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| Channel 2 is an endless slideshow of the day's events, set to big band jazz |
Though one can find wine and/or roses here, it is not all wine and roses here. There is an apartment close to Grandma's from which I often hear the sounds of an old man violently vomiting. I recall hearing this from all my previous visits and a chill came over me when I imagined that it was possibly the same guy. And then there is the man with long disheveled hair made all the more disheveled by an ill-fitting visor who remains seated at the dining table long after dining hours, looking not asleep but distinctly dead. In fact with his long hair he happens to look like a bit of a Deadhead. I don't know if this coincidence makes my description of him any less offensive.
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Notebook of the recently deceased in the lobby
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If you are drawn to dark undercurrents, you'd end up at the swinging doors of Meadbowbrook. Meadowbrook is the other wing of CLV, where residents are taken to peter out their very last days, although I've heard some have persisted here for years; Grandpa himself was at Meadowbrook for three. Meadowbrook doesn't hide what it is because it can't. It is essentially a hospital, with an emergency unit close at hand and the only place in the whole complex where it feels there are more staff than there are patients. No more wood panelling and plush floral patterned chairs. No sprawling dining room-- instead, residents sit in a small canteen filled with plastic tables and chairs. I recall the ice cream Grandpa and I ate from styrofoam cups. No longer "independent living," most of the doors to each unit are wide open. As I walked down the halls, my steady pace panning from one room to the next, I saw variations on a theme: grey humans like deflated balloons, crumpled and wasted, some trapped in some kind of hospital harness, others in wide-mouthed sleep. The sounds of ignored television and mild beeping and defibrillators. Hospital curtains around each bed. Large bouquets of flowers on tables, which looked garish--almost mocking--in their bursting celebration of freshness and color.
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| From my Meadowbrook visit in 2014 |
I kept walking with unwilling acceleration and found myself pushing through the swinging doors back to Clark Lindsey, past the plushy chairs and hot cocoa and pots of poinsettia, past a hunched old lady checking her mail, out the main entrance and onto the sidewalk, and kept walking and it was a while until a thought entered my head, and it was that I could go on walking forever. Just me and the cows. I felt boosted by all that was behind me but not particularly pulled towards what was ahead, which was just the same long, insistently straight road, which in bright clear sunshine revealed my unchanging fate in the distance. I broke into a run.
