Runaway Sisters: Austrian Nuns Flee Care Home for the Convent

Modern society not only has no place for the elder, but it must actively pursue the elder’s disappearance

My dad is 91. He is blind in one eye, walks with sticks, can’t hear very well and has a permanantly deformed finger which means, unlike Eric Morecombe, he plays all the wrong notes on his piano. But, as my friend Gavin Ashenden said to him ‘If Ravel can write a concerto for a one-handed painist, there’s hope yet for a 9 fingered one!’

Dad has now been widowed longer than he was married to my mum. She cooked, cleaned and ordered the chaos of both his mind and the home. His initial earnest attempts to find a new bride/housekeeper came to nothing. My gentle suggestion that he wait longer than 24 hours before turning up to the house of a newly widowed woman with flowers was ignored. There’s no telling these old folks!

As the years passed and my own family grew such that I could not adequately manage two households 40 miles apart, dad (after scaring off Pam the cleaning lady) settled into his own way of doing things. This way includes hoarding books, blue shirts, birdhouses and living off boiled cabbage and potatoes. It’s not how I would choose to live, but it suits him. He is healthy, happy, sociable and filthy. I have asked him to live with us, now that the older children have left home. We have room. He visits for large chunks of the year, but doesn’t want to leave the home he built, the neighbourhood he grew up in, the grime he has come to love. He is surrounded by piles of books, notebooks, his beloved piano, knick-knacks, ghastly ornaments, and helpful homemade signage like the large ‘PULL’ sticker he made for the fridge door (for any visitor unfamiliar with the complex operating system of a fridge).

Some well meaning busy bodies say he should be in a care home, but he doesn’t want that. He is a true eccentric, but he has capacity. He functions, differently to most of us, but it works. He eats, sleeps, reads, prays, gets to mass, plays the piano and listens to the radio at a volume which would blow most eardrums, but his home is detached and it seems to keep the rats at bay.

Today we heard that three Austrian nuns in their 80s have run away from the retirement home where they were placed and gone back to their former convent.