Nursing Home Dreams

There are days I am unsure where I am. Lucidity comes and goes like tides upon a shore of grey matter. They tell me my brain is slowly spongifying in my skull. I imagine it resembling some sort of marine creature, now, reminiscent of bleached coral, full of holes for small tropical fish. It makes me feel better, not as if I was slowly rotting and shrinking in the shell of my skin, but back near the coast in the far north, where I lived as a child. Those are my strongest memories, I suspect because of the olfactory component: the sharp scent of salt water, the stench of seaweed on the sand. Big heaping piles hopping with sea lice, decomposing in the sun. 

But memories are circular when I have the luxury of having them, and it loops from my fading mind, to salt crusted beaches, to seaweed, to decomposition, then back to myself, because decomposition is the state I am in now. To my great misfortune, I have to be alive during this ordeal. So much trouble they take too, the nurses and carers and physiotherapists, keeping me alive for as long as possible, like teasing out a thread to its thinnest point just before it breaks. Just shoot me, already, I said to them today when they wiped my mouth and changed the sheets, and they chuckled and replied, No luck again, Mr Baxter, forgot the shotgun, try again tomorrow? and then I felt quite scared, because they laughed and talked as if I have said the same thing every day for years, but I don’t remember. I was sure I had just come up with the request. 

So this where I have come to die. The nursing home on the outskirts of the inland town where I chose to retire. No sun and sea here. My room has a view of dry bushland in various shades of beige and dehydrated greens. If I stumble from my seat I can undo the latch of the window and let in the smell of hot air, and sometimes, though I suppose it is just my imagination, I think I can smell the westerly blowing in from the coast, carrying the astringency of salt and fish on the jetty across miles of red, dusty, cattle country. Moving by myself, once as natural as breathing, has become a monumental, David and Goliath task, and after opening the latch and edging back to the seat which now carries an accurate impression of my backside, I groan as I settle down again, bones creaking almost audibly. But as often and as stubbornly as I let in the imaginary sea breeze, some grotesque woman called Anna lets herself into my deathbed room and admonishes me. You’re letting out the air conditioning again, she will inevitably sigh, and with the ease of movement of a gazelle, the litheness of a leopard, the able-bodiedness of humans I once enjoyed, she walks across the linoleum floor and shuts the window. 

I have a love-hate relationship with this woman called Anna. She used to visit fortnightly, and although it is sometimes hard for me seperate newly minted memories and that of months ago, I suspect that in the recent past she has started visiting me daily, a scowl of worry deepening the lines in her face. I love her because she talks to me, provides company, and is my only visitor. I hate her because she says things along the lines of, You can’t keep hiding the air conditioning remote, Dad. You’d die in the heat. I find it insulting that she thinks I can’t withstand the weather of the country I’ve lived in all my life, decades before the invention of air conditioning, which I can’t help thinking is for those with the thinnest of skin. But seeing dark purple and green of the varicose veins in my legs and hands, growing more prominent by the day, perhaps I must start counting myself among the delicate. 

It is also curious that Anna thinks of herself as my daughter, because I did have a daughter called Anna once, but when I last saw her she was only eight years old. I don’t know where she is now, but I’m glad she is not in this hellhole with me. This woman is far, far older, and life has not been kind to her. She is in her sixties, is losing her grey hair in patches, and tells me she is or has started chemotherapy, and won’t be able to visit as often. This information which she shared with me today or yesterday or the day before filled her eyes with tears, and I was suddenly struck with the realisation that her eyes are the same bright blue of someone familiar, only I can’t think who. Still, I feel pity for Anna, for cancer is a many headed serpent, and I’m not sure if she’ll beat it. I warned her it runs in families, and asked if her mother had had it, and did she have daughters she was worried for too? As the gentler sex tends to do, she only further burst into fresh tears. 

There is a photo of someone I know on my nightstand, and I have concluded that I must know this person because why else would someone have placed this framed photo here? Perhaps I placed it here. But as much as a wrack my head, I feel only that the marine creature inside is as puzzled as I am. It is a black and white photo, so I can’t tell the colour of her eyes or her hair, except that they are on the lighter side. It is a very beautiful woman, in a pretty summer dress that I believe must be yellow, though there is no way to tell in the grayscale of the image. Sometimes, when I feel particularly lonely, I pick the frame off the nightstand and gaze at this woman, and I imagine I can smell lemon, mint, and lily-of-the-valley, which must be the perfume she used to wear, a scent I must know somewhere deep down. But no other information arises and I put the photo back down and turn on the television. Television is wonderful, but I am slightly ashamed that I watch so much, because what kind of hobby is watching television? But I’ve lost the motor capacity to do much else. Now I watch back to back episodes of House Hunters, and forget that I am forgetting. 

***

Today they told me I am going to die. I knew it, of course, everyone in a nursing home knows that they are there to die, but it is funny to think of my life as a series of dominos, day falling into the next day into the next, all to come to one last day. One more domino falling on the floor, the end of the line, the last hurrah that is more of a fizzle-out. The string will finally snap. The geriatricians, nurses, and the woman called Anna have done their best. Now only time will tell how many dominoes are left, but they suspect it is only a handful. The calendar pinned on the wall seems a lot less useful, now. 

I don’t leave the bed now. I don’t have the energy, and daily, the nurses come in with Webster packs and syringes and to replacement canisters of oxygen for the machine that helps me breathe. I am on a complicated concoction of drugs to make my last days easier. I lay, eyelids heavy, gazing through a gummy slit at the ceiling. With great effort, I turn my head to look at the photo on my nightstand. The mystery woman. I must have asked someone about her sometime, and they must have answered, but the identity of this woman must have slipped away again and again. Time has slipped through my fingers like sand, and somewhere there must be a beach filled with the lost grains of time from every life lived. 

I have fuzzy, opioid laced dreams. I know somewhere in these dreams lay the last flutterings of memory, like a ragged flag in the wind, but I can’t differentiate between what happened and what is in my head. But how would things end up in my head if they didn’t happen? 

I dream of my childhood. The squawks of gulls, their silhouettes gentle, winged curves against the blue of sky over sea. Sand in between my toes. Salt on my tongue, mingled with tears and sweat. Of the crackle of the radio, bringing news of war. Of the guns they pulled through the streets, to position at strategic outlooks over the brilliant sea. My parents, ushering me away from the rocks below the cliff, where as six year old, I had seen a man jump to his death. There had been blood in the tide, that day.

I dream of my siblings. I count each face that appears to me in my head multiple times, but each time ends up with a different number. I say the names, and the list goes on forever. Who was there, in my childhood? Who did I lay with, curled up skin to skin in that double bed where the whole family squeezed in at night? Who was only a friend, or worse, not real at all? I struggle to cross reference the memories. I can’t hold onto one long enough. All I know is I must have outlived them all. Otherwise, they would visit me. They must all be gone, by now. 

I dream of growing older, of finding work in the cattle country that I never ended up leaving. Red dusty earth in the air, thrown up by the hooves of thousands of beasts, so far from the ocean. Feeling homesick, but proud. I dream of long days and sweltering, swift nights where it felt like the moment my head touched the pillow I had to raise it to start the morning all over again. I had a kelpie, I remember. A skinny black and tan b***h that birthed litter after litter of pups I made someone else drown, for I couldn’t stand to do myself. She was my constant companion, back in the day, and I said sorry to her everyday for the difficulty of a dog’s life in a man’s world. Yet she treated me like I was the best darn thing in the universe, the man who took away her children and some days couldn’t afford to feed her. 

I dream of the woman in the photo, no longer frozen in her pose in the maybe-yellow dress, but in different outfits, with different lengths of hair. In day, night, and dusk. Here she is in the passenger seat while I drive, singing along to the radio, here she is in a field of sunflowers, and on the beach, and in the stained living room sofa watching sad movies with red eyes. She leans over to me to whisper in my ear, and lemon, mint, and lily-of-the-valley fills my nostrils. The words she whispers are, I love you. Then she kisses me. 

I dream of marriage. I was married once. There was a white wedding with the prettiest bride and a massive vanilla cake with violets on it. Usually, films end with the marriage. But after that day, the dominos keep falling and you have to live each day with the person you chose for the rest of your life. Or the rest of their life. I remember thinking I couldn’t do it, sometimes. I remember despair and the feeling of losing her. But each day fell into the next and we were still there, and at the end of the day, we were happier for it. I dream of marriage and the perfect love and I know that some things are more dream than memory, but to me it’s all the same. That woman in the photo died one day, and I was there, holding her hand. But I still can’t recall her name. 

I dream of Anna, my daughter Anna, not the imposter that visits me. She is clever for her age, a rascal and a tomboy, with dirt on her nose and tears on the knees of her jeans. She has bright blue, familiar eyes, as round as bottle caps, and an unfortunate tendency to lie and steal sweets from shops, but I love her all the same, because she is half of me that I will leave behind when I am gone. She is my legacy upon this earth, and she knows it, and one day she will grow up and make me proud. 

I dream of retirement, in this little town that has been my home for more three quarters of a century. Of quiet days of reading and watching television, of watching time put lines on a face I loved so much, lines that mirrored my own. I dream that I attend a long line of funerals, for everyone I ever loved, and some people I didn’t care about much at all, but still got the invite. Mum, Dad, innumerable brothers and sisters. Someone who I forgot the name of. Someone important. 

I dream of my own funeral. I know this is not memory, now, but it doesn’t feel any different to the other dreams. Who will be there? Who have I left behind? I’m not sure. I hope Anna will be there, the visitor Anna, because even though she is my daughter’s imposter I have grown fond of her.   But she has a lot going on in her life, I know, for she looks sadder and tireder, and has less hair on her head every time I see her, so I would forgive her if she doesn’t show up. I imagine being lowered down my grave, at the local cemetery. Is that what they will do? I can’t remember what I wrote down. I know there was a discussion, some time, about it. Or maybe they will place me in a burning fire until I am broken down into ash; yes, that’s what I asked for. I will become fine powder, a dust like the red dust of this country kicked up by cows. They will drive to to the ocean, to the town where I was born, and walk along the beach. They? Whoever I have left behind. It doesn’t matter who. They will throw me into the sea, and, as dust, I will be swept up into the tides and the salt, mix with the sand, and travel along the coast. I’ll float down to the depths and become one with the coral. I’ll be nibbled at by the tiniest marine life. By plankton, krill, sea lice. 

I can already hear the waves. Smell the salt, feel the warmth of the sun, the sound of blue water sweeping ashore. 

In my sleep, in my bed in the nursing home, in the room about to open up to a new resident, I smile. I can’t wait.