A Cautionary Tale

A man I know conducts a one-hour religious service at each of two local care homes, one of them on Saturday afternoon, one on Sunday. He is a good man with no illusions about himself and what he’s done in his life, very devout but with no religious arrogance. He is in his late 70s and still rides a motorcycle and pilots an ultra-light plane. His services are non-denominational, and include a couple of short readings, a brief talk, and lots and lots of music - simple well-known hymns, usually with repetitious words that can be followed easily by the residents who are able to or who try to sing along. Soothing to those who can’t.

He plays guitar or keyboard and sings lustily, assisted by 3, 4, 5 or so other volunteers playing musical instruments, or reading, or just singing along. A few of the residents come into the room on foot, maybe with walkers; most are in chairs – moveable beds – and are pushed in by staff. They are young and old, and of varying degrees of mental and physical incapacity. Disastrous births, illnesses, accidents, and infirmities of age have brought them here. They are waiting – for the next mealtime, for a diaper change or a bath, for the temporary diversion of new faces in the house, for the time when they can leave and go to someplace better.
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I wrote a song for them – about "going home" some day. (Those who know me will recognize the incongruity of that.) When I sang it in my on key but cracked voice, most of the people seemed to enjoy it, and some even applauded. One woman wheeled her chair out of the room until I was finished. She’s a sharp, critical woman with angry eyes who always takes people to task for any misbehavior in the room. She usually likes me, and loves my hair. This day, she asks me who I am, and what I’m doing there. “You don’t impress me a bit!” she says.
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I’m sitting alone on the piano bench when suddenly a little man on the other side of the room marches over and sits next to me. He wears his T-shirt tucked into his pants in that way that makes little old men look as if their waistband is up under their armpits. He sits up very straight with his hands folded in his lap. He announces, “I usually try to be normal, and fit in, but sometimes the Devil gets the best of me.” I tell him that he needs to send the Devil on his way, and he agrees. But I could be wrong - maybe this is the bit of a devil that makes life here bearable.
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A younger man rolls his chair up next to the bench and the little man gets up and walks off. I don’t think it’s that he dislikes the other man – I sense a shift of power. The man in the chair tells me that he is 38, that he was beaten as a child, and that he went to a military school until he was 10 where they fed him so well that he grew to be over 7 feet tall and more than 300 pounds. When he left there, he grew small again. He smiles, happy to have an audience, and pleased to be able to repeat his story several times.
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A frail, elderly woman asks me to tell her what the man just read, and what it means. I tell her that he said God loves her, which is basically what he did say, just longer. She wants me to hold her hand, which I do very carefully. Her hand is stiff, not pliable, her fingers and knuckles knotted and gnarled, her skin papery and thin and dry.
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There is a young woman, severely damaged in mind and body, who has been in care all of her life. She makes loud noises, hits her head with her hand, and tries to overcome the brakes on her chair and inch her way up to the front to touch the man speaking. Another woman cries out, “Help me. Help me.” Is she in pain? Or is it an automatic and constant plea? There is a man in the corner who looks like Stephen Hawking – his features are the same, his body as bent. Periodically, he needs to be adjusted and boosted up again in his chair.
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I recognize a man that I know. He does not recognize me. He sits erect, does not seem to be in pain, and smiles and nods pleasantly, but he is more disturbing than the rest of them. The others are as I have always known them. They were born in my consciousness fully-bloomed as they are now, as if they have always been this way. I remember this man when he walked and talked and worked and played and laughed and danced and loved. When he rode his motorcycle all across the country. He was different, and now he is not. This thing happened to him. It could happen to me. It could happen to all of us.