This Mortal Coil - Short Story

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.”

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.