Inseparable W. Maguire copyright 2016
When I was 17 and living on my own,certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home.
My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead. It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living.
The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door.
That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter, like it was a final stop between living and whatever comes later.
Passing through one day I saw a help wanted sign and answered it. I was poor and dumb and usually hungry and broke so I was always looking for another job. They hired me on the spot.
The people there were so old I thought they were another species. Kind of human…but not like me.
These folks weren't racing through the days or trying to chase down the future. They weren't revving their hearts or trying to make some girl. And they had stopped trying to catch up to the should be kind of life.
Instead they were hanging onto each day, like they understood Time and everything it carried couldn't be caught. Not really. Only caressed or savored.
For me at 17 living and everything in it was a matter of speed. I was chasing happiness and love and money. I was trying to outrun hunger and doubt and lonely.
But everything I was trying to catch always seemed to have another gear and so was always just beyond my reach.
That summer I became the groundskeeper at the Hereafter. This meant I was a janitor and a painter for the aged and the dying.
My job was to make the world look neat and trim, to make the calamity of isolation seem orderly, and to try to forever sweep away the dread that seemed to settle in its halls.
And then after midnight I’d mop floors and try to make the place feel a little less lonely, like it could ever be washed away.
The lady that ran the place never gave me a hard time about when I did the work, as long as it got done.
I can recall cutting the lawn at night a few times. Drunk once or twice. I think I even snuck a girl in a time or two to some empty bed on the ward.
The Hereafter was as good as any place to chase love, or at least the 17 year old version of it.
They didn’t pay much but I didn't need much...gas and beer money so we were a match.
I guess they liked having someone around whose heart could still race instead of merely meander.
There was this old man on the main floor. His grown kids had abandoned him there.
That’s really how it is. They drive by a couple times, sign the papers, then drop an old man or woman at the far edge of town into the Hereafter.
This guy's kids would come by once a month and, because he was hard of hearing, holler at him in a loud voice like he was a thousand miles away.
I suppose in a way he was.
But he wasn’t an idiot and I could see how much it humiliated him. To be yelled at by his kids...who felt like they had to make this pilgrimage every once in a while just so they could look into the mirror.
I watched it a few times. It was like watching some bad rerun. ‘How are you Dad? Can I get you anything Dad?’
You know the routine. It was merely obligatory, like he was a stranger who just happened to have the same last name.
It was like they had gotten a bill that said they owed love and respect but had forgotten the actual debt.
This guy was a plumber. He had crawled around in tight spaces under kitchens and basements on his hands and knees for 50 years. Whenever someone called, drowning in their house he would grab a wrench and go.
So he knew a busted pipe when he saw one. And he could tell at a glance that the pipes in his grown kids eyes were rusted out long ago.
He was the kind of man that was self reliant. And proud. Fixing things for decades makes a person self reliant and proud. And he truly believed there was nothing in this life that couldn’t be fixed with duct tape and sweat and love.
But he could barely walk anymore.
And try as he might there was never any way to fix the pipes of the time he had left.
They were just worn out, stripped at the nut from too many days. He was crawling in the basement of his last days and knew it.
But after all those years on his hands and knees he just wanted to stand and walk instead of staying stuck in the bed where they expected him to die.
So every night, very late he’d angle himself off his bed and unsteadily grab one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs and slowly drag himself one tiny uncertain step after another out into the hall.
He’d only do it at night…when there was no one to holler at him about how he shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t be trying to move, shouldn’t be doing anything but lying in a bed waiting on Death to finally find his room.
And late at night we would meet unexpectedly sometimes.
The 17 year old kid racing from job to job mopping the floors and the eighty something plumber who, once again in a tight spot, was trying to stand on his own two feet and walk through the hallways of the Hereafter.
I’d watch him some nights creep down the hallway. It was excruciating. The steps were so small.
We got so we would nod and not say anything. I really didn’t know what to say to him.
I was a little afraid he would slip and fall on my mopped floor. And I was afraid that Death was so close to him that it might take a hard long look at me if I got too close.
But I got into the habit of waiting for him to make his great escape each night.
He wasn't trying, like me, to catch up to happiness. He was just trying to recover some independence. Trying to walk away from every bit of worry and doubt and stillness that waited by his bed.
It hurt him to take those tiny steps…but it also hurt him not to try.
And caught between those two kinds of pain each night he summoned up the will to demonstrate he was still living…to himself.
I found him late one night leaning against a wall in the dark. He had slipped and could not quite regain his footing.
I remember I was drunk and so was unsteady myself. It was after midnight so the lights were off except his room light with an open door at the end of the corridor.
I saw him there, a shadow in the darkened hall, and stumbled over and grabbed his arm trying to lift him up.
The unsteady 17 year old and the unsteady 80 something leaning for a moment on each other.
His arm felt like a twig in November. Not really bone anymore, more like the memory of it.
He whispered hoarsely to me “No No No…I’m fine…’
Brave……self reliant.
So I let go like a person building a house of cards lets go of the last card…and moved my hands slowly away…certain it could all come tumbling down any second.
Then in that darkened hall, that old man…just a shadow in the dim, crept away toward the light.
At 17 I had never seen courage before. The simple daily kind. The common kind.
And though at 17 I could not name it, I remember being in awe of it.
Later I came to understand it is usually found in darkened hallways when the floor is slippery and when a soul is unsteady. It creeps forward, a little at a time from the shadows... like an old man.
And it never asks how far the fall might be.
I still think of him sometimes when I am not quite sure if I am steady enough.
I suppose that’s a kind of immortality.
That old man finally found a way to walk away forever a few days later. I think of it now like independence.
He was a plumber. There was never a pipe he could not fix, except of course Time’s.
And his kids, who hollered at his deafness each month, came and stood in his room…without a word… at last.
My boss, an old lady with butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo, asked me to fill in one month on the morning shift.
This was a problem because I had a couple other jobs and I liked to finish late and drink beer until I couldn’t remember how poor and stupid and full of myself I was.
But she was insistent. So I’d show up around 8 am with my head aching and smelling I’m quite sure like I had spent the night face down in a puddle of stale beer.
Early each day I began to notice his old man in the visitors room. He was the always the first one there. Always wore a white shirt and tie, combed and shaved and neat.
He walked with a cane and when they opened the ward for visitors he would always check himself in the mirror, like he was going on a first date and wanted to look his best.
His wife of 60 years was in the ward.
She had started falling and then started forgetting. Little things at first…misplaced keys, misplaced glasses.
And she would ask him ‘What did I do with them? Would you remember that for me?’
Then one day she got lost coming home from the grocery store. And then a week later he found her confused and frightened in their own cellar.
He took her to a doctor finally and listened as the doctor explained that the past…every bit of it …would eventually disappear.
So the old man tried.
He held her hand and guided her through the days and tried to become her compass. And all the while he wrestled with the doubt and the worry and the guilt until it became clear that he could not care for her.
So he found this place at the edge of the Hereafter, sold their house and took an apartment as near as he could.
He made all the arrangements, all the time fighting down the growing panic at the thought of being apart.
When he signed the papers and walked her in he felt like a traitor to every secret vow a man’s heart can make to itself.
I was there that day mopping the floor. He was stricken…with loneliness I suppose and with dread. I saw it in his face, though I’m sure I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How could I?
What did I know at 17 of having your heart cleaved in two, hollowed out at the prospect of losing everything ahead of you...and everything behind.
She cried when he left that day. And without him near seemed to lose her bearings. It can happen like that.
A heart can become unmoored.
And mopping the floors some nights I would hear her calling out that she didn’t know anyone or where this place was….or even sometimes who she herself was anymore.
I would stand outside her door listening and trying to translate that kind of terror into something my 17 year old innocence could understand.
It was like listening to a foreign language.
Of loneliness.
But the old man would show up every morning and would stand in that spot outside her door …..steeling himself.
Day after day he would paint a smile onto his face and turn into her room and in a loud voice brightly say good morning and how beautiful she looked again.
She was gaunt and confused and a little more lost each day. But he meant it, and I think truly cherished saying it to her…like he knew there would be a day when he would pray to God he could just say it once more.
She would always brighten at the sight of him, like a young girl in love for the very first time.
And he would sit by her side and each morning say “Do you know who I am?”
Somedays she would laugh and respond “Of course…what a silly question…you think I could ever forget my own heart….my husband of 60 years?”
And he would retell her things she had forgotten…a trip to the Cape each summer…the time he asked her to marry him…that first house before the kids.
Sometimes she would understand and ask ‘We did all that?’
And sometimes she would not…could not understand. Like the glue of memory had gotten so old that it cracked and fell away.
“Never mind…never mind that darling’ he would say.…'I’ll remember it for you.’
Near the end of the month I watched him again…cane in hand, dressed like he was going on a first date, stand in that spot outside her room then, once again, turn inside.
I went and stood in the spot, mop in hand and listened.
Once again he was gently asking “Do you know who I am?”
There was no answer. So he put his face close to hers so she could see him clearly and he whispered again - “ Do you know who I am?’
Her eyes searched his trying to summon some forgotten landmark.
Then she whispered to him “I don’t know where this place is…or who I am.’
‘I know I should know…I know I should know…’
Trying to recover what had already leaked away.
He was trying to quiet her. “Hush…hush now..its alright. I’m here.’
‘I know I should know' she protested, her voice breaking.
Then searching his eyes with her own she whispered ‘…... I don’t know your name…sir'.
'Would you....would you remember that...would you remember all of it... for me?'
The old man was silent for a long moment, then he dropped his cane and reached down and took the old woman in his arms.
And he whispered 'Yes.'
If a heart has ears I felt mine begin to burn. I didn’t want to hear anymore.
I never wanted to hear anything again.
I stumbled away, back down the hallway of the Hereafter.
I remember I threw the mop and I kicked over the bucket. What was the point?
How could the world ever be clean again.
I quit that morning and I never went back.
The world is a beautiful place. It is a terrible place.
These two come wrapped so tightly around each other that it is impossible to just touch one.
I have learned…that they rely on each other…to expose each other.. from where they hide in us.
Scrape a sorrowful thing and you expose the beauty. Scrape a thing of real beauty and there’s always some sacrifice…some sadness at the heart of it.
They require each other. They grow together.
Inseparable.
So an old man loses his legs and he grows courage in their place.
A husband and wife of 60 years facing certain loss…of everything they ever knew or did or felt and their love becomes not smaller... but larger.
The torrent runs faster because there’s a hole in the pipe.
There is some strange arithmetic at work in the human heart.
Take away something ...something you cannot do without …subtract it…and the sum somehow becomes larger.
And it humbles me still to think of it, to realize how little I understand.
I was 17…and a poor boy with only a glimmer of understanding.
Standing there that day listening I felt some part of me quiver…and since then that quivering, like a small earthquake only I can feel, has never stopped.
I feel it shaking some nights in my dreams. I feel it sitting wordlessly in the dark on my shoulders whispering its tremor into my sleeping heart.
It tells me again and again of things taken ..and of things granted only through the taking.
And some nights it whispers to me about this life and the Hereafter.
It tells me it is more beautiful... and more terrible than my heart's clay foundation can ever hope to bear.
When I was 17 and living on my own,certain that I knew more about anything than anyone around me, I took a job for a few months as a janitor at an old folks home.
My friends called it the Home for the Nearly Dead. It was out at the edge of town far from view, like it was slowly being pushed out there to the very precipice of living.
The building was a sad and decrepit little place with peeling paint and linoleum floors and a funeral home next door.
That part of town had its own zip code and some of the townspeople called it the Hereafter, like it was a final stop between living and whatever comes later.
Passing through one day I saw a help wanted sign and answered it. I was poor and dumb and usually hungry and broke so I was always looking for another job. They hired me on the spot.
The people there were so old I thought they were another species. Kind of human…but not like me.
These folks weren't racing through the days or trying to chase down the future. They weren't revving their hearts or trying to make some girl. And they had stopped trying to catch up to the should be kind of life.
Instead they were hanging onto each day, like they understood Time and everything it carried couldn't be caught. Not really. Only caressed or savored.
For me at 17 living and everything in it was a matter of speed. I was chasing happiness and love and money. I was trying to outrun hunger and doubt and lonely.
But everything I was trying to catch always seemed to have another gear and so was always just beyond my reach.
That summer I became the groundskeeper at the Hereafter. This meant I was a janitor and a painter for the aged and the dying.
My job was to make the world look neat and trim, to make the calamity of isolation seem orderly, and to try to forever sweep away the dread that seemed to settle in its halls.
And then after midnight I’d mop floors and try to make the place feel a little less lonely, like it could ever be washed away.
The lady that ran the place never gave me a hard time about when I did the work, as long as it got done.
I can recall cutting the lawn at night a few times. Drunk once or twice. I think I even snuck a girl in a time or two to some empty bed on the ward.
The Hereafter was as good as any place to chase love, or at least the 17 year old version of it.
They didn’t pay much but I didn't need much...gas and beer money so we were a match.
I guess they liked having someone around whose heart could still race instead of merely meander.
There was this old man on the main floor. His grown kids had abandoned him there.
That’s really how it is. They drive by a couple times, sign the papers, then drop an old man or woman at the far edge of town into the Hereafter.
This guy's kids would come by once a month and, because he was hard of hearing, holler at him in a loud voice like he was a thousand miles away.
I suppose in a way he was.
But he wasn’t an idiot and I could see how much it humiliated him. To be yelled at by his kids...who felt like they had to make this pilgrimage every once in a while just so they could look into the mirror.
I watched it a few times. It was like watching some bad rerun. ‘How are you Dad? Can I get you anything Dad?’
You know the routine. It was merely obligatory, like he was a stranger who just happened to have the same last name.
It was like they had gotten a bill that said they owed love and respect but had forgotten the actual debt.
This guy was a plumber. He had crawled around in tight spaces under kitchens and basements on his hands and knees for 50 years. Whenever someone called, drowning in their house he would grab a wrench and go.
So he knew a busted pipe when he saw one. And he could tell at a glance that the pipes in his grown kids eyes were rusted out long ago.
He was the kind of man that was self reliant. And proud. Fixing things for decades makes a person self reliant and proud. And he truly believed there was nothing in this life that couldn’t be fixed with duct tape and sweat and love.
But he could barely walk anymore.
And try as he might there was never any way to fix the pipes of the time he had left.
They were just worn out, stripped at the nut from too many days. He was crawling in the basement of his last days and knew it.
But after all those years on his hands and knees he just wanted to stand and walk instead of staying stuck in the bed where they expected him to die.
So every night, very late he’d angle himself off his bed and unsteadily grab one of those walkers with tennis balls on the legs and slowly drag himself one tiny uncertain step after another out into the hall.
He’d only do it at night…when there was no one to holler at him about how he shouldn’t be up, shouldn’t be trying to move, shouldn’t be doing anything but lying in a bed waiting on Death to finally find his room.
And late at night we would meet unexpectedly sometimes.
The 17 year old kid racing from job to job mopping the floors and the eighty something plumber who, once again in a tight spot, was trying to stand on his own two feet and walk through the hallways of the Hereafter.
I’d watch him some nights creep down the hallway. It was excruciating. The steps were so small.
We got so we would nod and not say anything. I really didn’t know what to say to him.
I was a little afraid he would slip and fall on my mopped floor. And I was afraid that Death was so close to him that it might take a hard long look at me if I got too close.
But I got into the habit of waiting for him to make his great escape each night.
He wasn't trying, like me, to catch up to happiness. He was just trying to recover some independence. Trying to walk away from every bit of worry and doubt and stillness that waited by his bed.
It hurt him to take those tiny steps…but it also hurt him not to try.
And caught between those two kinds of pain each night he summoned up the will to demonstrate he was still living…to himself.
I found him late one night leaning against a wall in the dark. He had slipped and could not quite regain his footing.
I remember I was drunk and so was unsteady myself. It was after midnight so the lights were off except his room light with an open door at the end of the corridor.
I saw him there, a shadow in the darkened hall, and stumbled over and grabbed his arm trying to lift him up.
The unsteady 17 year old and the unsteady 80 something leaning for a moment on each other.
His arm felt like a twig in November. Not really bone anymore, more like the memory of it.
He whispered hoarsely to me “No No No…I’m fine…’
Brave……self reliant.
So I let go like a person building a house of cards lets go of the last card…and moved my hands slowly away…certain it could all come tumbling down any second.
Then in that darkened hall, that old man…just a shadow in the dim, crept away toward the light.
At 17 I had never seen courage before. The simple daily kind. The common kind.
And though at 17 I could not name it, I remember being in awe of it.
Later I came to understand it is usually found in darkened hallways when the floor is slippery and when a soul is unsteady. It creeps forward, a little at a time from the shadows... like an old man.
And it never asks how far the fall might be.
I still think of him sometimes when I am not quite sure if I am steady enough.
I suppose that’s a kind of immortality.
That old man finally found a way to walk away forever a few days later. I think of it now like independence.
He was a plumber. There was never a pipe he could not fix, except of course Time’s.
And his kids, who hollered at his deafness each month, came and stood in his room…without a word… at last.
My boss, an old lady with butterfly glasses and a beehive hairdo, asked me to fill in one month on the morning shift.
This was a problem because I had a couple other jobs and I liked to finish late and drink beer until I couldn’t remember how poor and stupid and full of myself I was.
But she was insistent. So I’d show up around 8 am with my head aching and smelling I’m quite sure like I had spent the night face down in a puddle of stale beer.
Early each day I began to notice his old man in the visitors room. He was the always the first one there. Always wore a white shirt and tie, combed and shaved and neat.
He walked with a cane and when they opened the ward for visitors he would always check himself in the mirror, like he was going on a first date and wanted to look his best.
His wife of 60 years was in the ward.
She had started falling and then started forgetting. Little things at first…misplaced keys, misplaced glasses.
And she would ask him ‘What did I do with them? Would you remember that for me?’
Then one day she got lost coming home from the grocery store. And then a week later he found her confused and frightened in their own cellar.
He took her to a doctor finally and listened as the doctor explained that the past…every bit of it …would eventually disappear.
So the old man tried.
He held her hand and guided her through the days and tried to become her compass. And all the while he wrestled with the doubt and the worry and the guilt until it became clear that he could not care for her.
So he found this place at the edge of the Hereafter, sold their house and took an apartment as near as he could.
He made all the arrangements, all the time fighting down the growing panic at the thought of being apart.
When he signed the papers and walked her in he felt like a traitor to every secret vow a man’s heart can make to itself.
I was there that day mopping the floor. He was stricken…with loneliness I suppose and with dread. I saw it in his face, though I’m sure I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How could I?
What did I know at 17 of having your heart cleaved in two, hollowed out at the prospect of losing everything ahead of you...and everything behind.
She cried when he left that day. And without him near seemed to lose her bearings. It can happen like that.
A heart can become unmoored.
And mopping the floors some nights I would hear her calling out that she didn’t know anyone or where this place was….or even sometimes who she herself was anymore.
I would stand outside her door listening and trying to translate that kind of terror into something my 17 year old innocence could understand.
It was like listening to a foreign language.
Of loneliness.
But the old man would show up every morning and would stand in that spot outside her door …..steeling himself.
Day after day he would paint a smile onto his face and turn into her room and in a loud voice brightly say good morning and how beautiful she looked again.
She was gaunt and confused and a little more lost each day. But he meant it, and I think truly cherished saying it to her…like he knew there would be a day when he would pray to God he could just say it once more.
She would always brighten at the sight of him, like a young girl in love for the very first time.
And he would sit by her side and each morning say “Do you know who I am?”
Somedays she would laugh and respond “Of course…what a silly question…you think I could ever forget my own heart….my husband of 60 years?”
And he would retell her things she had forgotten…a trip to the Cape each summer…the time he asked her to marry him…that first house before the kids.
Sometimes she would understand and ask ‘We did all that?’
And sometimes she would not…could not understand. Like the glue of memory had gotten so old that it cracked and fell away.
“Never mind…never mind that darling’ he would say.…'I’ll remember it for you.’
Near the end of the month I watched him again…cane in hand, dressed like he was going on a first date, stand in that spot outside her room then, once again, turn inside.
I went and stood in the spot, mop in hand and listened.
Once again he was gently asking “Do you know who I am?”
There was no answer. So he put his face close to hers so she could see him clearly and he whispered again - “ Do you know who I am?’
Her eyes searched his trying to summon some forgotten landmark.
Then she whispered to him “I don’t know where this place is…or who I am.’
‘I know I should know…I know I should know…’
Trying to recover what had already leaked away.
He was trying to quiet her. “Hush…hush now..its alright. I’m here.’
‘I know I should know' she protested, her voice breaking.
Then searching his eyes with her own she whispered ‘…... I don’t know your name…sir'.
'Would you....would you remember that...would you remember all of it... for me?'
The old man was silent for a long moment, then he dropped his cane and reached down and took the old woman in his arms.
And he whispered 'Yes.'
If a heart has ears I felt mine begin to burn. I didn’t want to hear anymore.
I never wanted to hear anything again.
I stumbled away, back down the hallway of the Hereafter.
I remember I threw the mop and I kicked over the bucket. What was the point?
How could the world ever be clean again.
I quit that morning and I never went back.
The world is a beautiful place. It is a terrible place.
These two come wrapped so tightly around each other that it is impossible to just touch one.
I have learned…that they rely on each other…to expose each other.. from where they hide in us.
Scrape a sorrowful thing and you expose the beauty. Scrape a thing of real beauty and there’s always some sacrifice…some sadness at the heart of it.
They require each other. They grow together.
Inseparable.
So an old man loses his legs and he grows courage in their place.
A husband and wife of 60 years facing certain loss…of everything they ever knew or did or felt and their love becomes not smaller... but larger.
The torrent runs faster because there’s a hole in the pipe.
There is some strange arithmetic at work in the human heart.
Take away something ...something you cannot do without …subtract it…and the sum somehow becomes larger.
And it humbles me still to think of it, to realize how little I understand.
I was 17…and a poor boy with only a glimmer of understanding.
Standing there that day listening I felt some part of me quiver…and since then that quivering, like a small earthquake only I can feel, has never stopped.
I feel it shaking some nights in my dreams. I feel it sitting wordlessly in the dark on my shoulders whispering its tremor into my sleeping heart.
It tells me again and again of things taken ..and of things granted only through the taking.
And some nights it whispers to me about this life and the Hereafter.
It tells me it is more beautiful... and more terrible than my heart's clay foundation can ever hope to bear.
Buddy...you have deep talents. Hope you don't mind if I share this on facebook.
ReplyDeleteOne writer to another, you are the goods. Thanks for the read.
ReplyDelete