The Old Man And The Desire To Stop Being A Burden

 


     Thom Yorke (Radiohead frontman) has written quite a lot of depressing songs, his melancholic voice, in fact, is enough to get you depressed. One sad song he has written, which happened to appear in my News Feed this evening and which will probably make you cry if you’d dealt with old people in your life is “Last Flowers." It's about, at least in my interpretation, an old man who’s asking the people taking care of him to let him die (“if you take me there, you’ll get relief”). Why should he continue to live? He’s too old, probably too sick, insomniac (“I can’t face the evening straight”), his mind too erratic and delusional (“houses move and houses speak”), he can’t cope up with the modern technology, can’t probably operate these modern TVs and gadgets (“appliances have gone berserk, I cannot keep up”) and no one listens to him and takes him seriously anymore (“If I’m gonna talk, I just wanna talk, please don’t interrupt”).

     But of course, people around him just couldn’t euthanize him, so at the end, he was just given some strong sedatives so he’d be quiet ("it's too much, too bright, too powerful").

     The sadder thing is, everyone will go old, and many will be just like the old man in the song, and just have this desire to be euthanized and stop being a burden.

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