Home

HOME

By Josh Cole

Alarm extinguished, sun barely lit. Bed departed, airport bound. Backpack full of weekend needs: toiletries, undies and Ts. A book of characters to keep me company.

Brisk walk to my Brooklyn subway stop, soaking up a few minutes' early morning rays. Backpack bouncing in its rightful place. Ticket printed and purchased not more than twelve hours prior, stuffed either in pocket or pack. Not sure which, but sure that I've got it. Mostly sure.

Descend the stairs, swipe the plastic, turn the stile. Wait.

I'm taking the train too early and in the wrong direction. Wrong and early relative to what I'm used to, that is, trading Manhattan for JFK.

Train to train to tram to plane. Wait. Board. Wait. Board. Wait. Bored.

Seats designed to discomfit. A jealous detail by vengeful airline gods to temper the joy of happy travel and to compound the misery of traveling sad.

The air compresses. Oxygen decreases as altitude increases. Two hours and a lapse of consciousness later, I've landed.

From plane to tram to car this time. A forty-five minute drive and I'm home. Somewhat home. In a town that once was home, that I still call “home” upon occasion, though always accidentally.

The first stop, though, is another home. The Oakwood Home^*. A home according to Merriam-Webster's 1^st and 5^th definitions of the word, but not the 2^nd, 3^rd, 4^th or 6^th. Certainly not the 4^th, as this is not a place from whence people come, strictly a place to which people go. A place to take on the sleeping patterns of house cats.

Here, it's called a home and people have their rooms, but none of it belongs to them. A home full of people who have nothing left to lose but continue to lose things nonetheless. The odds dictate: if you're not presently dying, your roommate likely is. Thus, imminent death, assigned two per tiny room.

Here, death knows no privacy. It lurks everywhere, permeates everything. Invisible cloud making the atmosphere heavy, holding the residents down with brutal force. With nothing to do but sit. Or lay. And stare. Stare without conscious recognition, mostly at the fluorescents in the ceiling or at the screens in the televisions.

Here, televisions blare for fifteen hours each day. Without interruption. Their ambient drone broken only by the slam of metal doors and the nonsensities shouted by the psychotic legless woman down the hall. The administration of the legless woman's nightly sedative is reprieve for the entire home. Like clocking out from the clamor of an assembly line after a double shift, or brokering a holiday ceasefire on the battlefield.

Not that I've ever worked in manufacturing or ever been to war. My grandfather, on the other hand, has done both.

“There's a ghost upstairs!” the legless woman shouts. Her sedative is yet hours away. “Oh, I love you!”

A metal door slams somewhere down the hall. All of the doors in the home are metal, and all of them slam, as if by rule.

Most of that day spent waiting, for nothing in particular. Waiting and watching. Waiting out the time and watching over my grandmother. My father's mother, my grandfather's wife. Waiting and watching as she's wavering between long periods of morphine slumber and silent bouts of anguish. Bloodshot eyes trying unsuccessfully to issue forth tears. When the opiate wanes, she opens her eyes, barely, to find herself surrounded by faces unfamiliar. Moments here, moments there. Then the eyes close again, accompanied by a muted shriek, an agony silent but expressive. Her face wrenches horrifically, as if it's a Gothic torture frieze.

“I love you! I love them!” The legless lady again. “I love living alone!” she shouts. Delusion and irony exchange high-fives.

“We need to form a posse!” Hearing this from her through my Big City ears, I realize for the first time that there are no people of color in the home, neither caregivers nor cared-for. Not that this is unexpected, just a reminder of how long I've been gone, and how different this town is from the city which stole me away.

My grandfather is holding my grandmother's hand. Doting on her, as he always has, in sickness and in health. Aware he'll never get to dote in health again he's doubled up his doting now, doting while he can. Hours and hours each and every day, doting at her bedside. He knows what's coming next but smiles a smile that stretches now into eternity.

I watch his hand caress hers, knuckles swollen and skewed by age. Their flesh dappled with matching sunspots.

When you were sick, she could take your temperature within a tenth of a degree using nothing but the flat of her hand. When you were a baby, she spent hours holding you, lovingly, with those hands. When it was Christmas, she baked the most delicious chocolate chip cookies, a recipe you regret never having learned by her hands.

Nowadays, she can't so much as lift those hands, and we have no idea what she feels of hot or cold or even love.

A fluorescent tube flickers from the ceiling and I'm fixated more than I should be. Then the legless woman begins to count, and doesn't stop.

I watch the tremulous illumination as I listen to the legless woman screaming out numbers and it sparks madness in my mind, drives me toward the edge of a cliff I can sense but cannot see. Sometimes mania is the best abatement of reality, and for a moment I'm actually jealous of that woman down the hall.

Now I really want a cigarette. I want to sit and suck on sadistic smoke and consider nothing but the graceful vapors tumbling through the air. Back at Pittsburgh International, after I landed, I bummed a cigarette from some stranger in a football jersey and cargo shorts and double-puffed it until I could taste burnt filter, as if it might escape me otherwise. I did this outside the departures level before meeting my grandfather outside of arrivals where he was waiting to pick me up and drive me the hour to our small hometown. Though I'm well into my tenure as an adult, I still possess the child's aversion to familial disappointment.

Anyhow, that cigarette left me wanting more, as cigarettes are wont to do.

But there are no cigarettes here. No marijuana. No bourbon. No Ativan. At least not mine. To take the edge off I’d have to steal the RN’s keys and raid the prescription cart. Which, admittedly, I'm beginning to consider quite seriously.

Outside the home, we sit in the enclosed patio area. No cement and no rough edges out here. Everything rounded and rubberized as if designed for children.

My grandfather and I are seated on a hanging bench. My legs push slowly against the ground to swing the bench in tiny intervals, minor pacification for legs that would rather run full speed away from this place and this experience. My grandmother is parked in front of us, in a sort of institutional rolling recliner, one that the Oakwood staff must use a mini-crane to get her in and out of, as she has no self-motorization left.

I tell my grandfather how strong he is, how much I respect him for how he's handled my grandmother's descent.

“She's lucky to have you,” I tell him, as if that's consolation.

“I'm lucky to have her,” he smiles, a reaction so quick as to prove instinctual, as if a simpler, truer phrase has never been spoken. And with that I turn my face away from him, because if he's not crying then I sure as hell don't feel that I've got the right to.

I've spent years battling depression, waging a war against an enemy that doesn't even exist, and suddenly my troubles seem so trivial next to his, this man who's been in love and been in war and now seems to be in both at once. Suddenly, for a brief moment, I understand it all. Life, love, the universe, the divine, what have you. Just as quickly, that cognizance is gone, and I'll spend the rest of my life trying to retrieve it, but its impression is permanent. The ghost of the lesson remains.

“It's bright,” he says, and he steps inside to get her sunglasses. And it is bright, but I can't help feeling he's stepped away to allow me a moment. Whether to cry or contemplate or merely visit, I'm not sure.

My grandfather gone, I'm alone with my grandmother for the first time. Possibly ever, but certainly since dementia began gobbling at her brain. All my life they'd been together, a unit, inseparable and whole. When I was a little kid, my grandfather would sometimes pick me up from my parents' house, take me for a burger, fries and chocolate shake, and he and I would be alone together briefly in his giant car. Then we'd get to his house and they'd be together again, the way they were meant to be. The way I'll always remember them when I'm their age, assuming my memory is intact.

The dementia came on fast and cruel. At its outset, my grandmother forgot not mathematics nor world events nor her mother and her father. What she first forgot was my grandfather, the way he looks today. As if she were a stranger looking at the mantel from which all but their wedding photo had been removed. She'd wake in the mornings to some unknown man in her bed, certainly not her husband because her husband was much younger and better looking. This man in bed was old and wrinkled and spotted by the sun.

When he found her, wandering their country road, he'd have to convince her to come back, have to convince her that her husband would be waiting there at home, have to then change his clothes and ply her with details to prove himself.

My grandfather's love has ripened as he's aged, and it was especially heart-rending to consider that her last remaining memories were of mere puppy love.

Eventually, though, the dementia ate up her mind in its entirety, and it seems that now, as we sit in silence on the patio, that she's got absolutely nothing left to lose. My grandfather will carry all their memories for the both of them, and I question whether I could ever handle such a burden.

Vaguely aware that today is the last time I'll see my grandmother, alive or otherwise, I struggle with what to say to her. Tomorrow I'll decide not to come back here, not to sully the healthy memories I have of her with the vision of her now. A month from now I won't have the money for another flight to attend her funeral. So this moment counts, as far as final words and wishes go, but somehow it's already too late.

Everything I think to say sounds trite. So I just stroke her hair, which is soft and thin and dry against my fingers. I tell her that I love her. I tell her that I hope she isn't in much pain. I have no idea if she understands my words or if they're carried off by the breeze unregistered.

Later on, back inside, my grandfather is angry because the RNs forgot to turn the feeding tube on, again. It's the second time this week, though they act as if it's common course. And there are other mistakes. Like neglecting to put a pillow between my grandmother's knees to guard them against bruising. Like abandoning a bottle of lotion under the blankets by her feet. Like leaving the window blinds open for the midday sun to broil in on her.

My grandfather angry, I see it now for the first time in my life. He was a sterner man in his prime, a no-nonsense National Guardsman so I'm told. Never violent, mind you"I'm not sure he's ever had that in him"but strict for sure. As long as I can remember, though, he's played Santa Claus each Christmas and practiced competitive adoration. To this day, when I say, “I love you, Grandpa,” inevitably his response will be “I love you more than you love me.”

So I get a little angry, too, but mostly sad, because his love should meet no obstacles in his final days with her. There should be no burdens on his heart, beyond, of course, impending loss.

Down the hall the legless lady is still counting. I think. There are numbers involved, though they don't seem to be in order. And once in a while there seem to be numerals from another language thrown in, like Aramaic, or Muppet.

That evening, making dinner with my grandfather at his home, my attempts at wit are thwarted by his slackening eardrums. Which is fine because I'm never witty when I'm nervous. His hearing aids shriek as he adjusts their volume. We allow TV to do the talking. Occasionally we comment on the news or such, but our conversation's sparse. Exhaustion subdues us. His justified after countless days of vigil, mine is not. And I understand now that youth has got nothing on devotion.

I sleep in the room I'd always slept in when I was young, in those yore days, those long weekends of Monopoly and McDonald's. Endless hours at the basement table with my grandfather, counting colorful cash and building tiny hotels. When I went broke he let me write him IOUs, though he never accepted reimbursement. Just like years later when he'd give me money for the modest garden wedding my wife and I couldn't really afford.

I lay there listening to the forest outside my window, an owl there cooing me asleep, just as one had when I was young. Younger, I should say, because I realize that I was, and am, still young. I hold out hope that it's the same owl as way back when, for continuity's sake, a fearful clutch at the gentler past, but that hope crumbles under the weight of extended cogitation.

My mind wanders to the photo of my grandmother. The one taken not so long ago, shortly before the illness had descended but long after her face had softened and antiqued. The one where she's wearing her Barbara Bush pearls and her face is all aglow. I'd seen it earlier, resting against her pillow in their bed. My grandfather placed it there, to keep him company, sleeping alone for the first time in sixty years.

My grandfather in love, it's the loveliest thing I've seen in my life. His best advice to me"or at least the advice I remember best"is that, when you're in love, don't ever go to bed angry. It's trite, of course, but no less true. It certainly served my grandparents well for many decades.

I think about this as I drowse: I think that he'd be justified to be angry now as he goes to sleep, part of his whole, being slowly, painfully, unjustly cleaved away. I think that I'd be angry if I were him. Too angry to function. Too sad to maintain.

He and I do not agree on politics or prose, but I hold out hope that I can anyhow be like him when I'm his age, when I'm the grandfather. Because he did not go to bed angry. And he did not go to bed sad. He went to bed happy, and he woke up happy, and he happily went to the home where the love of his life was living. He smiled and he doted, in sickness as he did in health. Because he knows that home is not here nor there, but wherever the heart has ever been.

END

*This name has been changed.

Reviews

[A Shared Narrative]

Your prose is remarkable. This is a big change from "Melt" and it's still amazing.

My favorite part, especially, with a stream-of-consciousness narrative like this is how each sentence (especially at the start) is two halves to a whole. You can sense the pause, and then feel it move forward from there, often with a callback to the first half of the sentence. Callbacks and recursions like that make for great spoken-word pieces, especially when you throw in the alliteration as you did in the beginning.

You find the right voice for this, and you should record it. On reflection, this *is* a spoken word piece, and it should be heard *and* read. A few of my favorites (and the hallmarks of why it should be spoken word, too) are the board/bored, her hands, and the cigarette paragraph. It's a real skill I haven't quiet been able to capture in my own writing.

There are a few punctuation and spacing issues you will probably spot on another read-through (some quote marks being the most obvious -- the once or twice I saw it might have been WC mucking with your em-dash again, possibly). All in all, dropped on paper in a nearly perfect state as-is, though

Congrats on another home run.

That said... There are not words, beyond what you've already said, to offer sympathy enough for having to experience that. As good as this piece is, I'm always sorry to see when someone has to draw from a well this deep. I hope writing heals as much as experiencing it hurt.