Friday, June 1, 2012

Assisted living, indeed

I walked down the hall of the assisted living home, stopping to push the plunger of a device that poured disinfectant onto my hands. I rubbed them together as if doing so would keep me from getting old, as if doing so would wash the sting of loneliness from them. The smell of old folks was as real as the darkness that stunned my eyes as I left the brightness of the sunny day outside. One could smuggled a loaded gun inside this building easily, but one can't bring the warmth or the brightness inside. They are locked away as the door shuts behind you.

I smiled at one elderly person sitting in a wheelchair in the hall, walking past as the gentleman spoke loudly, asking about someone I couldn't see. I couldn't help him, even if I knew how to help him. Sometimes you just know these things.

I arrived at the room of my friend, an acquaintance I've grown close to in the five years I've served at Fitzgerald UMC, and I entered without so much as a knock. I'm not sure how this whole privacy thing works when you're living with a roommate, but I've never knocked and no one has ever been dressing. So, I'm safe, she's safe, her roommate's safe. In fact, I've never seen my friend's roommate awake. I assume there are times, but that's truly an assumption not backed by facts or even faith.

I walked to the second section of the room, and as usual, my friend is watching television. She watches a black-boxed version of an old television that sits on a small desk. There's no flat screen, no LCD, no plasma version for her. There is a black box, a shiny black box that has no dust on it. I'm reminded that a black box is what tells us of the final minutes of a dying airplane. I'm reminded that this black box is doing the same for my friend. I don't know why, but she watches from her wheelchair, never her bed, as if watching this device from her bed would be an admission of laziness that she will never give in to. Her home was always immaculate when I visited. Her half of the room, I suspect, will always be the same. So she rises from the bed to the chair as if this short "walk" is a devotion to movement, to exercise, to a moment of movement. I do not see her do this, for she is always in the chair when I come, but I assume (again) this is true.

I tap her on the shoulder, walk past her and sit on the bed that is made crisply as if a drill sergeant was expected to make a surprise visit. I set up the communion elements on the desk, in front of the television, ask how things are going, get the expected smile and we begin to talk. She looks sharp this day, with her white hair closely cropped though somehow a wave is in there. She is wearing a red sweater over a denim dress. She always wears a sweater, it seems, though it is -- to me -- warm in the hallways and only moderate temperature in this small room that is split by a curtain I've never seen drawn.  Her face is a monument to wrinkles, like something that would fit in nicely on Mount Rushmore but she is someone who will live her life and affect few.

Still, her smile irons away some of the wrinkles, and her smile is tight at the corners. She moved to this "home," this room last year after I had been visiting her for three years at her home, where she lived by herself except for a big ol' cat that had a bobbed tail and always seemed hungry when I got out of my car and walked by her bowl in the carport. Her house always smelled of freshly canned jellys and such, and she always gave me a jar of jelly, no matter if I had gotten one two weeks earlier or not. I pray her cat found a home, but I've never summoned the courage to ask.

When she had back surgery, then fell for the fourth or fifth time just in the time I've known her, her children talked (commanded) her into moving into the assisted living facility, if for no other reason than she would have someone regulating her meds and if she fell asleep unassisted, she wouldn't do so with the oven or stove eyes blazing away. It was the right choice, but sometimes the right choice isn't all that wonderful for the person whose life is changed dramatically by that right choice. It just isn't.

As I listen to her describe how well things have been going, I look to the left of my friend, and there is a big clock resting uncomfortably in a chair next to the bed, and as we talk, the digital numbers advance. A 45 dissolves into a 46 then transfigures into a 47.

For all of us, time moves, sometimes quickly and sometimes with that unimaginable crawl that comes with advancing age and humiliating pain. If one focuses on the digits, one can find oneself in the dance of life, so I imagine focusing on the game show or the soap opera or the religious offering of that black box is a much better offering than focusing on the slippage of time.

The symbolism of the large, round clock, of advancing time, simply can't be lost on me.Though she does not watch time march away from her, I do. Though she seems to be oblivious about time leaving her like a summer's sidewalk puddle evaporating on a New Orleans' afternoon, I am not so. I see the numbers drain away, I look at her and her pressed (somehow) sweater and I know, just flat know that her time is short. But that is not my part, not my job, to express those thoughts. I simply am there to provide communion, that wonderful moment of pairing of God and subject, of Creator and creation. I am there to share my time with hers, to share my disinfected hands with hers.

I finish with communion, pray for her that God be with her, watching over her. Though I am finished, she sips the juice from the tiny cup as if it were water to a person who has been crawling through a desert, taking a deep, deep pull from the tiny, tiny cup as if a  couple gallon bucket of water was in her arthritic fingers instead of a small vial. She squeezes time every bit as much as if she was putting fingers to those digital minutes and holding them, stopping them. She comes up from wherever she has been in the few seconds between the finish of my prayer and the opening of her old eyes (literally the door to her soul that seems centuries ancient, not decades), smiles and thanks me profusely not just for coming but for bringing her communion.

It is an argument, a strong, strong argument that these elements of stale, unappealing wafer and grape juice are much, much more than that.

I pack up, kiss the wrinkles on her forehead and leave, pausing down the hall to again disinfect my hands as if that would keep me from whatever it is that puts you in one of these places.

The man in the wheelchair still was calling for someone I could not see, but no one seemed particularly moved by this fact. I journeyed on, out into the sunlight, out away from the doors that keep "confused" persons from leaving but seem to have no problem letting them in.


The apostle Paul expressed notions like this: "As for me, the hour has come for me to be sacrificed; the time is here for me to leave this life. I have done my best in the race. I have run the full distance, and I have kept the faith. And now there is waiting for me the victory prize of being put right with God, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will give me on that Day -- and not only to me, but to all those who wait with love for him to appear."

I'm not smart enough to know much, except, except I notice things.

I notice that time has slowed in placed like these, though that is impossible.
I notice that time isn't necessarily a friendly thing in places like these.
I notice that the days of the week blend into one in places like these. The reason to watch television isn't just to have something to do but to have a measurement of time

There were times Paul couldn't decide if he wanted to stay and do the bidding of his Lord or if he wanted to simply let go and be with Jesus. I notice the potential of those thoughts more in places like these than any other time.

The Psalmist wrote, "Oh, God, my Lord, step in; work a miracle for me—you can do it! Get me out of here—your love is so great!— I'm at the end of my rope, my life in ruins. I'm fading away to nothing, passing away, my youth gone, old before my time. I'm weak from hunger and can hardly stand up, my body a rack of skin and bones. I'm a joke in poor taste to those who see me; they take one look and shake their heads."

I don't want to be like that. But I recognize, as my dear friend does, that all of that is in God's hands. See, life as well as time, is in the hands of our creator. Oops, there goes another minute we won't get back.

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