The Nursing Home - Day 1

--July 2003

Went to see Mama Ruth today. I haven’t seen her for 3 years. She looks so close to death. Her skin is drawn back from her mouth like a skeleton. Her hands are curled inward towards her wrists. It reminds me of the Ice Man, that 10,000 year-old man they found in the Italian Alps a few years ago. She's sleeping but I have to admit, she truly looks dead. My first thought is, “Oh no. We’re too late.” But Aunt Myrna starts talking to her as if she were sitting at the kitchen table so I look again and sure enough, she's still alive.

The home smells of urine. It drenches the nostrils like thick gulf coast humidity. Saturation. It reminds me of daycare centers. Is that what we’re destined for, to begin and end with the smell of pee? The only difference between birth and death is there’s no baby powder in death. I’ll have to make sure those who care for me in my end times surround me with some good-smelling lotions and powders. Perhaps it won’t help. Perhaps death is meant to smell like pee. Maybe that’s why babies smell that way, after all, they are only moments from having just been, well, not "alive."
The kids look scared. They see and feel the nearness of death. I don’t know if they can see past the foulness to what she used to be - a loving woman who used to cook for us and laugh with us. She was so pretty. Cheeks like a movie star. Now she looks like death. They fear her. So do I. Is this what’s in store for me?
There’s a 33 year-old woman who, at first meeting, appears lucid. Except for the wheelchair, there doesn’t appear to be any reason why she’s a resident here. Until she suddenly asks me where her room was. I tell her I don’t know just as a nurse walked by. She asks the nurse the same question and I could hardly contain my surprise when the nurse points to a doorway only 6 feet away and says, “Right there, DeeDee. Your name’s on the door” Oh. She’s been there for months and still cannot find her room or the bathroom. Mom says the nurses once mumbled something about her having done drugs and that it may have led to her current state. I hope my kids hear it and will remember it the next time someone offers drugs to them. Today DeeDee overhears that we’re taking Mama Ruth for a ride. She keeps asking everyone if she can go too, that she never gets to go outside. I want to tell them to take her outside, to let her feel the sunshine on her skin, to let her breathe fresh air and feel the wind move her hair. Instead, they dismiss her with the vague promise of taking her out later, but I can tell they won't. They seem to ignore her more than anything, treating her like a pesky neighborhood child who has overstayed her welcome. I wonder how many times a week she asks to leave? It’s heartbreaking because she knows she’s being ignored. She tells me, “They never listen to me.” I imagine DeeDee’s entire life will be spent within the confines of a 7000 square foot building surrounded by the old and the dying, comforted by distracted nurses who are watching the clock until their shift is over.
There’s an elderly lady (other than DeeDee, they’re all elderly) who traverses the hallways in her wheelchair with a baby doll in her lap. The only real movement from her is the constant shuffling of her feet as she drags herself up and down the halls. She never looks up, she never makes eye contact, and yet her feet, as if by self-determination, gently steer her around any obstacles she may encounter. I think she must have taught children because as she scoots down the hall, she teaches her baby doll: “And then there’s one, and then there’s two, then three, then four…” until finally she ends with, “and then we have twenty, see?” Ms. Harris is her name. I wonder if her students remember her? Or if she remembers them. Then I hear her mumble to herself, “Those damned kids!” Oh yes, she remembers them.
In the room next to Mama Ruth’s is Ms. Nelson. She does nothing but sit in a wheelchair just inside the door with her forehead on a dinner tray. Periodically, she raises her head and lets out a frightening scream, and then plops her head back onto the tray. Mom says Ms. Nelson once dropped her head right into a bowl of oatmeal. I pray, Lord, when I get older, leadeth my head not into oatmeal.