The Bough that Broke Back to Sea
The place had a manicured feel to it, and it was friendly, but it was manicured. Tom assured us that it was not for the patients, but for the family and visitors of the patients.
“The rooms on the top floor, you know, they have dining tables with table cloths and all that fancy stuff. And they’re all the same price, this room, that room. But it’s not for the patients, they don’t know what’s going on.”
Cheryl’s room did not have a dining table. Cheryl’s room had no semblance of Cheryl. She had only been there just over a month, and lay, in the way that a puppy sleeps awkwardly on it’s back, on her mattress on the floor. This sixty year old woman’s decline with Alzheimer’s Disease was, to say the least, unconventional. She was the youngest patient, and shows the least amount of cognitive activity. She used to use the word “fuck” like an elementary adjective.
She is forced to wear a helmet all the time, despite the fact that she was one who always had such an uncanny astuteness for her surroundings, and she walks with a spine now bent off to one side, despite the youthful strength that had always been shown even in her tomboyish haircut. A woman who had always cleverly hidden her real age behind decades and decades of charm and enthusiasm for life had aged twenty years within the twelve months that I had not seen her.
Tom has had trouble finding a support group that doesn’t consist entirely of women. Men like to haggle with each other to avoid any real essence of communication. They drone on about irrelevant topics and offer up tasteless jokes as a replacement for the pain and for the hassle. Most have already taken other women. Many pay representatives to attend and discuss their problems for them, discuss their feelings. We don’t communicate and so we forget how.
We sat there watching Cheryl sleep as her son, Tim, rubbed her thinning hair out of her face from time to time. We talked and kept the mood light.
It was a pretty place. It was pretty in the way that you would expect an Alzheimer’s home to be pretty. There was grass, and flowers, and a pool with leaves floating over the water, and an unceasing breeze through the courtyard that seemed to keep everything in motion, seemed to age things a little more quickly.
There were scrapbooks reminding the patients of themselves, and calendars with psalms reminding them of Jesus. And awkwardly placed homey items to serve as a slight distraction from the dehumanizing nature of the illness. A teddy bear, stood upright, dressed in sunflower patterned overalls holding a sign reading, “spring flowers.” Next to it, a vase of a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses, and next to that was Cheryl’s roommate, Carol, wearing a floral patterned night garment and white sneakers with scabs from various forgotten cuts and scrapes, sleeping upright in an armchair. She had picked one of the flowers from it’s stem, and even in her sleep sat clutching it tightly until its petals pushed their way in deformed directions between her fingers.
Possibly the greatest poverty facing humanity is the loss of the value of death. It is never anymore seen as a respectable act of nature’s inevitability. We are the frantic flapping of a fish out of water, too overcome with fear to savor the last bits of water on it’s gills; the bough of a tree pummeling off the precipice of a cliff into the sea, too aware of our fate to enjoy our last beautiful view, and too angered by the regression. So we are required to not remember, to deaden the meaning, to ease the pain, and to forget the final absurdity of it all.
“The rooms on the top floor, you know, they have dining tables with table cloths and all that fancy stuff. And they’re all the same price, this room, that room. But it’s not for the patients, they don’t know what’s going on.”
Cheryl’s room did not have a dining table. Cheryl’s room had no semblance of Cheryl. She had only been there just over a month, and lay, in the way that a puppy sleeps awkwardly on it’s back, on her mattress on the floor. This sixty year old woman’s decline with Alzheimer’s Disease was, to say the least, unconventional. She was the youngest patient, and shows the least amount of cognitive activity. She used to use the word “fuck” like an elementary adjective.
She is forced to wear a helmet all the time, despite the fact that she was one who always had such an uncanny astuteness for her surroundings, and she walks with a spine now bent off to one side, despite the youthful strength that had always been shown even in her tomboyish haircut. A woman who had always cleverly hidden her real age behind decades and decades of charm and enthusiasm for life had aged twenty years within the twelve months that I had not seen her.
Tom has had trouble finding a support group that doesn’t consist entirely of women. Men like to haggle with each other to avoid any real essence of communication. They drone on about irrelevant topics and offer up tasteless jokes as a replacement for the pain and for the hassle. Most have already taken other women. Many pay representatives to attend and discuss their problems for them, discuss their feelings. We don’t communicate and so we forget how.
We sat there watching Cheryl sleep as her son, Tim, rubbed her thinning hair out of her face from time to time. We talked and kept the mood light.
It was a pretty place. It was pretty in the way that you would expect an Alzheimer’s home to be pretty. There was grass, and flowers, and a pool with leaves floating over the water, and an unceasing breeze through the courtyard that seemed to keep everything in motion, seemed to age things a little more quickly.
There were scrapbooks reminding the patients of themselves, and calendars with psalms reminding them of Jesus. And awkwardly placed homey items to serve as a slight distraction from the dehumanizing nature of the illness. A teddy bear, stood upright, dressed in sunflower patterned overalls holding a sign reading, “spring flowers.” Next to it, a vase of a dozen long-stemmed yellow roses, and next to that was Cheryl’s roommate, Carol, wearing a floral patterned night garment and white sneakers with scabs from various forgotten cuts and scrapes, sleeping upright in an armchair. She had picked one of the flowers from it’s stem, and even in her sleep sat clutching it tightly until its petals pushed their way in deformed directions between her fingers.
Possibly the greatest poverty facing humanity is the loss of the value of death. It is never anymore seen as a respectable act of nature’s inevitability. We are the frantic flapping of a fish out of water, too overcome with fear to savor the last bits of water on it’s gills; the bough of a tree pummeling off the precipice of a cliff into the sea, too aware of our fate to enjoy our last beautiful view, and too angered by the regression. So we are required to not remember, to deaden the meaning, to ease the pain, and to forget the final absurdity of it all.