Lest They Be Forgotten

Between Floors

(What happens when the grim reaper comes - do we fight or give in? This was an observation inside a nursing home that turned into a story. Published in the anthology Changing Ways in 2008)

Between Floors

I dropped in on him unexpectedly yesterday. I’ve been doing this more often lately, as if expecting at any time to hear the news, “Sorry, Mr. Marlow, your father passed away last night.”

He wasn’t in his room on the third floor. He says that he is still okay; that the really sad cases get sent up to the fourth and final floor. Still, he was promoted—or should I say demoted—from the second to the third floor only two months ago, along with an increase in his meds. He says that the move up is like emigrating to a new country—something he had done as a young man before I was born.

“Doug’s gone to the tuck shop to buy candy,” said the floor supervisor. I peeped into his room nevertheless; it was tidy for a change. The bed was made with fresh beige sheets and his pyjamas were folded on top. His usual pile of clutter: CD’s, paints, paper, phone book, telephone, newspapers, glasses and case, old family photographs—all gone. On closer inspection, some items were still there; the CDs were stacked on the window sill, the phone and phonebook were reposing next to it, the photographs had been arranged in a collage and stuck on a large bristol board that was hanging on the wall to the left of his bed.

The central photograph in the collage was one of a young Doug on his sailboat, six feet tall, long blonde hair flying in the wind, shirt open to the chest, muscles rippling as he worked the ropes of the sails. I looked at my reflection in the mirror—those genes had not passed down to the next generation.

Skipping the stairs, I took the elevator down to the lobby. The elevator doors on the third floor were blocked by an assortment of interlocked wheelchairs and stretchers as if their occupants had tried to make a dash for freedom and got snarled in a traffic jam. Many of them were drugged or comatose in their infirmities. And though they were huddled together, no one talked or moved, except for the hyperactive woman who kept clenching and unclenching her fingers while munching on toothless gums. As I gingerly manoeuvred around the obstacles and stepped inside the elevator, she suddenly blurted out, “Can you take me with you?”

I rode the slow-moving, cavernous elevator down three floors, realizing how petrifying this must be for residents travelling in it alone. Escorts were normally required, except in a few cases—like Doug’s. But he too had been trapped inside once during a freak power outage. He never complained, because they would have put him on the “to be escorted” list and that would have meant another loss of one of his remaining freedoms.

I found him in his wheelchair in the lobby opposite the tuck shop, surrounded as he had been in former times, by a clutch of ladies. I recognized them as residents of the second floor where he had spent the last three years until his recent move upstairs. But today, unlike in the days prior to his illness, he wasn’t expounding on Keats or Byron to awestruck women mired in unromantic marriages, the more vulnerable of whom he would later seduce and take to bed to further explore the practicalities of following the path of the great love poets. Today he was shaking, more than usual. His tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth; his eyes darted from side to side. His spectacles swung wildly from the chain around his neck. His mane of thick, silver hair was dishevelled.

“Dad, it’s John,” I said.

“I know,” he replied, fixing his anxious blue eyes on me.

 A woman in the wheelchair next to him reached out and cleaned the drool from the side of his mouth with a tissue.