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| East to Wakaw on 312 |
This Mortal Coil©
George
G. Epp
To God, one day is as a thousand years,
a thousand years as one day. Why not ten thousand? Or a hundred
thousand? Why not, “to God, one minute is as a million years
. . .?”
I think about this every day, except
Sunday, mostly between lunch and afternoon snack when one of the
volunteers or a starched dietary aide comes around with the snack
wagon. “Kevin! Will you have some coffee and a cookie today?”
Between lunch and snack time is the longest part of day here; the
minutes ticking past like years, waiting for coffee or juice and a
cookie or two like we used to wait for Christmas.
They don’t want us in our rooms
then. Easier to keep an eye on us if we’re all seated in a circle
in the common room with the skylight and the nurses’ station. It’s
when they check our rooms for “rats, snakes and contraband,”
the director of care, Vanessa, says. They clean our toilets and
return our clean laundry and sterilize our disgusting leavings, north
wing in the morning, south wing between lunch and snack time in the
afternoons.
And in our pod, the eleven of us sit
in a circle, Phil Ferguson and I in our wheel chairs, two in brody
chairs and the rest in ordinary made-for-regular-normal-human-beings
chairs, and most of us nap, heads lolling back, sideways,
chin-on-chest and a few of us drooling shamelessly: it can be beyond
depressing for me, for instance, who can only sleep when it’s
inconvenient like in chapel when a well-meaning pastor from a local
church holds forth about making the best of every day.
These compassionate, local pastors—no
doubt fulfilling what they see as their Christian duty—modulate
what they say, how they say it to match what I think they imagine are
the very specialized needs of us pioneer people among them, who can
only see three-score-and-ten in their rear-view mirrors. They’re so
gentle, so obsequious, so soothing, these pastors: they put me to
sleep.
Can’t blame them. My body’s
confined to this wheelchair. The assumption that my mind is no longer
ambulatory seems a logical conclusion.
Paaah!
The minutes tick by like centuries.
Mrs. Diana May Goerzen is snoring,
lolling and drooling. I can’t look. She was in my class all the way
through school. They’ll be moving her to the north wing soon.
I wheel myself over to the big table
where bib folding, visitor dining, staff kibitzing happens. There’s
a jigsaw puzzle there: 1,000 pieces that all look the same, more or
less. I pick one up at random and put it in my pocket.
There’s a
talk show on TV; the sound’s turned down but it doesn’t matter,
really, because the two hostesses are wearing short skirts and shirts
with the top two buttons undone. The two men wear suits and ties and
look a lot like store manikins, especially since I can’t hear what
they’re saying. They all laugh a lot—apparently they’re very
clever conversationalists.
Vanessa Locklear gets me. We have a
naughty compact going on. After I was ordered in no uncertain terms
not to tell my jokes on the premises anymore, she leaned over to me
one day and said, “Hey Kevin. Got a joke for me?” and she winked.
I said that my wife and I (I like to personalize my jokes) went to
the doctor to see what we could do to prevent another pregnancy. He
said Rina should sleep upstairs and that that would fix that. So I
said, well if that works, I’ll sleep upstairs too!
Vanessa’s in charge of resident
care, but she comes to my room personally when I’m having one of
those days where I can’t get out of bed without screaming pain.
That would be about one or two days a week. “More, more, more
morphine?” she sings and we both smile. “Serve it to me in a
cereal bowl,” I say. “No way,” she says. “I need you alive,
Casanova.” And I’ll say something like, “Does your husband
suspect?” and she says, “I’m being super careful, but stop
calling me at home in the middle of the night, OK?”
She brings stuff; old photographs,
clippings I can’t read until later because I can’t concentrate
with the needles raging up and down my back. Lately, she’s been
bringing in sample bottles of Jack Daniels and slipping them under my
pillow as if they were clandestine spy drop-offs. Ah, Jack Daniels.
Some things never change, thank God. I made the mistake of asking a
starched care worker to twist the cap off one for me and she said,
“Where’d you get this, Kevin? You know we don’t allow liquor in
here!” I told her my cousin had brought it in because he knows I’m
allergic to flowers. She took the bottle with her—I presumed to
turn it in to the care director—but came back with it and a glass
with some ice ten minutes later.
I can’t remember the names of many of
the people in the place, except for the half-dozen or so I knew back
in the day. But days I remember, at least some, especially
days that got all the senses working.
I might be twelve or thirteen, lying
on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush. There’s
a breeze as subtle as the holy ghost caressing the ripened wheat
fields into an undulating prairie sea, setting the heart-shaped
poplar leaves to spinning. The musty/sweet aroma of dry grass, mown
hay and cattle rides on the breeze and the sun casts dappled shadows
across my face. I can remember the Canada Thistle digging into my
back. Weird. I can remember nothing about the few days before or
after lying in the sun on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a
poplar bush on a summer’s day.
We recreate here at St. Judes.
They call it recreation time. We move our arms to a
video the recreation director plays as she sits in a chair and
does the exercises with us. It’s a funny word, recreation;
literally to discard something and make it over again. Create it
again. Make me a spine over again, LORD. Please. Recreate
me.
We bat balloons
around and across the circle.
Except for Diana May who’s gone into
a permanent rage, apparently. She pointedly leafs through a Good
Housekeeping magazine while we do our balloon-volleyball thing. The
magazine rides in the basket of her walker all the time and by now is
dogeared and tattered.
I often had
daydreams about Diana May when we were both raunchy teenagers;
usually cavorting in some storybook meadow, or lying in the sun on our backs in a
stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush on a summer’s day. She was a hoot.
I never tell
dementia jokes anymore like “What’s one advantage of having
Alzheimer’s? You can hide your own Easter eggs,” or, “you only
need one book.”
I
wasn’t asked not to tell jokes for any other reason than that they
were mainly sexual, and, of course, like Hamlet says of his mother,
who’s raunching around with his uncle, “. . . at
your age/ The hey day in the blood is tame
.” My blood still has a bit of hey day. I swear I feel some days
like a twenty-year old with a very bad back, and a temporary weakness
in my left arm, left leg.
The possibility that I might be following Diana May into never never land occurs often, especially when I have to stop in mid-sentence because I can’t come up with a word or a name. “That happens to all of us, Dad,” my daughter says. “There’s nothing wrong with your mind.”
As
daughters go, Sandra’s the best. Every Saturday she takes the long
drive from the city and we spend the afternoon talking about stuff
that doesn’t matter and she holds my hand (the right one, the left
one’s useless) while we sit in silence and then we have supper
together at the table with the jigsaw puzzle and she says at least
once, “I wish I could take you home,” and I say, “That would be
nice, Sandy, but look around, I’ve got everything I need and what’s
more, I like it here.”
We tell these comforting lies every week. “It’s my turn to be old, honey,” I say and I know she remembers the movie where Arthur’s butler is really sick and Arthur asks him if he wants anything he, Arthur, can do for him. And the butler, Sir John Gielgud, says, “I want to be young again,” and Arthur says, “I’m sorry, but it’s your turn to be old.”
That’s funny . .
. if you’re Arthur. But when you realize you’ve turned into the
butler, well . . ..
So the trust
company in town has my POA: Power of Attorney. All my bills go to
them and they pay them. They send Sandy and Ike a statement of
account every month so there’s no chance of “elder fraud,” Ben
Floman at the trust company assured me.
I’ve lost interest in
money; used to be a balance in the bank meant access to stuff, good
food, good times. I could pay the home a million dollars and I’d
still be sitting here waiting for my supper dessert, in a wheelchair,
feeling the warning signs of another bout of pain. That’s if I had
a million dollars, which, Ben Floman says, I would have if I sold the
three revenue houses in town that Ben rents out for me.
Ben seems annoyed
that I keep putting off selling the rental properties; that’s
probably my main reason for telling him “I’ll think about it”
for the the third year in a row at tax time. I suspect he’s got an
angle but I don’t know what it is. Also, I’m kind of on strike
when it comes to decisions.
“What would you like for dessert today,
Kevin?”
“I’d like
Baked Alaska followed by a snifter of Apricot Brandy, please.”
“Sorry, we just
have ice cream with chocolate sauce or banana pudding.”
“You asked me
what I’d like,” I say . . . argumentatively.
“Which will it
be, Kevin?”
“I’m leaving
it up to you. I made a decision about socks this morning and I’m
still tired from that.”
I can tell by the
disarray of Donna's hair that she’s having an exasperating day. She
drops a bowl of pudding on my plate and moves on. The only thing I
can think of that might be worse than me sitting here in this dining
room, stirring a thin pudding with one piece of banana in it, would
be having to wait on a testy old man in a wheel chair who has a knack
for making a bad day worse. Donna's kids may be in reform school, her
husband cheating on her and she may just have been diagnosed with
breast cancer. Maybe she has to drive around this dining room
distributing desserts because they pay her minimum wage for it and
she needs it to pay the rent.
She’s not
complaining though. I don’t complain much anymore either. The chaplain
here paid acute attention to me when I was transferred here from the
personal care hell Ike and Sandy found for me when things were getting
desperate. I complained about everything on one of his visits: the
food, the service, the smells, the beds. “We need to remember, Mr.
Martens, that everyone has their own cross to bear.”
“You asked me
about me, not about everyone,” I said. “And I don’t
know what that means, ‘cross to bear.’”
“We all suffer,
Mr. Martens. That’s what that means. We just have to bear up under
. . . under whatever burdens life places upon us.”
“So what’s
your cross?”
“Well, we’re
here to talk about you,” he said.
The chaplain and I
have figuratively walked around each other ever since. I should say,
“rolled,” I guess—in my case.
Our brains are race
car drivers. Our bodies are race cars. Together we burn rubber. But
eventually, the valves burn and try as you want, you can’t do
better than fifth or sixth place. And then the transmission gets
wonky and the car spontaneously flips out of gear just when you’re
thinking you might make the podium this time. Finally the fenders
fall off, the differential wears out, and it matters not a whit how
much you pound on the wheel and swear in frustration: you know this
baby isn’t gonna get you on the track, not now, not ever.
Neat metaphor.
Except that race car drivers just get a new car when the old one has
to be retired.
Thing is, on good days, you
still feel young and athletic and rarin’ to go. I have roughly two days a year like that.
I guess the
trick would be for the car and driver to decline at exactly the same
speed. Race car drivers should then be buried in their cars, not in
caskets. If I ever meet the man on the throne in the great beyond,
I’m gonna ask him about the point of creating a brain that outlasts
the body . . . also about mosquitoes and why two arms instead of
three.
Come to think of
it, Diana May’s mind is in far worse shape than her body; she still
walks just as fast as I can get my electric chair to go down the
straight-away. Problem is, she never knows where she’s going, not
even when it’s her room she’s possibly looking for. I asked her
one day if she wanted a lift and she punched me in the face.
Vanessa came in
one day and said, “What can I do to convince you to get out of bed
this morning, Kevin?”
“Weeeellll!” I
said.
“Besides that, I
mean.”
“Could you jack
up my brain and drive a new body underneath?”
“I’ll get
right on that,” she said.
Phil Ferguson sits
across from me in the dining room. He had polio in the big epidemic
when he was a kid and his already-compromised race car ground to a
stuttering halt when he was sixty or so. I don’t know where his
dinner-time thoughts come from but there’s got to be one every day.
“So,” he said the other day, “now we know our premier’s
nothing more than a socialist in sheep’s clothing.”
“Sheep don’t
wear clothes,” I say. “Of course he’s a socialist. He’s a New
Democrat.”
“What?” He’s
chosen the ice cream. “It’s like . . . it’s like we’re
turning communist here.”
I haven’t the
faintest idea what he’s talking about. Is there something wrong
with the ice cream? “We’re lucky to live in a socialist country,”
I say. “Gives us a nice place to get ready to die . . . and a
pension.”
Phil finishes his
ice cream, backs away from the table and wheels himself between
tables toward the hallway.
Ike and Sandy bought me this electric
wheelchair after my stroke. With severely diminished use of my left
half, I guess they didn’t want me spending the rest of my few days
rolling in circles.
I guess free
health care is the next best thing to good health . . . or sudden
death. My pension plus a few hundred dollars rental proceeds more
than pay for everything I need. Every three months or so, Ben comes
to tell me that he’s investing most of the rental money into a GIC
or something. Every Christmas, I tell him to write a check to Sandy
for ten thousand dollars. That’s the maximum gift I can give her
and Ike without them having to pay income tax on it. I’d have given
Vanessa a thousand dollars as a Christmas present but Sandy said that
would be “a very, very bad idea.” Instead, I had Ben give a
thousand dollar donation to St. Judes. I got a third of it back at
income tax time.
What a great
socialist, communist country this is! Thank you, Tommy Douglas!
I used to read . .
. a lot! Especially after Sandy married and left and the evenings
were excruciatingly long and empty. I would read the paper every
morning over breakfast, I read books about the economy and politics
and history for an hour or two in bed before going to sleep. I read
great literature like Moby Dick and The Brothers Karamazoff
and one winter, at least three of Shakespeare’s plays (with the help of Cole’s Notes, of course) because I
wanted to know; I had to know.
Now, I read the headlines in the paper
between breakfast and lunch and do the Wordfind puzzle. Must
be the stupidest activity on earth—except for cutting a picture
into tiny pieces and then spending hours putting it back together
again.
“Well you’ve
got to fill your time with something,” Ike said when I mentioned
the futility of looking for words in a sea of letters. Filling your
time. An interesting concept. Abraham was almost hundred when he
fathered Isaac, Sarai was 90. Apparently they filled their time on a
“let’s get pregnant” project. I could go for that . . . if
perchance I could. That’s another thing Hamlet didn’t
get about his mom; your mind still says, “let’s get it on,”
even though your body may be saying, “sorry, I gave at the office .
. . a long time ago. Go take a cold shower.”
Ann and I met at
the U of S, Education Faculty. I graduated a year ahead of her and
went teaching at a country school twenty miles out. We were married a
week after her graduation and set up housekeeping in an apartment in
Nutana. Ann landed a plum job in the Catholic system, teaching
Kindergarten and I worked for the Correspondence Branch, writing
course material. I’d found in my first year out there at Kenville
that I was neither good at nor enjoyed dealing with the snotty noses
and petty hurts of kids, even though I like kids . . . in principle.
I got tired of
writing reams of Social Studies units in about six months; took a
short course, got my realtor’s license and a job at Remax selling
properties. I started flipping houses the year Sandy was born and
with a few lucky breaks, got into renovating and renting houses. By
the time Sandy started school (that was the fall before Ann died of a
sudden heart attack while jogging down Meewasin Trail—that was in
April) I had already quit the business and we were living off rental
properties.
I could be
thirty-one or two. Sandy in pyjamas leaning on my shoulder on the
sofa, twirling a button on a string while I read aloud a chapter of
Wind in the Willows. She’s just had a bath and the sweet
smell of her hair reminds me that Ann would shower after running and
that I didn’t run with her that day and she’d be sitting on the
other side of Sandy if I’d been with her to call for help when she
. . ..
Sandy could be in
Grade four or five and we’re kind of used to just me and her. We’re
on our tenth or eleventh book and the illustrations have stuck with
me: I see a frog in formal dress smoking a cigar, leaning on his cane
and Sandy twirling a button on a string and the dark sole of her foot
. . . and she’s back and forth between wanting to be a writer or a
teacher. I sit on the edge of her bed some nights and she buries her
face against me and cries herself to sleep. Twenty years later, her tears are still hot
on my skin.
Vanessa asked me
about Ann once. I told her that since she died, I have never been
able to cry. Not even when my mother died. I didn’t shed a tear.
“The well’s gone dry.”
“Would you like
to cry?” she asked.
“What would be
the point?”
“It’s not the
kind of thing that has a point to it, you old curmudgeon.”
That’s new. I
was Casanova, now Curmudgeon. It’s a great word. Truth is, I’m
neither. She knows it and Sandra knows it. Ann knew it and Diana May
used to know it.
“It’s all
pretend, you know,” I say.
“No it’s not,”
she says. “Pretending is a deliberate act. We do what we have to
do, what we can do, eh?”
Like I said,
Vanessa’s the one person here who gets me. Or tries, at least. I
think she gets everybody here. Or tries, at least. I told her once in
a pain-induced moment of weakness that her husband had to be a very
lucky man. She laughed, “I’m not married . . . and before you
ask, no I will not marry you.”
“So you’ve
kind of dedicated yourself to being a
. . . a missionary to old
people.”
“Not even
close,” she said. “I’m a professional who gets good pay and
owns a nice house, a nice car and both money and time to travel.
What’s more, I like this job.”
I felt a pang of .
. . something at the possibility that being considerate was in aid of
primarily a good salary. “And here I thought you’d crawled out of
Song of Solomon.”
“You give me way
too much credit,”she said as she left. “You’ll catch me on a
bad day, Kevin, and you’ll think I crawled out of Ecclesiastes.”
“Diana May died
last night,” Vanessa tells me on a Saturday morning when summer’s
in the air, wafting through an open window and the smell of lilacs is
sweet, almost heavy. “I know you’ve known each other for years. I
wanted to tell you myself.”
“What?”
“She died last
night. In her sleep. It was very peaceful.”
“What?”
“Diana May died
last night, Kevin.”
I raise the head
of my bed with the remote. Vanessa isn’t wearing her starchies;
she’s in street clothes. “What happened. Did she fall?”
“No, she just
slipped away in her sleep.”
My back is bad . .
. again. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m sorry to hear that. Diana
May?”
Vanessa
straightens my coverlet. “Yes, Diana May. I’ll let you know when
the memorial service happens. You’d want to be there, I’m
guessing.”
I’m trying to process. “I think she died some time ago.” I say.
“Unfortunately,
that’s true, Kevin. Are you gonna be OK?”
“How d’ya
mean?”
“I mean, are you
. . . OK?”
“Actually,
Wonder Woman, I’m jealous.” I don’t know why I called her
‘Wonder Woman.’ Sometimes I just open my mouth and crap comes
out.
She knits her
brow. “I understand, Kevin.”
Sandy
will undoubtedly be here promptly at two. Suddenly the rehearsals of
parts with her for her Hamlet
debut come rushing back to me. She’s Ophelia, but I remember that
it was Hamlet’s mortal coil speech that stuck in my head while
helping her learn her lines. We’re on the same sofa that we read on
when she was eight or nine and I’m reading, then reciting:
“To
die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.”
Sandy
bursts into tears. She’s thinking about her mom. I take her in my
arms and the sweet smell of her hair reminds
me that Ann would shower after running and that I didn’t run with
her that day and she’d be sitting on the sofa with me and Sandy if
I’d been with her to call for help when she . . ..
But
she’s late, and I try to get out of bed because I hate not to be up
and about when she comes. It’s no use; the thought of lifting
myself up to a sitting position seems a mountain to climb. When she
arrives, she’s all solicitous, but what can she do?
“Hi Dad,” she greets me. Gives me an awkward hug. “How are you?”
“It’s
three o’clock and I’m in bed. That’s how I am.”
“I’m
so sorry. Are you in pain?”
I
wave off the question. “Diana May shuffled off her mortal coil last
night.”
“What?”
“Diana
May! You remember. She was mom’s friend all through college; you
used to call her Auntie Di.”
“Well,
I don’t remember. Sorry. I wasn’t there when you and mom were in
college.”
“Well
you were probably only three or four when Diana May quit coming to
our house.”
Sandy
looks puzzled. “Were you and she friends?”
“Memorial
service is on Tuesday, in Kenville. No way I can go. Anyway, I’m
not sure I would if I could.”
Sandy
stands up, leaves my bedside and examines the flowerbed outside my
window. “I could take you there if you’d like to go.”
“No,
no. If my back stays like this I couldn’t ride all that way in a
car.”
It
comes to me in a rush. The fear of dying, the pain of dying, the
finality of dying is nothing to us compared to that of our children.
It’s the survivors who do the dying; the dying are just . . .
released. “Come here, Sandy,” I say. “Help me up.”
Together
we wrestle me to a sitting position, into a dressing gown and into
the wheelchair. I’ve less pain than I expected. “We’re gonna
take a walk in the garden, you and me and your mom.”
I
drive my wheelchair through the door to Pod 6 and Sandy follows. The
garden is magnificent. Rose bushes are resplendent in reds and greens
and yellows and whites and the salvia borders have never been
brighter. We sit in the shade of a maple tree, she on a lawn chair
and me in my wheelchair and I share all the memories of Ann I can
call to mind, laughter and picnics, hikes and trips, the joy of
knowing we would have a child and the wonder of her when she came.
When
I’m done, Sandy says so quietly that I have to ask her to repeat,
“Do you want to die, Dad?”
“Definitely
not,” I say. “I want to be young again!”
She
laughs. “Sorry, Dad. It’s your turn to be old.” And then she
cries, and with all the effort I can muster, I hoist myself upright
and she jumps up.
“What the hell are you doing?!” and she
clenches me in her arms to keep me from falling, then lowers me back
into the chair.
Later,
when we say our good-byes, she says, “Get better, Dad. I’ll bring
Ike when I come next week."
“That’d
be great,” I say.
“Really wish you wouldn’t,” I think. Bring
Ike, that is.
I
might be twelve or thirteen, lying on my back in a stand of brome
grass beside a poplar bush. There’s a breeze as subtle as the holy
ghost caressing the ripened wheat fields into an undulating prairie
sea, setting the heart-shaped poplar leaves to spinning. The
musty/sweet aroma of juicy grass, mown hay and cattle rides on the
breeze and the sun casts dappled shadows across my face. I can
remember the Canada Thistle digging into my back. Weird. I can
remember nothing about the few days before or after lying in the sun
on my back in a stand of brome grass beside a poplar bush on a
summer’s day.
