Notes from a nursing home: ‘We don’t speak of sadness here’

Andrew McKean has been a resident in an aged care home for the past two and a half years: ‘The day stretches before me, simple and unhurried, the sun climbing higher, the air still fresh.’ Photograph: Bec Lorrimer/The Guardian

I sit in my room in this nursing home near Sydney, a box of four walls that holds all I now call my own. Two suitcases could carry it: a few clothes, some worn books, a scattering of trinkets. The thought strikes me as both stark and oddly freeing.

Not long ago my world was vast, a house with rooms I rarely entered, a garden that sprawled beyond need, two cars idling in the driveway, one barely driven.