The Nursing Home

July 28, 2016

ROBERT COPPEDGE, like many in his generation, did not face life with a purpose-oriented attitude. Rather, his captain while crossing the sea of experience was a faint feeling, much like intuition except not as reliable. In fact, most of his actions were dictated by caprice and could not reasonably be described as the results of a conscious decision-making process. Long-term goals, when they chose to enter his mind, were regarded by his inner monologue with the same unregulatable mixture of suspicion and mistrust which tends to arise in house pets when strange visitors intrude. Such moments were rare, in truth, for it was not often that his mind had room to spare for new entrants. His daily thoughts were crowded with short-term goals which, really, functioned more like distractions than goals. Subconsciously, he understood that his disposition was an unpragmatic one to have, but whether he was actively playing his part in the long drama of life or sitting backstage between scenes, the conscious part of him remained convinced that, all things considered, it was the best disposition to have. Time, which had freed him from many things in life, had never freed him from his belief that slow advancement in one direction in order to reach one specific end felt too much like torture to willfully endure. Progress, in his own estimation, had little to do with outcomes, but rather it meant, simply, never having to be alone with his own thoughts. What he feared was that, if he spent too much time alone with them, they would somehow change him, and he would end up like so many others who, in his opinion, wasted their lives.

Robert, who went by Rob, worked at a nursing home, where it was his job to transport a select group of senior citizens around in their wheelchairs and to get them out of and back into their beds at certain designated times throughout the day. It was the first job that he had ever kept for an extensive period of time. He had been working at the nursing home for over two consecutive years. Rob was thirty-four years old but told himself and believed that he was still a young adult. His actual young adulthood had occurred sometime between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five. Being around the elderly so often, however, had convinced him that there was a stark, undeniable contrast between their condition and his own, and as a result, the idea that he was still quite young, at least relatively speaking, became ingrained in him like knowledge. It added, among other things, a measure of confidence to his personality. The increasing amount of pain he felt in his kneecaps when he bent down to pick things up off the floor; the slow, subtle onset of a mysterious lethargy which had caused him, gradually, to adopt an increasingly earlier bedtime; the diminishing amount of interest he took in that special dream of finding the right person to marry, to have a family with, and to spend the rest of his life with; in short, any and all evidence suggesting that he was getting on in years he was able to overlook with ease, and did.

Eight of the nine seniors whom Rob had to cart around suffered from what he imagined was dementia. He did not know with certainty that it was in fact dementia, because he was not a doctor, and besides that, management had never given him access to any of their records and none of his coworkers had ever bothered to share with him any information pertaining to the residents’ conditions. What he knew about dementia was that it took away a person’s awareness. It had taken him only a couple of days on the job to realize that each of the individuals who were on his roster possessed a different amount of awareness, the only exception being Perry, a man who, as far as Rob could tell, possessed none whatsoever. Indeed, despite what shortcomings he had, Rob was by no means a terrible student in the grand old classroom of life. Life’s lessons, in other words, did not fall upon deaf ears when they chose to fall upon his, for he heard, and not only heard but listened closely to everything life chose to tell him. What life had chosen to tell him this time was that, unlike ordinary paths, the path of dementia was not the sort of path whereupon the individual can travel all the way to the very end of it, and then return and share news with others about what lies ahead. Rob had learned, in a short amount of time, that, not entirely unlike life itself, dementia was for the most part a one-way street that led its victim through much humiliation and onto a shameful death. That, in Rob’s opinion, was an eerie quality which he did not enjoy contemplating. It involved a train of thought that urged him to loosen his grip on the belief that life gets better as time passes, and Rob was not by any means prepared to part ways with hope.

Broadly speaking, the older individuals on Rob’s roster possessed most of the awareness, whereas the younger ones, younger relatively speaking, were the ones whom the disease had apparently affected the most aggressively. Perry, for instance, was only sixty-one years old, and the only things he could do for himself were the acts of breathing and blinking. Carol, on the other hand, who was the only one on his roster who did not seem to be afflicted at all, seemed sharper, more alert, and more attentive than Rob himself most days, and she was ninety-seven. Gary, who was sixty-three, constantly touched his face with the tips of all his fingers, and looked at people whenever they spoke to him, but never said anything back. Tracy, age sixty-five, always kept her mouth open but never spoke, and though she was made to wear a bib, it was a rare day if she did not end up drooling all over herself. Joshua, who was sixty-six, watched the television all day and only said the word “What?” He said it in a loud and confrontational way, without ever adding anything else to it. Janet, age sixty-eight, was the social butterfly of the group. She was always trying to convince someone to play another round of checkers with her, or to do something—it could have been anything at all, so long as it was done together—to ease the ache of loneliness. Thomas, age seventy-two, slouched in his wheelchair next to a window in the community room for eight hours a day watching the birds and the trees and the ground outside, with a look of sadness that never left his face and with a wrinkled hand that was always held up against his temple, propping up his head. Kathleen, age seventy-seven, called Rob “Scotty” and only spoke in sharp sudden bursts of half-sentences that sounded like the beginnings of questions. Lenore, who was eighty-five, whenever she was not reading books by Nora Roberts, worked on crossword puzzles and rarely said anything to anyone.

Rob worked a twelve-hour shift from six in the morning until six in the evening, Monday through Friday. The official title of his position was personal care attendant, but his actual role was to be a muscle. His role, because of his size,—he was right at three-hundred pounds on the scales, not solid muscle but not all flab,—was a good fit for him. His regular hourly wage was ten dollars, but because they let him work twenty hours of overtime each week, he was able to afford a decent standard of living for himself. The facility where he worked, Shady Acres Nursing Home, housed approximately thirty other seniors whom Rob was never required to transport. Rob had noticed during his first month on the job that the primary difference between the rest of them and the nine who were on his roster was that the rest of them were not overweight. If Rob’s calculations were correct, the heaviest of his seniors weighed over three-hundred pounds, and not one of them weighed less than two-hundred-and-fifty.

The daily work of cleaning, wiping, and bathing—tasks which Rob periodically referred to as the dirty work—was piled onto the shoulders of the nurses’ aides. Rob himself was never asked by management to do anything except to cart his nine residents around as needed and to get them in and out of their beds. Rob believed that the reason behind the small list of responsibilities they had given him was the amount of physical exertion which it entailed. Regardless of what the real reason was, their decision was perfectly fine by him. When all of the daily tasks that were expected of him were added together in terms of the amount of time required to perform them, his twelve-hour workday involved about six and a half hours of actual work. The rest of the time he sat down in a chair in the community room beside the door that led to the cafeteria and, as long as none of his seniors required his assistance, he either browsed the World Wide Web on his smartphone, or eavesdropped on the seniors’ conversations. More often than not, the seniors’ conversations did not interest Rob enough for him to care about what was being said in them. Furthermore, the ones who actually spoke were not the ones in whom Rob took the most personal interest. It was the ones who either did not or could not speak who interested him the most. During his first week on the job, he had tried talking with them. Eventually, he resorted to talking at them, and, at some point,—the point at which he realized that his talking made no difference whatsoever,—he gave up talking altogether and began replying to their silence with silence of his own. He imagined that the silent ones—Perry, Gary, Tracy, and Thomas—were off somewhere, off in some fantasy place inside of their heads, experiencing an alternate reality. He could not tell whether they were trapped there or if they wanted to be there, but he could definitely see them there, sitting on some beach, or reclining in some hammock, or holding onto the rails on the side of some ocean liner and gazing out across the waters at what looked like the edge of the world.

The last day of Rob’s employment at Shady Acres began almost exactly like any other day that he had spent working there, with the one exception of the performance review. Rob’s supervisor had informed him about the review a week in advance. The supervisor had told him at the time that management had decided to make it mandatory for all employees to sit down and have a conversation with their immediate supervisors about their work performance, and that it was only a formality and there was nothing to get nervous about. When he heard his name called out over the building’s intercom system, Rob went to the employee breakroom, where the supervisor had set up a little interview table. At the very center of the tabletop lay a thin manila folder. One of the supervisor’s legs was crossed over the other one, and in his lap was a newspaper that he was reading. After the supervisor finished what he was reading, he and Rob discussed Rob’s work performance for almost half an hour. At the end of the conversation, a cold spell of nausea trickled down on top of Rob, and in no time at all it felt as if every atom of his body was ill. He did not cart his group of senior citizens back to their bedrooms that day. He simply left the break room, went out to his car, sat for a few minutes in the parking lot staring blankly at the steering column that was in front of him, and then drove away.

~ 6:30 a.m.

“HAVEN’T you got yourself a girlfriend yet?”

“No ma’am,” Rob replied. “I haven’t been looking for one.”

“Well, what are you waiting for? You know you’re not getting any younger.”

Rob was not a fan of this sort of conversation. He felt like it was too invasive, but pretending to be offended by it was out of the question, since almost everything Carol ever said or did to anybody was invasive. He did not have the heart to tell her that her invasiveness, although it may have been socially acceptable and even encouraged in her day and age, was no longer the norm.

“I’m not waiting on anything in particular,” he replied. “I’m just not interested right now. Maybe I’ll be interested someday, but right now I’m just doing my own thing.”

“Pshaw.”

He hated it when she made that sound. He felt like that was her way of calling him stupid without actually using the word. He stalled her chair in the middle of the hallway and sighed. He considered telling her the truth,—that he had not had a girlfriend in the past ten years, and that he had essentially given up on the idea of finding another one,— then he realized that mentioning something like that would have given her an opportunity to be even more invasive.

“One of these days, I’ll find me a good gal, and we’ll get married and live happily ever after.”

He said it in a way that he thought made it practically impossible for any trained pair of eyes to overlook his sarcasm. Sarcasm, he had learned long ago, was the best way to eject himself from conversations that he was not comfortable having. He had also learned, more recently, that it was a useful way to avoid conflict on the job, and that, at the same time, it made himself feel, in a very subtle way, superior to the people he used it on. Experience had shown him that sarcasm was a language that senior citizens in particular were not fully able to understand. It was, in other words, his own version of knowing Latin in a room full of people who did not.

“If you say so.”

After he finished wheeling her to the community room, Carol watched him as he walked back down the hallway and shook her head in disapproval. Then she grabbed the needles and yarn out of her lap and started knitting. What she could not understand was why such a strong, decent-looking man did not have the good sense to go out and find himself a good woman to woo and marry and be happy with. She could tell he was not happy. Ever since she was a little girl, she had been able to tell the difference between real happiness and fake happiness. She was certain that this ability of hers was an extra sense which most of the other people in the world did not have access to. Whenever he was nearby, her extra sense informed her that the smile on his face was not a smile at all, but was only a mask he wore to fend off the questions and criticisms of others. In her opinion, it looked like he had been told to bite down on something and now he was going around showing his teeth to everybody while he did it.

She knew that finding someone to marry was not the ultimate answer to the problem of unhappiness. She knew, beyond a shadow of doubt, that the real ultimate answer to the problem of unhappiness had to involve knowing the Lord. She knew the Lord, or at least she believed she knew the Lord and, although she was not always the happiest camper, she never felt the total absence of joy. Even when the pain of rheumatoid arthritis and the pain of fibromyalgia got together at the same time and did everything they could to torment her, she never felt the total absence of joy. She was certain, however, that if she did not have the Lord to lean on, she would have felt such a morbid feeling every single day and, as a result, she would have given up on life years ago.

To her, the Lord was Jesus, and that made her a Christian. As a Christian, she knew that it was not her place to judge the other faiths of the world. She also knew that it was not her place to judge the faithless. She knew the Lord and how He was—how He did not tolerate sin or hypocrisy, and how, whenever He found evil lurking into His garden, He crushed it underneath His foot. Whenever opportunities arose for her to take a stance against some of the more controversial actions and opinions which other faiths and faithlessness promulgate, the way she was able to restrain herself from indulging in the sharing of unwise commentary with her peers was by telling herself, in private, that those people who commit such heinous acts and who promote such sinister opinions have something much larger to fear than the opinion of a little old lady.

Several months had passed since she had first asked the care attendant whether or not he attended any church services. After he had told her “No” and she had asked him “Well, why not?” his answer had immediately convinced her that witnessing to him would be a long-term project. In the past, she had had a heavy hand in winning people who were like him into Christ’s kingdom, but she was not sure if she had enough time remaining to finish the job with the care attendant. She decided that she could at least begin the job by laying the groundwork—that way, when someone else came along who cared enough to try to lead him in the right direction, the job would not seem as intimidating. After that initial exchange, she had only directly pressed the issue of salvation with him once. What became clear to her from that interaction was that talking about the Lord really spooked him out, and that if it was at all possible for him to avoid it, he would avoid it at all costs. It encouraged Carol to learn that, although he had shown signs of clinging to the most sophisticated types of doubt, he had also shown signs of being afraid of the Lord Jesus. That, to her, was a good sign, for it was her understanding that no matter how deeply enthralled by doubt a person was, no person who feared the Lord was a lost cause.

Carol was in a position to know what it was like to be enthralled by doubt, for faith had never been easy for her. Naturally, she had always preferred the certainty of knowing over the guesswork of belief. Fortunately, she had had someone who had witnessed to her practically every day for the first eighteen years of her life. Still, she could remember how, when she was sixteen years old, she had secretly entertained the idea that Christianity was only a book club that had been stuck on the same book for over nineteen-hundred years.

Carol’s grandmother, a widow who was not afraid to speak her mind, had taken her in when she was six months old and had done her parents’ jobs for them. Had it not been for the grandmother, Carol might never have known anything about the Lord. She might never have known anything about herself, either. The grandmother explained to the girl, once she had reached the age of reason, that her mother had been an irresponsible person who had decided to marry the first man who paid any attention to her. The grandmother also informed the girl that her father, despite everyone’s expectations, turned out to be a terrible husband who, when he drank, which was regularly, liked to use his wife as a punching bag, and that he had even done it once during the pregnancy. According to the grandmother, after the mother finally turned to her for advice, the grandmother helped the mother get in touch with an attorney in order to initiate a trial for divorce and, as fate would have it, receiving the court summons set the father off. Carol learned, at the age of fourteen, that her father, who had fought on the Western Front, committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a pistol, and that, after her father’s funeral, her mother decided to leave the baby with the grandmother because “it hurt too much to think about” and moved out to California, never to be seen nor heard from again.

Carol, who despite having made mistakes in her younger years had learned from them, married a Christian man at the age of twenty-eight, and they had two daughters together, both of whom they raised as Christians. When her grandmother passed away from natural causes in 1952, it did not come as a shock to Carol. It was something that she had been able to prepare for. But after her husband passed away from the cancer in ’64, she fell into a deep depression. It was during that time of despair and loneliness when Carol first realized that genuine kindness,—which, she later learned, is the only means by which the saints are able to guide resigned souls into the Kingdom of Heaven,—comes natural to no one, but rather it must be cultivated by the extensive training of the will.

Two years after her husband’s death, she ended up losing one of her daughters, who had gone and gotten herself killed in an automobile accident after moving down to Texas with a man whom Carol suspected she was living in sin with. It had been troublesome to grow up while nursing anger at two lousy parents who were not there for her; it had been difficult to lose the love of her life in what had evidently been a part of the Lord’s own plan; but losing one of her daughters was beyond difficult. She believed, then, that the grief she felt was beyond her ability to bear. It was then, while she was still putting flowers on her husband’s and her daughter’s headstones every Sunday afternoon at Dogwood Cemetery, when Carol realized that what she was up against was the Christian life’s grand ultimatum: When hardship only intensified, would she go on proclaiming, “Though God slay me, yet I will trust in Him”? or would she put on the hardened heart and turn her back on the Lord?

She did not put on the hardened heart, which is not to say that she never wanted to put it on, or that she never tried to put it on. It was as if, in the middle of trying it on, she heard the voice of her grandmother again calling out to her to come and help out in the kitchen, and so she stepped away from what she was doing and went to her.

~ 9:30 a.m.

WHAT he felt like was a sack of crap. To make sure that he would not forget it, Thomas told himself over and over again that that was how he felt, like a total sack of crap. He felt like one of those sacks of crap that he had created in the autumns of his youth when he had been out deer hunting in the Ozarks with his cousin and his uncle. He felt like one of those sacks of crap that he had filled and had tied up and had tossed into the fire pit at the campsite. Now he was just waiting, there among the ashes in the pit, a sack of crap prepared to go up in flames. That was the way he felt and, as far as he could tell, there was nothing that he or anybody else could do about it.

Part of why he felt that way was because, after all, they had made him come. Even though it had been against his wishes, even though he had raised a complaint to them on multiple occasions, or had tried to, they had made him come anyway. And where were they now? They certainly were not here to console him. They certainly were not here to keep him company. They had assured him that they would come to console him and keep him company frequently, but where were they now? They were off enjoying themselves, in freedom, while he had to sit like an unwanted dog in a kennel and wait to die. There was something terrible and wrong about it all. When they were little he had taken all the trouble in the world to be a good father for them. He had worked a job that he had hated for more years than he thought was possible, and the only reason he had done it was to build a good life for them and to set a good example for them to follow. And what thanks had he gotten? What gratitude had they shown? All they cared about was staying busy and buying things and feeling good and living for themselves. In the end, the quality of their father’s life had not mattered to them. They had taken him out of his home and had tossed him away like a sack of crap.

He wished to God he was dead. He wanted it bad, death. He wanted it to come quickly, so that he could disappear off the face of the earth. He no longer cared if there was an afterlife. He no longer cared if there was a God or any angels that would be waiting for him, waving and cheering at the gate when at last he would arrive. He figured that life is probably the same, no matter which world a person is in. It tricks people into working like dogs, only to leave them feeling like sacks of crap. What good was there in working hard? What good was there in climbing up the ladder of success? Each step taken was only a delusion. No amount of wealth and no amount of pleasure could do anything for anyone except distract them for a little while. He closed his eyes and imagined himself lying in his casket, while they stood there looking down at him, crying. The truth was, he thought, if they do cry when the time comes, they will be crying for themselves. It was their own losses they cared about, not his.

Then he considered how Bernice would feel, and the thought of her always acted upon his heart like a powerful anesthetic. He felt too weak and tired to smile, but whenever he pictured her face he imagined himself smiling. She would not have liked him thinking about their children that way. He believed that if only she was still alive, he would have had the strength to stay positive about everything. But she was not alive, and that was why staying positive was impossible. Nevertheless, when he remembered her, he could sense within himself a small trace of the strength that she used to make him feel, and that small trace was enough to silence the bitterness, at least for a moment. It never lasted long, the moment, but it was the only thing in the world that made his life seem bearable. After it came and left, he felt rested enough to face again the loud, screeching bitterness of his soul.

Part of the reason why thinking of Bernice calmed him down was because whenever he thought of her he realized that, in spite of all the bad things, he had in fact been a very lucky man. After all, he had married the most beautiful girl he had ever known to come out of the state of Tennessee. Not every man could lay hold of such a claim. They had fallen in love at the age of fifteen and had gone on and spent over forty years together and had had three children, all of whom had gone on to have children of their own. When he was calm and thinking of Bernice, he was reminded of the fact that there were some who go through life without ever experiencing love, and he felt grateful that that had not been the case for him.

The most important fact in his case—that is, the most immediate one—was that not one of them had come to see him since Independence Day, and that had been over three weeks ago. That time, they had only stayed for fifteen minutes. He was glad they had come at all, certainly, but he felt like they could have at least shown some genuine concern and respect by staying a whole hour. But the grandkids were bored and told their parents they wanted to go home and, instead of setting a good example and teaching them that sometimes people have to do things that are not fun, the parents had sympathized with the grandchildren and had taken off after spending only a quarter of an hour with him. Every day since then, Thomas had kept his eyes on the parking lot. It was one of their cars that he was looking for.

Benjamin, his oldest son, knew better. He knew that Benjamin knew better, but evidently knowing better meant nothing at all. He had always been the smart one. He had been a bright boy growing up, and the only problem he had, as far as Thomas knew, was that he thought that with enough smartness, he would not have to work hard. As a boy, Benjamin had seen how hard his father had worked, and by the time he graduated high school, he had already made up his mind that he was not going to work that hard. He was the only one of the three who had gone off to college, and he graduated with a degree in philosophy, which meant, to Thomas, that he had gone and had his head filled up with tons of bull crap. It was tons of bull crap that could not help him pay off a mortgage, that could not help him advance into a good-paying position with a firm, and that could not teach him the proper skills that are required when it comes to handling the business of life. It was a bunch of bull crap that only made him seem like a punk, an arrogant little punk that nobody in their right mind would want to hire or work alongside. It had taken Benjamin five years after graduating college to find a decent paying job, and the job he ended up with—being a car salesman—he could have gotten straight out of high school.

It had been Benjamin’s idea, Thomas thought. The other two would not have thought it up. It had to have been Benjamin who had come up with the idea to throw him out, to lock him up in a nursing home so that none of them would have to help out or be worried about him anymore. They had all acted like it was an idea that they had all come up with together, but he did not believe that for one second. He knew it had been Benjamin’s idea, but he had never bothered asking—not because he couldn’t, because he felt like, at least when it came to things that really got his nerves to working, he probably could if he tried hard enough. But he had never even bothered trying to ask because he was afraid that if he found out that he was right, he might have never been able to look at his son in the eyes again.

Occasionally, Thomas heard some of the other residents talking about how they hated it when their condition “infringed upon the lives of their children,” and how they “did not want to be a burden.” He felt like these were lies they told each other. When he searched within himself, which was all he ever did, he could find no excuse good enough to use for padding against the hard blow of his own children’s neglect, and so every day he met the force of it head-on.