G. K. Wuori

Kindred Hospital

Early in the morning, then, still dark, you take another walk in the interests of joint lubrication, cardiovascular health, and getting the hell out of the house and away from the keyboard for a short time. Nothing brewing in the neighborhood except the pickups – the F350’s, the Rams, the GMC’s. Very smelly, and you wonder sometimes how many soldiers had to die to feed that morning’s warm-ups.
You walk to the end of the street so that you’re facing the whole complex of St. Mary’s – church, school, daycare center, parish center, rectory. Normally, it’s a right or left turn here, but you decide to go straight and onto the drive between the church and the rectory. It all turns into an asphalt parking lot/playground, but on the southern border of all this is the old hospital, separated from the eduplex by a wire fence and not a part of St. Mary’s at all.
At one time babies were born in this hospital, fevers tamed, limbs removed, and bodies were returned to the earth. In what must have been an unusual orgy of civic good sense, these two neighboring towns some thirty years ago agreed to close their municipal hospitals and build a mutual hospital – state-of-the-art, of course, but no more costly competing for all the latest medical gear.
So the old hospital in your town became a new hospital that only a few years ago was bought out and, thus, became an even newer hospital, one dedicated to those patients who need virtually permanent maintenance. It’s where you go when intensive care promises no outcome, but you’re way beyond the skills of a nursing home.
In the summer you tend not to notice the place much – just another red brick building, one-story, architecturally bland.
But in the winter at six a.m. the lights are on and most of the windows are uncurtained. Caregivers move in and out of the rooms in what you assume is a final preparation of the patients by the third-shift staff for the attentions of what will soon be the first-shift staff.
This one morning, though, walking closer to the hospital than you usually do to avoid some ice, you look up and you see him there – his head on a pillow, his bed slightly inclined. He has no breathing tube so you see his face clearly – eyes open, even from a distance in need of a shave. An attendant is standing in his doorway, her back to him, leaning against the doorjamb and talking to someone in the hall.
For no particularly cosmic reason this is going to be a good day for you. A few of the things you’ve been working on have “popped” the right way, a particularly vexing problem looks like it has worked itself out, and even the winter weather looks good for some running around you have to do that afternoon.
Which leads you to think, If I were to walk into that man’s room right now, what could I wish for him? How could I be of good cheer without sounding stupid or foolish?
“Hey, man, these scientists and medical people, you know, they’re always working. You just never know when something might be right around the corner so you have to keep hoping.”
That would be ghastly. As far as I know, no one who enters this place ever leaves it alive. It’s just not a place for cures or miracles.
So you don’t play that sort of endgame. You realize that no fraud is a greater fraud than offering bogus hope.
Still, you do wonder what you might say to someone like that, how you’d make contact and let him know his ticket’s still good for the dance, even if that dance has to take place in his mind now, that the richness of his presence, however slight (like us all) is still being felt.
So you say it, then, right there in the parking lot as you ambulate yourself through a world as familiar to him as it is to you – just no longer accessible to him –

There isn’t any day for any of us, no matter what our situation, that doesn’t offer at least a moment, maybe two or three, of goodness. A moment of amusement; could be that, something said or only heard, a pleasant face or the charm of an interesting visitor, maybe something on the television, or simply the soothing touch of fresh linen. I hope you have that, sir, I really do.

Oh, and if the outreach – what a fucking way to put it – is gone, if the coma is irreversible and deep, I would wish for you good memories to be wandered through, or at least the random circus of an injured brain’s remaining dreams – with music; I bet you’d like the music.

You continue walking then, and for the rest of the walk that day you wonder if any of that made sense.

G. K. Wuori © 2007
Photoillustration by the author