Ghosts of Christmas Past
[I wrote this in a Pre-Covid time, back when well-intentioned people could visit senior citizens and nursing homes. Things are different now.]
Last night, my friend and I went to Christmas carol at a senior citizens’ home. Two of them, actually. The first one was a large facility; it had the antiseptic smell of clean, but maybe not truly clean. It might be the kind of facility where the corporation (and sadly so many are just corporations now) pays the care-givers the usual minimum to do their care-giving, but also tasks them with cleaning as they also tend to their regular care-giving duties. Nah, it wasn’t that bad, actually. I think they probably did have a professional cleaner, equally underpaid. I just expected it to smell, because all the other senior places I’ve gone to have had that strange combination of old-people-smell and cleaning stuff.
The senior places I’ve gone to. What does that mean? Before last night, I’d only gone to four: two for my Grandma Simone, who moved from one to another, one for my mother-in-law’s boyfriend, which was actually a hospice place, and it stank in the same way as Grandma’s had, and fourth, the facility my Uncle Thayer was in. My uncle, who was in his late 80s, was in a dementia care place, though I use the term loosely. No care at all, as far as I could see. Ancient people rolling around in wheel chairs, or lying in beds with no hope or joy. The first time I visited Uncle Thayer, I went with my brother, Sam, thank God. Uncle wasn’t that bad yet. He had even made arrangements for us to stay at a nearby hotel. Always generous, when my sibs and I were children, Uncle Thayer had taken us to exotic locations on tax-deductible cruises disguised as medical and career development. As a doctor, he was required to stay current in his field. We went to Saint Thomas, Saint Croix, Barbados, etc. on cruises that expanded our sense of the globe, teaching us that there is more to the planet than just our own small patch in our own small town. Once he even took my brother to Antarctica! Travel was a generous gift to each of us, helping us see the word in a bigger way, and a tax write off for Uncle. Win-win.
My brothers traveled one on one with him. My sister and I traveled together, partly to stave off any potential wrong doing by Thayer. If my Dad was worried about Uncle, in case he had pedophile tendencies, I marvel that he let us travel with him at all. Weird. Since Dad did let us go on the cruises with him–in spite of the fact that Dad did, in fact, think Uncle Thayer might have been a pedophile–I wonder why he let us. I also question why he had both my sister and I travel with Uncle together. Instead of preventing any wrong doing on Thayer’s part, doesn’t that seem instead a generous pedophiliac gift of “two for one?” And what did Dad think that we could do, just vulnerable kids, my sister four years older than I, when I was only ten or eleven? Did Dad think my fourteen or fifteen year old sister could fend off an adult man, six feet tall and probably 230, 240 pounds (I’m guessing)? Fortunately for all my siblings and me, there never was any pedophilia, and Dad’s concerns never came to pass. As far as I’ve known, he was just a very generous uncle, giving us the tremendous gift of travel that happily changed all of us for the better, tax write off or not.
So when my brother and I went to visit Uncle Thayer, we took him out for dinner, gratefully avoiding the depressing feel of the dementia care place, or at least shortening it. Over dinner we talked about trips we had taken, dinner parties over the years, all the stuff you talk about with a demented Uncle who is not yet in late stages of the disease. We spent the night at the hotel he had reserved and paid for us, always generous. The next day my brother and I went to a movie, to take a break from the antiseptic-and-old-people smell. It was more than we could stand for very long. We went to see a horror movie. Strangely, there was a poem recited in the movie which is not at all well known. I had heard never even heard it…it except for when Uncle Thayer had taught it to us when we were little:
Late last morning, in the middle of the night, two dead boys got up to fight. Back to back they stabbed each other, drew their swords and shot each other. A deaf policeman heard the noise. He came and shot those two dead boys! If you don’t believe me, ask the blind man; he saw it all.
It is a strange poem indeed, but the fact that it was part of that particular horror movie we were watching while we had been on our visiting-Uncle-Thayer trip was even stranger. Why that particular poem? Why now? We took it as a sign that we were supposed to have seen that movie together when we took our break from the depressing senior center, and it eased our Catholic guilt. After the movie, when we went back to see Thayer for the second time that day, he was dead.
No, I’m just kidding, he wasn’t dead. Oh, and we’re not Catholic either. Uncle was just happy to see us, again, as happy as he had been the first time. And we again talked about trips we had taken, dinner parties over the years, and all the stuff you talk about with a demented uncle who is not yet in the late stages of the disease. I know, I already said that. You get the idea. We let Uncle Thayer lead the conversations because when talking to someone with dementia it’s easier that way.
When Thayer was a younger man, in his doctoring days, he never had purchased long-term care insurance. He assumed that because he had been a doctor, he would be cared for in his older age simply as a courtesy. The system doesn’t work like that. People don’t care for old people simply because they used to be doctors. In fact, often they don’t care for them at all.
In the shit hole “care” facility in Downey, California, such travesties were committed, absolutely heinous sins. The second time I visited Uncle, this time without the support of my brother, Thayer had been promoted to the more extreme version of the place. The next level. In the meanwhile, a growth had formed on his face, large and wart like (or maybe even cancerous?). It had developed, unattended and uncared for. He had clearly not showered—or been showered– in days, so I complained to the “care givers.” They explained to me that “personal items,” such as soap, shampoo and the like are the family’s responsibility to provide. What?!? He wasn’t showered because he didn’t have any soap? I demanded to see a manager, and explained that this “care” was unacceptable. And why hadn’t his family, specifically his brother, who was responsible for Thayer in this Downey shit hole “care facility” not been notified? Was there no one, not even an underpaid staff member, willing to go to a dollar store and get soap? Or bring back a bottle of shampoo? Did no one at that entire shitty place die so their stuff could be fast-forwarded to my also-dying uncle? Didn’t anyone recognize how messed up this was, anyone at all? As it turns out, there was not.
And that was one of the four senior places I have visited in my life.