The Staff

It can be complicated. There are multiple levels, multiple programs, different sources of funding, connections curving and twisting and sometimes quite Byzantine.

There are those who work with the patients directly, or who work in some fashion around them…nurses, RNs, PAs, Nurse's Aides, M.D.s, the custodial staff, the receptionists, the physical therapists, the speech therapists, the vocational therapists, the replacers of oxygen tanks, the emptiers of this and the fillers of that, those who man desks and those who pilot the wheelchairs to lunches of much softened meats and pureed vegetables…

And, as a rule, these people know my father. He is there so often. He is so friendly. So open. He greets them. He speaks to them. Asks about their families and their lives. They call him, "Mr. Tucker," even when he tells them he is "T.J." They check on him, they watch out for him, ask him about her, encourage him, even…in their way…protect him, or as much as they can in the chaos of the place and the time.

*

Then there is another level. These are the occupiers of front offices and the givers of bills. These do not see the patients, or not as much. These deal with the children or siblings or spouses or whoever it is that is deemed Responsible. Some of these, too, have a relationship with my Father. Something like friendship. He brings them a check once a month.

They have a game they play. He hands the women at her desk the check. She tries to take it. He pretends his fingers clamp shut and the paper cannot be removed by any means short of surgery. She giggles. He relents. The money changes hands.

*

Other layers, other complications. There is a layer of administrators who, in theory, also deal with the patients and their families, but whose actual contact with either may be rather minimal. They are, instead, the managers of those who do connect. They are not "in charge," exactly, but neither do they labor in the vineyards and fields. They hew not wood nor draw water, but they command those who do. They set not policy, but enforce it. In another sort of army, they'd be NCOs. Subalterns is, I think, the term employed by Those Who Know Important Things.

These we shall revisit.


*

Further still upwards. Managers.

Managers of the complex, some of whom have offices here. Most of whom do not. They are invisible. You will not see them. They have no interest in seeing you. They are the Great and the Powerful. The Oz. Behind the curtain. Silent and the Inevitable. The MBAs. Heaven's blest. Children of the King. Increasers of shareholder value. Those who made suburban parents and high school guidance counselors very, very happy.

These, too, we shall see again.

*

And all these women and men are present. These different strands. They connect, twine, interlink, form that most tentative and least natural but most common of all our modern communities…a workplace. The Office. No worse than most. Better than many.

Yet, I wonder, for you see the Others…the patients…they too are present daily. But, they are not permanent. They, the patients, occupy the beds and the chairs, are wheeled into the sunshine on pleasant days, are left in front of the televisions when there is rain. They are tended to. They may be here for years.

But, ultimately, sooner or later, and usually sooner, they…the patients…they have other appointments. Some recover from some distressing ailment and are able to live at home. Others, most, the majority, they, well, shall we say? it is best left unsaid. Insert silence here. An inevitable silence. Perhaps meditative. Perhaps even to be wished. If not to be hurried. But a silence.

On the other hand they…the staff…they will remain. Coming in each morning. Leaving each evening. Thirty minutes for lunch. Tasks large and small repeated ad infinitum. Gossip around the proverbial water cooler. Small friendships which would not normally form and will not last the change of jobs or position. Enmities which are deathless and eternal. Our normal lives.

And I wonder, then, whose story this really is. Who are the genuine residents? Whose home is, in fact, the Home?

Who, in the end, is fixed? The flies in amber?

And who the free?

Room

Her room.

It is easily envisioned. Not cramped, but not large. Comfortable but not personal. What you expect of life in an institution. Thus:

1) Her bed: a technical marvel. It is inflated. It rises and falls and shifts positions all by itself. This to fight bedsores. At the foot of her bed is a machine that contains controls and an air pump. It huffs and it puffs and moves the mattress according to some mysterious and complicated algorithm of its own. We ignore it. It ignores us. We are thus, man and machine, united in indifference to one another.

2) Entertainment: twin TVs on the wall, one of her, one for a potential roommate. Turned on by the nurses and aides. They show Sesame Street, Elmo and Bert and Ernie, The View, Celebrity Chefs, DIY shows, rebuild your house in seven easy days (she was a great fan of home construction. Putting in a ceiling or installing sheet rock was a pleasure to her, and a hardware store more fun than a candy shop)…sometimes adventure movies, science-fiction, Men In Black is a fav. She watches it. Her eyes open. Not quite staring. Not quite anything else.

3) Decoration: Mostly photos, and mostly on the wall in front of her. There is a collage of family scenes my wife put together on cardstock—assorted images, some familiar, some strange. My father in a heavy jacket, standing tall against some distant winter's snow. Her and him at the beach. Texas, I think. My son as a child. The dogs. We show them, the pictures, to her. She looks at them. She does not change expression.

4) Medical devices: A metal stand next to her bed supporting a plastic bag. It contains the chalk-brown fluid that is her nutrient; a long tube aches down to the insertion point in her stomach. Another, similar tube snakes down from under her bedclothes to the catheter balloon where it hangs under her bed, filling laboriously, drop by golden drop.

5) Flowers: Or, rather, flowering plants in pots on the windowsill. One is dead but remains, dry, yellow, straw-like but somehow still clinging to shape and color, like a dried herb. One lives, after a fashion. It is something we bought at the grocery store and bought to her. ("Wait, wait," she said, when I showed her the plant and to my amazement she reached for it, would let not me take it away, not until she had brought it to her chest and held it between clinched fists.) It sits on the sill and I water it when I remember. The flowers droop. Grow brown.

6) Dressers: two, one beside her bed, the other across the room from it. They, along with the little closet at the end of the room, hold her clothing, folded or hung. Also medical supplies, spare Foley balloons, plastic tubing, adult diapers, a dozen other things industrial and gray.

And last.

7: The Window…

Only one of those, but it is beside her bed. It looks out into the parking lot but also beyond it. Look up, look over the parked cars, over the little bus that takes the seniors on their outings, over the pickups of the lawn crew, over the vans making their deliveries of oxygen tanks and processed meals, over the ambulances that appear without sirens and carry their sheeted burdens out the back, over all of that and …you will see the mountains.

The mountains.

The Sandias. Blue in the morning. Rose at sunset. Reaching up from the mesa. Enormous. Vigorous. Glorious. A promise.

A Certainty.

Scent

If those others are not, then what is the dominant sense in the Home?

Strangely, I think it is scent. You smell things. You return to those first origins of life, when chemical sensitivity was all-important. When molecules and olfactory receptors defined perception. And communication. With their own grammar and poetry.

It is not all good. Very little of it is sweet or mellow. You detect…cleaners, harsh and abrasive, bland food on the trays being taken on carts to those patients who can sit and eat; medical smells, disinfectants, the electronic-hot-metal odor of clinical machines; very few perfumes or personal scents unless they're on the skins of visitors; and, most of all…

Urine.

It is not that the place is unclean. No. It is very, very clean. But urine is a powerful scent. And the Foley catheter is not a perfect technology. (Note to transhumanists and others who long for the blending of man and machine, partisans of cyborg and superhuman, there is much remaining undone, long miles to be traversed 'tween here and your utopia.).

And so, as you walk past a patient or a patient's room, you will detect urine. Sometimes, too, feces, if they are having a bowel movement.

You get used to it. You don't think you could, but you do. And if you are of a certain mental bent there is something instructive in it. Almost comforting. For, you see, these are also the scents of the nursery. Of the maternity ward. Cycle of life, etc. I'm sorry if that strikes you as platitudinous. Perhaps it is. But it is also true. And inescapable.

Besides, it is humbling. We go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and from uric acid and methane to uric acid and methane. Even the most remarkable among us comes, in time, to here. The most powerful, the most arrogant, the most supercilious, the most talented …here. Here and nowhere else.

Oh ye mighty. Sniff upon these works and despair.

Or, better, learn modesty. And so wisdom.

Swimming

Sound, too, is not dominant, though for other reasons.

There is an attempt to muffle noises in the Home. There is soundproofing here and there, padding in the walls and so on. But it does not matter. Everywhere there is noise. Constant, grating, strident noise.

Everything is alarmed, you see. Open the wrong door, or the right one at the wrong time, and emergency alarms begin their incessant beepings. If a patient rolls over and hits the nurse's call button, more beepings, equally loud. If one of the machines that support the patients in their beds malfunctions or runs out of some necessary fluid, yet more beepings and bleatings.

And, of course, all the rooms have TVs, usually tuned to competing channels, and (given the viewers' almost inevitable deafness) usually quite loud.

Yet, after a day or so, you learn to tune out all this. It blurs away. Becomes indistinct. In time, it's all just white noise, and in a strange way, even serene.

Or, here's a better description. Go swimming. Put your head under the water. Listen, if you can, to the talk of other swimmers on the surface. What do you hear? It is reduced, of course. Their conversations dwindle, grow dim, are incomprehensible…

And somehow alien. As though you eavesdropped on strangers from a different world, far away and chill, where concepts are different, nothing quite makes sense, and communication…no matter how sincerely attempted…is impossible.

Yet, even so, there is hope to be had. It is in the knowledge that you will eventually rise, abandon the rushing waters, come again upon the tile and earth, feel the towel over your shoulder, the sun on your body, the warmth, the knowledge, hear again the spoken word…

Rendered coherent. And whole. And potent.

The Home

It is pleasant as such places go. A smallish building, tan and white and yellow, "southwestern colors"…you go through the front entrance, sign in at the desk, talk to whichever receptionist is on duty (there are two, they alternate)…then you go through the doors behind the desk (closed, difficult to open if you are seated in a wheel chair, deliberately so, reduces "risk of elopement").

You find yourself inside a large central space. The nurse's station is on your right. Hallways lead off to the patients' rooms in various directions. If it is morning, then many of them…I mean, the patients…will be in this central space. They are pushed there in their wheel chairs and one of the aides reads them the morning paper. You must, then, navigate a crowd of chairs and impassive men and women.

You find your way to one of the seemingly identical hallways (it is all too easy to get confused, to pick the wrong one, and have to return and start over again) and head toward the individual room you want to visit. My mother's is on the immediate right hand side, which makes it a little easier.

It's funny. As I think about it, I realize that vision is not the dominant sense there. Things seem a little smooth, a little bland, a little hazy. The beige rugs, the earth tone walls, the subliminal blues which are almost gray, the uniformity of the furnishings, give the place a curiously unseeable quality. It is not invisible, you are not blinded, but you somehow cannot recall looking at anything in particular. Nothing specific. It is as though someone wrapped your face with gauze and you perceive the world indistinctly, as through a veil.

Which perhaps is fitting. Maybe that is the way the patients in their chairs also see the world. Veiled. Awaiting that moment in the ceremony when the music swells, union is achieved, the veil is lifted, and all things are made once more new and crystalline.

I like that. It is a comforting image. True or not, I shall choose to believe it. Forsaking all others.

Besides, there are moments when something like that truly seems to happen. Albeit on a smaller scale. When, say, you are picking your way carefully through the chairs, the old men and the old women, and one of them looks at you for just a moment, and you smile, and to your surprise one of them smiles back…

For a second, a split second, it is as if the sun reaches through shuttered windows.

All shadows are banished. Your sight is incalculably clear. 

how much of her remains?

And her?

She speaks sometimes. Not a great deal. I don't know how much she recognizes me. She will smile. She will respond to my questions, at least on occasion. Usually, it is just "yes" or "no." Sometimes we will get a full sentence.

She moves her hands. With some help, she has even fed herself. She has a great fondness for soft ice cream. And my father brings her mashed sweet potatoes, which she also seems to love.

I wonder, sometimes, when I watch…when I watch those beautiful, luminous eyes of hers…how much of her remains. How much of the woman I knew and loved and admired?

My nightmare is that she is still in there, someplace, unable to speak, unable to move…raging against the dying of the light.

Such a thing is not to be considered. It would be kinder if she were not there at all…if she had, somehow, moved on to whatever place it is that awaits us…(insert the image of the celestial sphere, the blue crystal dome of heaven, turned by mystic clockwork engines …and she, the traveler of the tarot deck, comes, pauses, considers, passes on, through the boundary of What Is, sees what we may not yet perceive…)

Kinder, yet harder, for it would mean she would never return to us.

And there is part of me, hopeless yet ever hoping, that it is only a matter of time, or reconnections, or resumed neural linkages, and one day…maybe after many summers…there will come the morning…

The morning she looks out into the room. Sees her husband. Smiles. Says Thank you for waiting. Reaches for his hand.

colossus

As a rule, I see my mother once a day. I get up, walk the dog, have breakfast, then head over to the nursing home. My father will be already there. He spends the morning there, and sometimes much of the afternoon. He comes and sits by her bed, speaks to her, plays her music on a little stereo he bought on eBay, and (most of all) watches out for her.

They are in awe of him. I mean, the staff at the home. He is there every day. Rain or shine. Snow or sleet. He is there. He comes and is with her. He is her companion. Her guardian. Her support. No matter what.

If you saw him, not knowing, you would see a very small man, very old, wearing ill fitting clothing that we can never get him to change, his hair unkempt…

You would dismiss him.

You would be wrong to do so.

Remember the saying about entertaining angels unaware? With him, it is the titan that is concealed. The giant. The more-than-man.

How frail the flesh. How fragile the bone. But perceive him correctly. You will see the monolith. The shimmering entity. The colossus at the edge of cosmos. The gaze which seeks the infinite.

And will, in time, obtain it.

A certain spectrum...

And so I begin again.

It has been months since I've done anything with Xcargo. I have some excuse. As you know, we moved to New Mexico this summer. My mother had a stroke—a second one, actually—and my father is elderly. Someone had to be here. And that was me. Or, rather, Martha and me.

If circumstances were different, if we came for other reasons, we'd be quite happy. Martha was retiring from Tufts, anyway. What I think of as my career is entirely portable. I can do it via computer and the web. Our son is now going to school in Virginia. There was, in short, increasingly little to hold us to Massachusetts. Why stay and fight the winters?

Thus, we came, and we are glad to be here. Or mostly so. The qualifier of the mostly being, of course, our motivation. The reason for our coming. The illness. The stroke. The slow and incomplete dying of the brain.

Alas, you see, the quality of contentment has something of the nature of physics. Between the quantum of the consequence and the shimmer of the cause, there is a certain spectrum which, like the rainbow, is constructed by the breaking of the light. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, one taken from the falsity of vacuum, then consider the virtual pair. Whose life is beautiful but brief.

Begun in nothing. And ended there.