"BEING BUSY KEEPS ME YOUNG."
This docu series is about Valère, my grandpa.
My grandpa is 83 years old,
but rarely sits still.
Physically he’s perfectly fine, but lately his memory is starting to fail him. Everywhere around the house you find handwritten notes, things he can’t or doesn’t want to forget.
The best thing he ever learned, so he tells me for the second time that morning, is writing and reading. “I can write it down on a piece of paper and simply read it back the day after that!”
My grandma died 12 years ago, very unexpectedly, from a fatal fall down the stairs. From that day on my grandpa was suddenly alone in a big, empty home. And you notice it. The more time I spend with him, the more I realize how everything he does has become some sort of occupational therapy.
Getting out of bed, shaving, making the bed, breakfast, feeding the birds, walking, biking, watering the plants,… all of this even before he starts preparing his lunch at 12 o’clock.
“The time passes faster,” he says, “when I’m always busy with something.”
Everything becomes an almost obsessive ritual.
Everyday, eating alone had been the hardest part for my grandpa since my grandma died. He has said that multiple times before and at lunch, it became clear why: he doesn’t shut up. Which is nice, I love listening to his stories. He tells me all about his past, most of the stories I’ve heard at least twice, but I let him tell them again. When he talks about his memories, from what seems like a different lifetime, he flourishes.
“When I was your age, I didn’t really want to go to college. At the farm where I grew up, I was the only one who had to go study. To be honest, back then I was secretly jealous of my friends who all had to work on the fields and help their moms and dads.” “Can you imagine?” He adds laughing.
He graduated as a teacher and enthusiastically taught informatics almost his entire life.
His origin from a farmer family definitely leaves its traces. He loves being outside and being surrounded by nature.
Every morning after his breakfast he walks alongside the river that flows through his city. In the afternoon, if the weather allows him to, he works in his (vegetable)garden. “Not for too long,” he exclaims laughing when he grabs his old sweater and a hat from the garage, “I’m not twenty anymore.” And indeed, his garden visit is short but efficient. He harvests some veggies, pulls some weeds and makes a stroll around the house checking for new mosses growing in his garden. (“These mosses ruin my entire lawn!” He mumbles to himself.)
In the later afternoon everything seems to slow down a little bit.
When I look at my grandpa’s face I see the exhaustion of a busy morning finally set in. When he’s quiet he suddenly appears quite lonely, something I never really noticed before. When I’m here with the whole family, my grandpa rarely sits still. Now he’s just sitting here, quietly staring outside the window. Looking at a little bird carefully eating the breadcrumbs and seeds my grandpa threw there earlier that day.
“That little birdhouse,” he speaks up after a while, “I found that in the attic, must have been from the farm in Machelen where your grandma grew up.” I ask about my grandma and a smile immediately forms back on his face.
We talk for hours.
You find traces of my grandma everywhere in the house. Old photographs and souvenirs from all over the world decorate the walls and hallways. Upstairs my grandpa still only uses one of the bathrooms, “The other one,” he explains, “was the girls-bathroom, only your grandma and your aunt could go in there. Me and the boys had to get ready in this one.”
By the time the news comes on tv, he seems to be done talking. He looks tired, the wrinkles in his forehead and around his eyes illuminated by the television screen.
He looks at the screen, but I’m not sure if he’s really listening.
For the first time this day, I see a 83 year old man.
“Being busy keeps me young.” he had claimed this morning
I had laughed back then, but maybe now
I don’t disagree anymore.