An old immigrant’s dilemma

Taureef Mohammed

DOCTOR, this is confidential – don’t tell my children. Let me tell you what really happening. Doc, my real problem is loneliness.

Things was all right three years ago when my husband was alive – we used to walk two, three miles a day. Before covid, we would go for drive all over the place, dropping in here and there. Every Friday we used to go to the West Indian mosque right outside Toronto.

It wasn’t the same like back home in Trinidad, but it was good enough. In this cold country, hearing a Caribbean accent would bring back the warmth of the islands.

We move here before you was born, looking for something better. Life in Trinidad was just feeling too hard. My husband was always good with he hands, and start off working as a labourer with a construction company, and with time he open up he own plumbing business. I used to handle the bookings. We save up and buy a bungalow in a place just outside Toronto where it have plenty Caribbean immigrants.

It was always a kind of lonely life here, but once you get in a routine like everybody else you forget that you alone, and you just keep going, following along with the seasons, one by one, working to pay off your mortgages that pile up high like the snow.

All the children born and grow up here, went to university and whatnot. All of them working, paying their own mortgage now, married, raising their own children, and have, of course, their own routine.
But my children take this routine thing to a next level. I telling you. I mean I never see routine so before: Sunday to Sunday, everything planned to the hour. But that is how life is here nowadays.

Well, covid come and stop everybody routine. And that is when things start to go downhill for me. Up to now I can’t catch back myself. My routine never start back, and all of a sudden I on ten different medications. All you doctors have tablet for everything – depression, pressure, sugar, heart, back pain – but not for this one.

As I say, life in this country was always lonely. I don’t know what it is about this place – whether it is the size and how spread-out it is, or how everybody house lock-up tight tight and the place quiet quiet. I don’t know what it is.

When we land here 45 years ago, it was the first thing that hit we, and we was expecting it to be a lonely life.
What I didn’t expect was for the loneliness to creep up on me like this, so merciless, at this age. The winter is feel a hundred times worse. The silence from outside come inside. Sometimes I put on the radio or TV for company.

Yes, my children around. Well, they around as best as around can be in this big, spread-out country. The eldest son living here in the Toronto area, the other one get a job with a oil company out west, is about a five-hour flight to where he is, and my youngest daughter living in a town two hours' drive from here. So they around somewhat. I don’t like to worry them. They have their life to live.

My eldest son would drop in every now and then to make sure the fridge in order, that I taking my medications and whatnot; every week take me to buy groceries, and go for a little outing with the grandchildren.
Since I in the hospital he is check in with me every morning before he go to work, make sure I get out of the bed, help me with breakfast, bring something for me to read, and try to get an update for the staff.

The latest is that they thinking to discharge me soon, and we need to talk about the next steps. The other day some lady, a social worker, I think, come to talk to me about my “options.” She bring up the talk about selling my house and moving into a retirement home.
She say I will get back in a routine. Ah yes, I say – that is what I missing!

This morning I was talking about it with my son. I tell him over my dead body I going in a retirement home. That is white-people thing. If push come to shove, I tell him, I will sell my house and go back Trinidad.

Taureef Mohammed is a physician from TT working in Canada

E-mail: taureef_im@hotmail.com