We caught them at lunch, the yellow castaways sitting over their dull ceramic plates, food in the corners of their mouths, on their shirtfronts and slacks. My grandfather had put on weight. The only real pleasure left him in life was eating, and so it seemed natural that he take part in that as much as possible, to make up for all the other deprivations he suffered. His life was a bed, a wheel chair, the well-intended condescension of his children, a cafeteria table… A man could only sleep and sit so much. So there was food to break up the monotony.
His tremulous bulk heaved under a black rugby shirt and his snow-white hair looked so downy soft that I had to check myself from stroking it like a child’s. His scalp was patchy with dry skin and sores. He looked ugly, was the fact that I tried to conceal from myself, from the rest of the people watching—and to be sure they were watching—this little Saturday afternoon meet and greet. It had me thinking about the nature of family and the unconditional love that is buried not too deeply within that word. What did I owe this man? About a quarter of my DNA, sure. A few visits when I was younger, one in particular where he tried to teach me the secret to a curve ball and grew impatient when i failed to grasp the seams the right way, and another where he scolded me for something and for which I never truly forgave him, at least never stopped seeing him as a figure of some unpredictable menace.
But he was a good man, generous with his family, his indifferent wife and her shiftless brother who stayed with them on and off for an indecorous amount of time…the same brother who more or less stole his son, my father, away, who to this day thinks this brother, now deceased, to be more of a father than his own, still living.
So here is this man, with all the weight and significance of his history, sitting in a wheel chair with a white and blue absorbing pad separating his hair-trigger bowels from the upholstery of the chair, and I honestly don’t know how to view him. He had that twitchy air of a drunk, where something in your primal core told you to stand out of his reach, and that diseased look of scabs and sores to which your core also suggested you leave the man breathing room…but I was supposed to shake his hand, pat his shoulder, because he was family.
My aunt went up the stairway to drop off his rent check and left the two of us seated confab style in this mock-up living room they’d erected just off the cafeteria, complete with fireplace and the arbitrary spray of magazines fanned across the coffee table. Was this area meant to simulate the various lost homes these people would never return to but were cursed to be forever attempting to recall through the angry prism of their dementia? He asked a few perfunctory questions which I answered, detecting too much patronization in my voice, again like talking to a child, and after a moment I could tell he was bored with me. There was a flutter of his palsied arm towards his room, then he leaned forward and I was afraid he’d pitch too far and fall out of his chair. It actually occurred to me that he might shatter like a china plate if he hit the floor, his bones turning to silver and dust, this man of six feet and two hundred plus pounds, who’d been a basketball star, a soccer player, who was known as the jock of the family—he wanted to be pushed into his room. I cast a hopeful glace over my shoulder to see my aunt’s sandaled feet descending the steps just in the nick of time and I pushed him the twenty or so feet to his room, again, overly cautious that I might catch one of his splayed feet or dangling arms against the furniture and watch as it disconnected from his body with a soft –thuk.
In his room he made it clear he wanted to use the bathroom and so I pushed him as far as the door and then Diane, the RN, took over with unflinching alacrity. I could hear the sounds of their struggle echoed by the cheap plastic tiles as she hefted him from the chair onto the bowl, and then the immediate sound of his flatulence which came in an unnerving stream that sounded almost machine made, like the cartoon sound of a fart or whoopee cushion. While the two of them were doing their awkward dance I heard a plaintive voice calling out to no one in particular for help. It was a woman in a chair, white head bowed to her chest. Blue floral coverall, nervous yellow hands. I came out into the hall, reluctantly, and she said she needed help, needed to be at least pushed to her room. It seems when we reach a state of prolonged helplessness we ask for help from any source it might be given, a stranger standing in an open doorway, the mute face of a closed door, the carnation speckled corridor or a hospital/prison/cemetary...She said she didn’t know which room was hers but pointed forward and so forward we went. At the end of the hall she pointed to a door and I read the name, Della Hawchkins, on the sign.
--Della? I asked.
I pushed her in and she, like my grandfather, asked to use the bathroom. I found an aid in scrubs in the hall and explained the situation, extricating myself from it as quickly as possible and by the time I returned to my grandfather’s room he was just emerging from his own bathroom adventure. My aunt lay him down into his bed, a hospital type bed with the moveable guards like a crib, and from there we stayed on and talked to him, standing over him like angels or death, close but not too close, as he tried to piece some things together.
His wife, my grandmother, had died the previous spring and we’d spread her ashes up along a Colorado mountain stream. He knew this, or had at least been told, but still asked about her, had me fetch a framed photo of her from his bureau, and asked me if my “aunt” wasn’t beautiful.
We left after a difficult ten minutes of conversation and I squeezed his arm when I said I’d be back to see him soon, careful not to specify how soon. Then outside, taking my first breath of air that wasn’t laced with the sadness of age, the imminence of death, I caught sight of a speckled rooster, plucky and proud as life itself, and knew that, odd as it was, there was no more normal place for him to be at just that moment.
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