Hospice

 The small room smelled sanitary and lonely, like peroxide rain in an isolated forest. Flowers hung in photographs on the gray walls, but the overall smell and sense of cleanly isolation hung in the air. The gray walls and floors, chestnut curtains and bedding, and pale blue comforter absorbed the soft pink, orange and jade hues of the framed wall prints, contrasting the scarlet roses on the bedside table. The light from the window at the edge of the room tiptoed cautiously in, dimly, as if unsure whether to return at a better time.

She reached out a frail hand from a skeletal frame reaching for something on the horizon of some unseen place. She wore a sapphire fleece sweater that smelled like tobacco and Robitussin, when you leaned in. When I took her hand in mine, she gasped as if surprised to see me, licked her thin cracked lips and leaned her head forward to speak. Although her mouth formed the words, only a muffle came out. A second time, “You wanna go outside? I think this is the last one for awhile.”

Sometimes, in less than a span of a breath, time pauses, collapses, planets collide, and fear combusts into spiraling shards of broken truth tearing into your broken soul. In less than the time to blink one eye, every fiber of the world leaps up into your throat at once, leaving a dry acid taste and no room for a scream. The otherwise listless walls close in, growing sinister. The deafening boom of the clock’s second hand can be heard just above your thunderous heartbeat as you are seized back to that terrible dizzying breath. Then that split instant immediately escapes as if ashamed or fearful. I breathed in, one deep reorienting gulp of oxygen.

I croaked, “C’mon. You’ll be ok.” I wasn’t sure who I trying to deceive, myself or her. Maybe it was one last grasp at hope. I lowered myself, hung her legs limply to the side of the bed, and placed one of her arms around my shoulder while I gingerly lifted her weak frame into the chair. She called it dancing. Not long ago, I’d needed help to lift her. Now she was lighter than a schoolchild. She pressed her parched tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Do you want to try another sip of water?” “Maybe when we get back,” she fibbed.

I wheeled her slowly, down the fluorescent hallway. Bumps hurt now, more than they used to. She never said so, she was much too tough, but she tensed and gasped approaching cracks and entryways. Warm sunlight bathed us, warming me, breathing color into her cheeks momentarily. Two drags into her cigarette, she started nodding forward, and I returned her to the sunless room. Not her room. Her room was livelier, stacked with rows of books, collections of ocean scented body sprays, smiling family photos and glued together remnants of decades-old kindergarten ceramics. This room was the sanitized charlatan of her otherwise room. I wheeled her softly to this miscreant room nonetheless.

I would’ve lifted her back into bed, but she waved me back. “Let me sit awhile. I talked to Carol, and she’s having the guys move me this weekend.” The reaper lurked in the background behind the chestnut curtains. The second hand thundered again. She glanced a moment toward the curtains, challenging, and continued. “I think I’ll be home by Monday, then. I’ll be glad to be out of here, especially at night.” “Monday, then,” I hoped, surveying the room, looking for any sharp thing. I would have ripped the scythe from his icy hands, slicing his bitter throat, with a haughty victorious battle cry but that I could deprive him of it. The less than breath, less than blink, years-in-a-moment moment shackles you to yourself, paralyzing, silencing any defiant scream you would otherwise utter. In that single space of eternal second, you cannot fraction a bargaining breath, or raise a fortifying arm. The sunlight dared, though, challenged the fiendish creature, chased away the lurking minute. The air freshened, and the grey walls offered a sip of warmer tan. She laughed, then, as if they’d shared a secret which I wasn’t privy, again from the belly as if sharing that secret now, pushed herself out of the chair onto her legs, stepping cautiously forward.