I never got the chance to see my grandmother outside the nursing home. Never saw her standing up outside the confines of the metal bed rails. Never said good bye without feeling like we were abandoning her.
Just before I was born, a stroke and a botched surgery left her bed-bound and blind. For fifteen years we visited her in the nursing home on holidays and, whenever Mamma made us. The day she died, we knew it was coming. Mamma and her sisters went to be with her. As the moment got closer, Daddy drove my brother, sister, and me up to join them. I didn’t last long inside the dark room, watching my mother’s feet dangle from the edge of the bed as she buried her face against her own mother’s chest. When my grandmother took her last breath I had gone to sit outside on the curb. My Aunt Juju told me that she was gone just before tearfully lighting up a Winston.
At fourteen years old, I learned the relief that death can bring in certain circumstances. No matter how sad everyone was that she was gone, all the years that she had lost, everyone agreed on one thing. At least she wouldn’t have to stay in that damn nursing home anymore.
So last month, when Paw Paw suddenly lost the ability to pull himself out of bed, I believe we all secretly hoped he was closer to the end than he was. Knowing full-well what came next if his body refused to give in. But, here I am, twenty years later, stepping over that same curb where I cried for my grandmother, passing through the same double doors of the same nursing home Mamma drove me to hundreds of times as a child. Here I am, on my way to see Paw Paw.
Things have changed just inside the front door. Where the lobby used to look like a mountain lodge, complete with a rock wall and fireplace, there is now a large receptionist desk beneath the sterile shine of fluorescent lights. She buzzes me in and I enter to her left. The dishwasher steam wafting out from the cafeteria meets the thick hallway odor of human soil, taking me back to age 14, 11, 9, 8, 7,6,5. I walk fast past the drooping heads of old ladies parked along the walls at different angles.
“Whats your name?” One spry old woman tries to hook me.
I’m a pro, so I keep walking, “my name is Ben, you have a good morning.”
I turn the corner and there he is; Paw Paw. Asleep in his wheelchair with one shoe on. A part of me wonders if I should just let him sleep. Maybe it’s better than waking him up to remind him of where he is and, that he’s not going home. But I tap his shoulder and his eyes open.
“Whoa” he fakes a right hook at me, “Brother Ben.” He laughs. “What is that I said about you?…You shot a rooster but?”
“I killed the hen.”
“You got to be a pretty good shot to do that,” he laughs.
“Yeah,” there is nowhere to sit so I lean against the wall with my hands in my pockets. Dementia has tied the end of his memory to the beginning, so his thoughts run on an endless loop. And just like that, we fall into the same conversation we’ve had for the last ten years.
We start with his childhood in Six Mile Creek, where he watched his dog Tuffy catch balls of hamburger out of the air. Then we move on to the army, where he slept on top of a tank to stay warm while he was deployed to Germany. This is the part where he likes to show off his knowledge of the German language, babbling off a phrase of German sounds. “You know what that means?” he asks. “Kiss my ass.”
After the army, his memory skips most of his life. The time he was married, the years spent raising his children, and he lands on the era I know best. The last decade, where he sat in his house and watched the world through his window. He asks about the groundhogs, the deer, the birds. Then his eyes narrow and he asks, “who is living in my house now.”
“Nobody,” I say.
“I built that little old house, with my little old hands.”
“I know you did.”
“I want to go home.”
“I know Pop.”
I let the conversation drift away, turning my attention to the episode of MASH on his roommate’s television. There is no sense in trying to make him understand why we’ve done this. Even if I could, he’d forget. So I just let his mind play out like a record and wait for it to start over; side one track one.
“Brother Ben,” he says. “What is it I used to say about you? You shot the rooster?”
And so it goes.
I stay for forty-five minutes. When I leave he shakes my hand and tries to hook me in to stay with the story about Six Mile Creek. But, I’m a pro. I put my foot outside the door so he’ll understand it’s time for me to go.
“I’ll be back soon,” I say.
“Okay Ben,” he interlaces his fingers atop his belly. “See you soon.”
I walk out the way I came, zig-zagging through the grandparents of strangers. When I reach the door, the receptionist doesn’t look up, she just hits the button to let me out. Outside, I drop the surgical mask from my face and take in a breath of clean air.
Standing beneath the blue sky and the changing leaves of a red maple, the relief of being out drives in just how much I hate this place. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll be back soon. I promised.
