To keep existing

It’s fucking raining outside. At the end of the hall, through double glass doors beyond an aching-green sloped lawn, the field is full of Canadian geese… the geese are not unusual, but the number of geese is extraordinary. It is cloud-dark: raining secondarily from the eves, a curtain of fat wet drops. 

We pause there at the end of the hall before entering the room on the left to talk to an old man in a hospital bed. He is growing small, with strands of fine white hair that look silky, tufted by his pillows into the vision of a nest for a delicate egg-shell skull. He is thin, his legs are bent, propped by pillows under the blankets. I don’t know why he’s here. I never know; even though I’ve probably heard him discussed in nurse reports and interdisciplinary team meetings, talked about by doctors and social workers and dietitians and all the fields of rehabilitative therapy, I don’t remember anything about him.  I remember stories, vaguely, and I remember their faces sometimes when we see them again, but I don’t remember how the stories and names and faces connect. And I don’t want to. 

But I’m only half committed to forgetting because half of my attention is consumed with a relentless melancholy all my own. I am both resentful of and resonant with their grief... 

He is upset, his wife is forgetting him, her children are giving themselves his things as if he’s already dead. It makes me sad about the way I barged into my dad’s house, put him into that hospice bed, and began pragmatically to throw his belongings into a dumpster, letting them clang against the metal sides and break at the bottom. I thought I was there to clean up a tragically broken plot line, but really, I was just an inconsiderate jerk. This man, laying here, would be powerless, were he not intruding on me.  

No one will help him. His wife is receding into her dementia, and her grown sons are dividing up his belongings because waiting for death is not efficient. No one cares. 

I think I remember him now, because he is so stuck in this grief. It's not just that no one cares... It's that he has told it, tells it, and tells it again, and STILL, no one cares. 

“Her son, 51 years old! and still living in his mom’s basement? he wouldn’t lift a finger to help me remodel or rebuild that house...” he says this time again, when I begin to remember...

He's turned away from us looking out the window into all that gray wetness. He looks our way sometimes, just to say HUH, WHAT DID YOU SAY WHAT?  never having heard us, he turns back to recount this indignity again. He smells bad, but only when you lean in close like I do to interpret repetitive questions performing a simulacrum of care with big doe eyes. Content doesn’t matter, it’s how you make them feel.  

They make me feel sad. 

The provision of care works through their projections onto us, our cultivated non-anxious presence. I try to remain as invisible as possible and not let their stories stay with me. But this grievance of loss and persistent injustice, this same story again, and again, the nagging sinking troubled diligence of fading away, feeling yourself evaporate while everything is being taken from you and nobody cares and nobody will do anything about it. Your power, your physical boundaries, your dignity, fuck even memories in your wife’s dementing mind, all being taken away.  

This is shit. This... all we want to do is live and if we do, we arrive at this. Stripped, feeble, broken. This is the reward for living. Love, even as it happens, is already a memory.