The Hard Part

I haven't felt much like writing lately.  Or really, like doing much of anything.  No reading.  Little internet.  No cleaning.  Less contact even than usual for me with others.  It has been far easier to blank my mind with trivial TV or absolute stillness and quiet.  Finally, though, reality intruded.  Yesterday, we loaded up early and headed north to Kosciusko for the very last time.  We needed to go and clean out my uncle's room at the VA nursing home.

On the way, we were all fairly calm, cheerful even.  There was sun, something all too rare these days when you have to dash out and do everything between rain storms.  Everybody had gotten rest.  We chatted amicably in the vehicle as the miles passed.

The closer we got to Kosciusko, the more the tension built.  When we pulled into the parking lot, I could feel it like rope sliding through a slipknot, tightening everything inside me.

We were met in the lobby by the facility's social worker.  She had been working to close everything out and help us get things together on that end.  She and others in the office told us how much he'd come to mean to them in the 10 years he'd been living there.  Whether it was simply kindness or genuinely meant (the latter is what it felt like), it was appreciated.

Going down that hall toward his wing was when it really started to hit me.  I knew that he would not be there.  He was not going to be sitting in the cafeteria as he so often was when we arrived.  He was not going to be in the smoking room waiting for a cigarette break.  He was not going to be in his room waiting for them to come and get him out of his bed.  He simply wasn't going to be there at all.

We went into his room, and his stuff had already been mostly sorted and boxed by the facility staff.  We spent the next two hours deciding what to keep, how to pack it, how to get it in the van.  It was possible to turn off the mind about it to a great degree, to retreat into the movement of it.  Sometimes, though, an item would just shatter everything, a collection of his beloved baseball caps, the inexplicably vast quantity of packaged Spam in the refrigerator, a shirt with a giant Halloween pumpkin on it.

We didn't take a lot.  Most of it will be donated to whoever needs it at the facility's discretion.  The wheelchair - specially designed and the last in a long line - we left.  We left the clothing, the medical supplies.  It was good to think that maybe someone else could get use from them.

After we loaded up the few items we decided to keep, we went back inside to finish things up.  The social worker had told us that some of his closest friends there had asked to see us before we left.  One gentleman had been so sad that he wasn't eating well.  I let Mom and Dad talk with them.  I just could not have those conversations.  I sat down quiet and still on the big sofa in the lobby and waited for it all to be done.

Dad and I had been asking each other at various times, "Are you okay?  Are you going to be okay?"  Both of us, I think are good at "containment."  As I sat there on that too-soft sectional working to compress it all and keep it manageable, though, I kept thinking, "This is the last.  This is the last time I will sit on this sofa.  This is the last time I will look down that sunny corridor and the last time I will see all those flags from all the branches of military service blaze with color as I walk under them.  This is the last time I will sit here and watch this aquarium of fish.  This is the last."  And it was painful and I wanted to run because of course, none of those things were the point at all.  Not at all.

This was the only memorial, really, that we would have of him.  By his own very strong wishes, there was not to be another.  He had donated his body to medical research, and so we did not even see him after everything was done.  There was only this horrible absence.

My parents had decided that they wanted to provide for a big pizza night to be given to his friends.  They apparently used to love to order lots of pizza and have a good time talking and carrying on before he got so sick.  This way, there will be one more celebration of him.  He was always so generous with everyone, and I know that he would have been happy with this idea.

When the last of the protocol had been attended to, we set off.  We were quiet as we rolled past the huge metal sculpture they erected earlier this year to honor the Veterans, POWs, and MIAs.  The black steel soldiers stared back from their abstract eyes as we left the grounds.  We left them and the seals of the various branches behind along with the gazebo where we used to sit beside the pond and talk with him.  I cannot speak for the others, but I did not look back as we left it all behind us.  I could not.