Reflections of a Nursing Home

On sleepless nights their faces come, unbidden to my mind. Quivering lips and doleful eyes glimmer out of the gloom. —Gray-aged creases, crinkled to scowls; faces stale and spent beside the insolence of youth. They peer up at me out of oversized hospital beds and follow me from the corners of hallways.

I am haunted by their silent accusations.

Sunshine Meadows called to offer me the position on the same day rent was due. My one-bedroom apartment cost two-hundred and seventy-five dollars a month and the role as night-aide, 6 PM to 6 AM, paid $8.50 an hour. I accepted gratefully and chewed my fingernails until the first paycheck cleared.

I was sixteen years old, and alone. My conscience resorts to this irrelevant statistic—age—when it feels particularly guilty, when the images of lips and eyes and creases flash unceasingly in memory.

A forgetful youth. A selfish moment. Is this neglect?

A cutting word. A cruel grimace. Is this abuse?

An impudent girl in over-large scrubs clocks on to her shift.

The work is steady, but unenviable. Distribute pills. Check vitals. Apply lotions, creams and cosmetics. Wash. Scrub. Comb. Hair. Urine. Dentures. Feces.

An endless monotony of self-sacrifice to the nearly dead.

The shower shift is especially unsavory. Twelve hours heaving the invalid and overweight from wheelchair to shower seat, removing undergarments, hearing aids and jewelry, and being bitingly warned against pocketing the treasures stripped from their scabby necks. The men are prone to grope. The women are prone to complain.

After careful scrubbing between each fleshy excrescence and a second hugging of their naked, now wet bodies back to the wheelchair, the process of re-clothing begins. Breasts are scooped from their long descent into bras. Hip-high compression socks are peeled over layers of mottled, flaking skin. Buttons are adjusted. Watches are replaced. Every individual has their preference.

‘Over the shirt, I said. Over the shirt, not under!’

‘Watch the curls. I just had it permed.’

‘Put it in the left pocket, not the right. I can’t reach it in the right.’

The list of demands is unending.

Irma is uniquely cantankerous. She has two great vanities: heaps of gaudy jewelry that she wears draped about her wrists and neck, and vermilion lipstick, meticulously applied. If the jewelry is not put on in just-the-right order, or the lipstick applied not just-to-her-liking, it must be removed and started over.

As I draw closer to that threshold between activity and inability, my compassion grows. My own skin is now blotched, my own mobility now constrained. Handing over control of my personal comforts, however small, to the impersonality of a stranger feels dreadful.

On the third re-application of lipstick, with Irma insisting “it’s just not quite right. See how it’s smeared at the bottom?” I sneer and toss the tube into her lap.

“If you don’t like it, put it on yourself.”

Her embarrassed glance at the useless, arthritic arms at her sides, and those quivering red lips linger now in my mind.

Her voice is falsely cheery when she replies.

“Well.. that’s ok then. I think it looks alright after all.”