When my father's mother grew old, before I was born, she used to walk up and down Point Road in Durban with a clipboard, stopping off at every grimy apartment block, greasy speakeasy and fleapit hotel, demanding rent. When the proprietors refused to hand over cash, on the legally irreproachable grounds that she didn't own their building, she became abusive and shouted for the police. When the police arrived she would abuse them for refusing to arrest anyone, so sometimes they would arrest her.It makes me sad: she spent her whole life with no money at all and certainly never owned a roof over her head, and yet when age and failing faculties delivered her to a fantasy world in which she was finally a property mogul, it was still riven with deadbeat tenants and financial stress. The poor old girl couldn't catch a break.There is a home for the aged not far from where I live, a large slightly brutal-looking double block overlooking the Atlantic. Whenever I walk past I look up at the windows and marvel at the accumulated years. I like to imagine sunshine coming through the windows in the dining room in the mornings and falling across breakfast tablecloths and pots of marmalade, and I hope there are flowers on the tables.Recently I paused outside to tie a shoelace. There was an old lady sitting in a wheelchair holding a cheap umbrella as a sunshade. She was neatly dressed and had applied her make-up and had her purse on her lap. I said hello to her and to her nurse, standing beside her.The old lady told me that she was waiting for her son to fetch her and take her for a drive. He comes every morning, she said. I noticed that it was 5pm, but I glanced at the nurse and decided not to say anything.I tied my other shoelace, so that I could linger a little longer, and also because whenever you tighten one lace it always makes the other feel loose, even though a minute ago it felt just right.The old lady reminded me of a story I'd heard about the Benrath Senior Centre in Düsseldorf. Benrath is a home for the aged, a little way out of town on the fringes of a forest, and patients suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's would regularly go missing, forcing staff to spend frantic hours tracking them down through the woods or at the side of the busy motorway. One old lady needed to go home because it was getting late and her mother would be worried about her. One old man who needed to report back to his military base after his long weekend, terrified he'd be accused of desertion. There was a former opera singer who needed to get to rehearsal.Can you imagine something more confusing and upsetting than to be going about your urgent business only to be suddenly seized by the elbow and told that what you fervently believe is wrong, that your mother isn't waiting for you at home, that she's dead and you're 80 years old, that your working days are long over, that this building doesn't belong to you? Imagine if that happened to you right now. Imagine how afraid you would be, how you'd cry, how you'd fight.The staff at Benrath could think of no solution to this problem besides locking their residents with dementia and Alzheimer's in a special ward. Beside the drain on the staff and the time demands and the trauma and confusion, it was surely only a matter of time before there was a serious accident.And then someone made a suggestion.The staff built a replica bus stop outside the home. It looked real, but no buses would ever stop there. Residents who wandered out in search of their distant past would see the stop and sit there, patiently waiting for the bus to arrive and take them onwards. Whenever someone went missing the staff would find them at the bus stop and sit calmly beside them, waiting for the bus. In time the fever of the confusion would pass, and they'd calmly forget whatever mission they were undertaking, and the nurse would gently steer them back indoors for a cup of tea.It's such a loving, gentle solution, to allow the damaged flowers of the mind to open and close in their own time, that it always breaks my heart with sad joy a little and makes me wonder, somewhat uneasily, where I'll end up when the time comes.I finished tying my shoelace and said goodbye, and the old lady turned to her nurse and said, perfectly cheerfully: "Well, it doesn't look like he's coming today. Maybe we should go back in."..