting in the street, or typing on social media. 

From the first breath to the last, all lives matter, big and small, old and young. 

I hope one day we will live in a society where our attention is drawn, not just to huge news agendas, but to little people who might otherwise fall through the cracks.