Obligation Met

It takes every bit of will power and positive thinking I can manage to visit the nursing home - it's a dismal and cheerless place where the poor are warehoused and neglected - thrown together like wounded animals and slowly dying from loneliness and fear and abandonment.  This is a place where the poor receive marginal care at best, a landfill for the people we throw away, a shadowy and forgotten place for the disabled and the helpless.  My friend Henry lives here - his hair is so long it almost reaches his shoulders, his fingernails are ragged and dirty, he needs a shower very badly, a change of clothes, a decent meal and a little hope.  His paralyzed leg has atrophied and is now several inches shorter than his good one and the good one is swollen to twice it's normal size - keeping it elevated would help but there are no extra pillows so the nurses say with sullen indifference - as if he'd asked for magic waters or a miracle.  His breath makes me flinch, his vision is failing, and his mind, once tack sharp and so quick I couldn't keep up, is now clouded and fuzzy.  He's easily distracted and disoriented and it takes enormous effort to maintain his focus - he rambles and wanders, not always clear or coherent, often losing track of a simple sentence and forgetting his thought, then coming back with a sense of surprise.  His only links to the outside world are an old and sometimes unreliable cell phone and a tired laptop with a monitor he can barely read - he doesn't always remember how either works and I wonder if the day might come when he won't know me.  Everything about visiting him makes me angry, impatient, uncomfortable and guilty.  He cries when I get up to leave and the part of me that loves him cringes but the rest of me runs down the dim hallways and past the blank faced residents parked in their wheelchairs, desperate to be outside in the clean air and away from this sad and hopeless place with its raw sounds and smells of sickness, amputated limbs, dementia and loneliness.


I've been harsh with him this visit, refusing to let him deflect with jokes and other foolishness, not letting him be evasive or change the subject.  Through all the haze I thought I might have glimpsed a man about to take his first step into a new reality - and I pressed him.  Talking about divorce isn't the same as getting one I'd told him flat out.  Promising to call the therapist isn't the same as actually picking up the phone and making the call. Losing a daughter and granddaughter might be a consequence.  And finally, don't start something you can't finish - I'll be by your side with every step if you decide to stand and fight, I'd told him, I'll help you up if you fall, but don't look for me to take the lead or do your fighting for you.


And these terrible phone calls have to stop, I warn him, a very unveiled reference to the dozens of calls he makes to me and the messages he leaves - hysterical and crying, begging and pleading for help I can't give and sometimes threatening suicide. 


I'm sorry, he mumbles, Won't happen again.


But within a week the calls resume and with a heavy but hardened heart, I arrange to change the number of my cell.  His case worker tells me I need to cut the ties and let him reach bottom - the stark truth of this old and familiar phrase strikes me like a hammer blow.  I pack up my feelings, especially the guilt, put them in a box, wrap and tie it securely, add a tag that reads Obligation Met and lock it up in my mind.


Sometimes, I remember reading somewhere, You have to walk away from people, not because you don't care, but because they don't.