A terrible peculiarity, the man thought. This concept: nursing home. Pre-death waiting areas. Yet another affront to sweet humanity. Just one further deformation marring the complexion of this 20th century. In the modern west, he amended. This wouldn’t happen, wouldn’t be thinkable, in rural China. In those endless mountain villages he wandered. Not two years prior. Another epoch it seemed. Or solar system. Not to sanctify Asian sensibilities! Think of those matchbox-dimensioned traveller hotels littering Japanese techno conurbations. Or the garish pink vending machines dispensing spent panties. No — it was modernity, not geography. Modernity, extending its robotic tentacles like a black mold into every far undefended crevice of civility and benevolence its sensors can monitor. An algorithmic spider web enmeshing the earth. Like a shopping mall with acres of parking lots.

The man removed a second copper wire twistie from his jacket pocket. He secured it to the other side of the birdhouse and looped it around the branch. Not too thick a branch — it was a small tree — but just the right height. Maybe five feet from the window, just above eye level. He tested the strength of the attachments. Against wind and wear. Pushing down slightly upon the ledge where birdseed could rest. Satisfied, he sprinkled a handful of seeds and turned around to smile through the window. Nana waved in gratitude. She wasn’t in love with birds especially, but it was the gesture, the personal, the creative kindness that warmed her. A century now, on this planet. And few individual possessions remained to her. Nor was there any space for them. A tiny TV on a table in the corner. An African violet on the window sill. Even her room was not private. Another bed was arranged closer to the hallway door, near the shared bathroom. Some weeks, some months, like now, it lay unoccupied, awaiting the bureaucracy to supply the next doomed transient. But today, this day, Nana had a new possession. A birdhouse to gaze upon out her window — her hard fought for window, one of the few in the entire establishment with its own little tree. Nana was a politician, she knew how to get things for herself and the people she cared about. Decades ago she would organize yearly senior citizen bus trips all about the U.S., running Tuesday evening sales meetings like a candidate’s campaign, selling the sufficient amount of fellow seniors on the destination this season, and the accomodations. One by one till the dollars worked. She always got re-elected in her senior residence building. And she always paid herself with the bus trip for free.

He turned away to walk back towards the nursing home’s entrance lobby. It was a cold day in April, and breezy. Not much of a feeling of pending summer. He didn’t like the lobby. Prison entrance vibes, carefully disguised. The deception, the decay, modernity… it was a clandestine gradual thing, he reflected. True, the evil spread in a bureaucratic and mild manner for the most part. There was always the rational justifications which could be located, and emphasized. Always the resigned collective shrug. But conscience never entirely disappeared, except for psychopaths, the ones usually who obtained power. Even now, the man could see in himself the faint warning beneath a whirlwind of real-world concerns: You are not doing enough! If one truly perceives something that is amiss, humanistically, the perception is never simply gratis. It always is accompanied by an unshaped tug of moral responsibility. And it is on the individual to find the path out this jungle. Bureaucrats win not in glorious triumph, but in the disengagement of the masses.

“I’m pretty sure some birds will come, Nana”, he told her. “Not right away, too windy. But one will find it, and you will like it seeing them so up close”. He sat beside her on the bed. Held her hand. There wasn’t much need for talking during these visits. Both sensed the obligatory quality in them, burrowing beneath the surface. Yes there was gratitude. Nana’s face expressed less these days; it had become less plastic. He had to really peer into the eyes to catch thoughts and feelings, and she appreciated this. She knew he was a thinker and a dreamer at heart. He had things and activities which took his time, his freedom. A woman too. Yet he visited. Every few months. This time, she spoke more. She wanted to express something that had been puzzling her. It was simply this: She could not — for the life of her — figure out why or how she was still alive! What in God’s name was the reason she yet drew breath? The man perceived the genuine bafflement in her thoughts. Nothing left to accomplish, no goals to win, dreams to chase, events to anticipate. Her questioning belied something interesting. There was a grudging silent acceptance, or long-won awareness in fact, that life is so arranged that things always have purpose. Even when the reasons and meanings are concealed from the experiencers. Especially then! But Nana could not plumb the significance of why she still had not passed away. And this concept saturated her. They sat in silence awhile. “Maybe that is the reason, Nana. Maybe why you are still here is because you need to ponder why you are still alive. What for”. She had a quick laugh at this. But she knew his offering was not trivial. Twenty years ago, she recalled, they were sitting together at her 80th birthday get together at some tarted up restaurant, and she bemoaned to him the fact that in all places she was sagging and no longer could easily recognize herself in the mirror. She bemoaned this not without some humor. He told her don’t worry, Nana… You are just getting ready for your new bodies. Your next body. For a few weeks after that, Nana would mention to anyone she felt like, chuckling, that her grandson told her she was getting ready for hew new body.

Not a year and a half later, the man was approached respectfully by an older gentleman, wearing a hat in the custom of the 1940s. A senior citizen himself, but not at death’s door. Properly dressed, suit, polite. The funeral home was in Nana’s old town. Where she’d spent her years dominating the senior citizen buildings in the decades of adjustment after her husband died. The gentleman wanted to express his respects. “Your grandmother knew the mayor in those days”, he explained. “In some ways she had him in her pocket”. The mayor, an obese and no-longer-with-us figure, knew that Betty — for that was how Nana was widely known — could deliver votes bigtime from the town’s sizable senior citizen constituency. Many was the ritualized photo-op dinner back in the day, always with the mayor and Betty at the central head table. In the dining halls. Every senior citizen building had an all-purpose dining hall. Bingo, and funding dinners. Betty was known in all of them; she’d graced the local papers often next to the mayor and a bouquet. An article announcing new funding for upgraded air conditioners or more comfortable buses for seniors visiting the Grand Canyon. The gentleman told him, with utmost respect, “Your grandmother was one tough son-of-a-bitch, a tough lady, who fought for, and won, her buildings.” He didn’t need to say much more. Just wanted to shake hands, and pass on his admirations.

The man took this in. It was like a missing jigsaw piece. Growing up, he’d heard the whispered remarks. Her determination. Some would say ruthlessness. But the man knew her secret side, shielded from the struggles and machinations. He was her favorite, recognized in infancy. When no one else was tolerated in her kitchen, he as a child stood next to her watching the strange alchemy of her food preparation. And those smells! God. And be it an off-the-cuff sausage lasagna or a sauerbraten meal concocted from scratch for several hours, it was he — only he — whom she would gift a premature taste to as the cooking approached completion. Never using a spoon or fork. No! She would cup a morsel gently in her palm and pass it to his mouth directly, a gift given for the sake of earth’s goodness.

_______RS

[ Image: detail of a photo from an article about the declining fate of nursing homes during Covid. ]

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