Doughnuts and death. Sexy air fresheners. Making good your escape.

I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty…

I pedalled into the parking lot of Extended Care and looked around for a place to lock up. Then I looked through the foyer doors, which were glass. I could see the residents inside in the wide common area before the nurse’s station, all of them confined to wheelchairs or propped at long wooden tables, nothing in front of them, irretrievably lost and dreaming in private senile territories.

A few wide-screen TVs hung from the ceilings, senselessly playing soaps with the sound turned off, absorbing the attention of any last few cognizant residents. I didn’t have to worry about anyone stealing my bike…

I leaned it in the foyer and went in with a kit of my grandmother’s things. We’d picked out a few essentials together, and now she was at home having a grilled cheese for lunch and waiting for the mobile hairdresser to come give her a wash-and-set, a going-away present to herself.

Her room was down a long hallway that smelled like Murphy’s oil soap and sweet decay, like fallen apples. The nurse led me, walking fast in her silent nurse shoes.  My nan would be sharing the room with another woman. Kind of.

“She’s been unconscious for 6 months,” the nurse explained. “But her family comes in every day and sings to her. It’s sweet.”

heh heh. My grandma hates singing. She files it under “carrying on.” A devout church-goer all her life, she’d nonetheless avoid High Mass in favour of the bare bones early-morning service, all morning-dim and where the only sound emerging from the small congregation would be the humble murmur of prayer.

The High Mass was later in the day, and was for people who liked their church with a lot of pomp and circumstance, the incense billowing  and altar boys drowsing over their folded hands and a choir in full voice. People who preferred to sleep in late and eat breakfast before doing their Sunday duty went to High Mass.

“Listen to that carrying on,” she’d harrumph, as the lilting sounds of the choir drifted across the street from the church into her apartment.

She’d probably prefer it if this unconscious woman was forgotten by her family and lay in carefully tended neglect, her hair and nails curling about her under the crisp sheets. Like many old people, my grandma finds an element of cosmic comfort in the suffering of others.

The nurse went away and in an effort to harness the energy expended by my gonging heart I quickly worked at stuffing things in drawers and setting up this pocket of living space to be somewhat homey for a woman who cherished her private space. I tucked away her slipper socks and slippery, elasticized Walmart underwear. I hung up her array of pajamas and fluffy bathrobes, her main outfits now.

The bathroom was near her bed fortunately. It didn’t lock from the inside. It had a button near the toilet paper roll that said “Press For Assistance.”

I turned on the TV to make sure it was active. Even the TV itself looked more like a medical device than an entertainment device, jutting out from the wall on a long metal arm that could be bent at all sorts of angles, to accomodate any degree of immobility.

The nuns in school had a particularly horrifying story of hell, and how if you went there you were forced to spend Eternity in whatever position you landed, mired in hell-mud and helpless to move. Fidgeting with that TV I wondered if hell had televisions that jut out from the walls so you could at least watch re-runs of “J.A.G.” as you roasted.

After stripping the bed I put on her familiar sheets and a quilt she’d made herself, crocheting in the evenings throughout the course of a whole hockey season, lap covered in yarn and her skinny legs sticking straight out from the La-Z-Boy. Last, I hung up her Catholic voo-doo bric-a-brac. The cross made out of folded palm fronds, and her picture of a very Anglo Jesus staring beseechingly whilst pointing to his flaming, thorn-bracketed heart.

My grandma’s ability to walk slipped before her marbles slipped. The fact that she would be bed-bound in this place with her awareness fully intact made my hands shake. Or was it a sugar crash?

I climbed in the bed for a break. Even beneath the cotton, the plasticky pillows and plasticly mattress cover rustled in an uncomfortable, bed-wetty kind of way. She’d be taking her meals in this bed, doing everything in this bed. It would be her island of existence. All her movements would be narrated by the rustle of pee-sheets. If you eat in such a bed, is it an incontinental breakfast?

It was a weird mood that took me as I lay on the bed staring at the blank TV and the same patch of ceiling my gran would inevitably stare at. It was weird because I felt slightly good, that good feeling that sometimes takes over when the brain just throws up its hands and surrenders to circumstance. I felt pleasantly untethered. My main awareness was of wanting nothing, because there wasn’t anything that would make a difference.

Under that, a feeling of doom threatened to seep out and harsh my mellow, but for the time being it stayed submerged.

I was going to put some treats in the fridge for her, “gransnacks” tailored to her very particular and by no means refined tastes. Vanilla pudding, marshmallow cookies, Squirrely bread. I also had a carton of glazed doughnuts. They suddenly seemed like absolutely the thing.

Hospitals are famishing places. I sat crosslegged on the pee sheets and ate two of them; the hard taste of sugar at the back of my throat felt like life itself, evoking Halloween, and autumn leaves, and pancakes on Sunday mornings, and all the many good small things of life we learn to starve ourselves away from.

Extended Care is the end of the line for people who are too far gone for “homes,” where an illusion of domesticity is still maintained. It’s an adjunct to the hospital, and has a conveyance tunnel that goes right to the morgue.

In high school, my pal Vanny and I sometimes used to come by the Extended Care in sit in the foyer waiting for her mom to get off work so she could drive our lazy asses somewhere. Her mom was a nurse aide. (She works there still, in fact. She has a golden afro which glows like a halo under the flourescents of the halls.) But the first time I sat there, surrounded by the damned and watching Country Music Television with the sound off was a life-changing event for me. It was the first time the reality of mortality actually crossed the threshold and made itself at home in my asshole adolescent mind. I went home and wept into my mattress for hours as I shivered in the wind that blew from the chasm of waiting death, a fate that seemed real for the first time. Death was the bones under the superficialities we hoped would suffice as flesh. It’s touch was like laughing breath, icy and untempered by its journey down the too-brief corridor of existence, blowing over my fat face as I hiccupped and sobbed quietly at the injustice of it all.

My same friend I just mentioned is saying Sayonara to the status quo. She’s spent about a million consecutive years in school, and working weird jobs, and traveling about living in decrepit suites here and there, and she needs a change. She needs some glamour.

Not the utilitarian kind of glamour of the understimulated office girl who wears too much eyeshadow in compensation.  The real kind, involving travel and combed hair and flirting in many languages. She is going to live in Dubai for a couple of years, just having taken on an airline hostess contract with Emirates airline.

“Shit, that’s the airline where everyone’s all fucking sexy!” i exclaim when she tells me the news. I narrow my gaze and stare at my friend in order to laser through the baked-on rubble of familiarity and really see her, the way a fat-necked businessman might, or one of the gallivanting, lesser royals. God, my friend is kind of sexy. She’s one of those people with a physical sheen, a “glow” that would cast a forgiving light on any physical faults if they were there, though she is just naturally pretty in a classical way, a high art beauty instead of a blunt and symmetrical magazine kind of prettiness.

I am jealous insofar as we were shat out of similar wringers of dismal environment, iffy genetics and terrible fashion sense but somehow she’s emerged as a butterfly.

“I just want to wear red lipstick to work and make a lot of money,” Vanny says. “I just want to leave everything behind, good and bad. Be cavalier for a few years, play around in a career where staff all has a ‘use-by’ date.”

“Abdicate,” I agree. “Make good your escape.”

She’s nodding. “Check my shit at the door for a while. Bring people drinks, not think about health and school and science and stuff.”

I understand completely, though being of a more trashed and ill-used mentality when I long for escape it often manifests in a longing for old terrible habits. To draw the curtains, hide myself from everybody, and lay around reading, playing video games and eating cake, cereal and cookies by the shit-tonne until I’ve become outsized, tremendous.  In this weird isolation I’d push myself beyond the boundaries of loveability, absolving myself of the responsibilities of relationships, work, life itself, my heart finally exploding from laziness and food and thwarted ambition hopefully before my savings run out and I’m forced into the streets, wandering in a syrup-streaked muu-muu in search of a ditch to collapse in.

I wish I had Vanny’s skill for aiming high and taking long shots.  Her life has been various and fun whereas I tend towards retreat, not risk. Comfort in the known quantity, however dismal it may be. Though honestly, in increments I am making positive changes. Will I ever really be that fat hermit again? Doubtful. I just have no other images of myself that come to mind when I think of letting go.  Letting go doesn’t have to connote falling.

“Just face it, life is always going to suck for some people!” my brother shouted, fidgeting with a plastic token as he zeroed his intense gaze on the gameboard. We were playing “Pandemic” and having one of our usual conversations about life, love, and trying to make sense of it all. “So just buckle up and shut up and be nice to each other!”
It was 11pm. R. was out of town sloshing around abandoned mines in the Rockies and this is how I was spending my wild and crazy nights of revisited singlehood. Drinking tall beers and playing boardgames with my brothers, who themselves are setting a disturbing trend of living together in co-dependent bachelor squalor, like something out of Dickens. I am trying to urge them to wear ascots, and take up going on twilight constitutionals, and stock their cupboards with toffee and peanut brittle.

“Some people never fit in and sometimes you just have to face you might be one of them,” my younger brother says. He’s just recently broken up with his girlfriend.

We are going along in this vein until I become aware of a good scent, a fragile thread of spice in the usual fug of cigarettes and burnt popcorn.

“What smells sort of good in here?” I asked, sniffing tentatively at the delicate perfume. Normally I don’t breathe too deeply at their house, or even drink out of a glass without furtively re-washing it.

My younger brother looks up from his cards, pleased. “We bought a Glade Sense & Spray,” he said. “Apple Cinnamon. So our house will smell sexy.”

“Yeah, like Quaker oatmeal, the flavoured kind,”  my other brother says. “Smells like heaven in here, doesn’t it…”

…I woke, and found that life was Duty.

-Ellen Sturgis Hooper