I woke up with a vivid dream that involved a nursing home.
There were old people who were giving away free violins and violin lessons and
food trying to get kids to come, to see kids. I was trying to help them.
Harabojii and Halmoni were there. My mother's parents. My Harabojii (Korean for grandfather) died 14 years ago, and my Halmoni has traveled the long road of widow-hood and prayer these many years. In my dream, it was so good to see them together again. But I
knew Harabojii was sick and we probably didn’t have long. I hugged him, then
remembered I have a cold.
But I was trying to advise the old people to try giving away
guitar lessons, broader appeal. Trying to help them find a way for their scheme to see children around to work. Then Badguys were chasing me at one point.
There was drama. I don’t remember what happened.
But waking up with the conviction that---why on earth did we
sort people like widgets? For energy efficiency, put all the old people in one room,
so we can effectively change diapers and provide “care”. Care like lining them
up to change their diapers, brush their teeth, and give them all the same
nutritionally calculated puddings.
Why?
People aren’t widgets. That kind of life barely sounds like
life. Its all the stuff that happens in the cracks that makes life feel like life. The
inconveniences, the people talking in line at the grocery store, the children,
always uncontrollable, nuts, with their myriad ideas and fights and stories and
sins, running into and out of our lives like tornado.
Life comes in the unexpected, the inconvenient, the in-betweens.
We manage life, by putting all the kids in a room together,
so their crazy ideas can be dissuaded en-mass, not to climb the flagpole, or
organize a table leaping-off contest. We make them copy down math and memorize
mantras and things. Not that there isn’t a place for education.
But seriously, what are we doing????
We stuff the kids into rooms, and then when some boys
inevitably won’t sit still, we drug them to make it more efficient for the
vastly out-numbered teacher to keep the kids learning. It’s like a prison.
We manage life, by putting all the old people into a room
together (or rather, many tiny rooms in one big building) and give them “care”
to make sure they have the proper nutrition and diaper changes in time. It’s
like a prison.
Prisons are massively efficient ways for society to stuff troublemakers
into one building and hopefully try to keep them from killing each-other. (If there is a
Purgatory, I hope it is very different than our model.)
I love efficiency. I love batch-sewing dresses, and batch-producing
meals.
But boiling life down a life to nutrients ingested,
mantras memorized, widgets produced, diapers changed….what happened to the wild
morning wind cold and inconvenient, blowing the barely-opened morning-glories
against the pale sky brightening in the dawn?
People aren’t widgets. We need the chaos of children, the
inconvenience of human contact, the single woman telling you not to
leave the top of the chip bag unsealed, the middle aged reflecting on their
life and their drama having to pull it together to interact with a surly teenager….. all of it, all mixed up into life.
And what about the childless? Those who never got to have
children and grandchildren? They should not be shunted off into an
assembly-line style of senior care.
When I lay in the hospital after being gutted and stitched,
hovering between life and death, unable to sit without assistance, the tube
draining on my side sending spasms every time I had to sit up. Having to hit
the nurse button to bring a bedpan…when it was a terrifying thing knowing I
would have to sit up in 30 minutes… the fight to hold on to my walker, and make
it across the room…they all felt like huge and terrifying obstacles. It was
like being suddenly old. My youth---when things like eating, sitting up, walking
about---felt far away and impossible. Part of me doubted I would ever be able
to do those things again.
To want to live---was so hard. And I knew deep down somehow,
that I had to want to live if I was going to live. Perhaps it was melodrama,
but I felt that if I gave up, I would die. I was in grief over Anthony, and the
pain was the worst in my life. Worse than the 7 unmedicated labors. It felt
like transition when I tried to poop. But what got me though transition was
yearning for my baby in my arms. And this time, I knew my baby was dead. And
that there would never be another new baby from me. It was hard.
To be old, is so hard. To know that the days of possibility
and birth are behind you…and before you lies pain to just to continue to exist.
Back to my point.
I yearned to see green things, and my children’s faces. The
dawn sky. I strained to see that little flap of a green palm leaf in that
courtyard, the window facing a stucco wall, and the bed facing the wrong way.
Prison cell room. I tried to stare at the fake wood pattern on the door,
thanking God for making woodgrain. I needed to see beauty so badly.
When I was moved into
the blue room with the big window, and could see the horizon lit wit the dawn
and dusk glow…it was like I could breathe again. The art on the wall of the
raindrops clinging to a leaf. I stared at every nature picture I could get. And
children's faces. Seeing their faces was like a burst of color in a grey world. I'd stare at their faces...they almost felt like they were shining with LIFE.
When the ileas blocked my intestine, the pain was so intense....begging God not to listen to any prayers to die I might make, that my statement was I wanted to live, and I was tying myself to the mast....hearing that child cry out for his mommy, his daddy reassuring him that wasn't his mom....me getting there, the bowel scan....then coming back...the pain subsiding [had they started the Dilotted at that point?] looking up and thinking there was so much light afterwards...not sure if I was really aware of reality...and I saw this very goodlooking shape of a man's beautiful shoulders standing there in the brightness [If I remember...half of me wasn't sure if I was seeing Jesus in heaven or some person and I shouldn't be thinking this as a married woman....and especially if it were Jesus...it was very confusing]...and then realized it was Josh with the window behind him.....then afterwards, somehow, the pain meds taking enough edge off, the relief. But still having to fight to live. Telling Josh how
we were going to have picnics with the kids in Europe. Imagining going to
the park with a picnic with the kids. Imagining the children, and nature, out of
that hospital prison. Hospital is a prison. I thought of Harabojii, talking
about our trip to Korea, and to the beach, and the picnic, how we were going to have it…all those long months in the hospital, when he couldn’t even eat….I
understood better. How he felt. So hard. You need to look forward to something.
To children’s faces and green.
I thought about the nursing homes for the childless. We need
to make every room have a big window, to see the dawn. No prison rooms. Force
people to eat together at least once a day. Sing together. Chapel. And put it in
an orchard. So families can come and pick the fruit, and hangout with the old
people. They need to see children. They need to be part of a community.
Make it a community. Like Rivendell. Host craft nights,
dances, etc. Things for children. Old ppl need to see new life. And new life
needs the old. We need to be in it, together. Inconvenient and all. It’s life.
Somehow, we have to un-divorce the care of the old from the rest of society. Never
have we had this much voyeuristic living, distortions of reality, Instagram
replacing long hours shelling beans with octogenarians. We watch dramas and cry
our eyes out. And don’t know how to talk to our grandparents. [this is me]
We have lost so much. And we have skyrocketing rates of
depression. We need to shell more beans. Have that awkward long walk with
someone in a walker who needs to pause every 10 ft and have that rambling
conversation that may repeat itself. Life is in the cracks. In the in betweens
of leaves against a sky.
Because we are humans. We weren’t meant to die in prison
cells of efficiency, alone. We were meant to struggle along, inconveniently,
often painfully, together.
Even if they’re grumpy. Even if it hurts. Even if its hard.
We need to do it together. Because its important. The children need to know how
to live, how to reflect on the story of life---one day, their own life---and
the children need to learn how to die, how to make peace. How to live while dying. All of it.
Because we're all living while dying. We're all in this strange riddle, put together, to get through it, together.
The old need to be around children. Around new life. We
are the human race, the human family. We were made for each other.
****************
After writing this, I want to volunteer at a nursing home or
something. I am not sure how. I know these organizations exist.
Or a prison. And make a garden.
