The Gap in the Curtains

There is a house on your street that you pass everyday.

As you drive by, your eyes always find that familiar face in the grass- a faded garden gnome sitting lopsided inside a circle of weeds.

The house itself is nondescript, unadorned.

It is neither well kept nor neglected.

There is a large window in the front of the house, and the curtains are gently parted in the center.

Behind those curtains is a hospital bed, and there is a triangle of dusty sunshine streaming through the gap.  The prism of sunlight across the blankets is the only light in the room. Their faces are darkened by shadows.

In the bed is a woman who is 81 years old.  She doesn’t know her name, or if she does, she doesn’t say it.

Her husband is seated on the couch, thin and frail, and neatly dressed. The pointy edges of his collarbones press through the well-worn fabric. His belt is notched in a new hole he made to fit his boney frame.  His pants are gathered at the waist like a little boy wearing next year’s hand-me-downs.

Every morning he makes two scrambled eggs, one for him and one for her.  Most of hers falls from her mouth as he tries to coax her to chew and swallow.  He gives her sips of water that seem to go down, but her coughs are wet and gurgily.

One street over is a similar house that is overtaken by boxwood shrubs and a bloom-less rhododendron.  The lawn hasn’t been mowed since the neighbor cut it two months ago because “he couldn’t stand to look at it anymore.”

Behind the part of those window curtains is another hospital bed. In that bed is a large, friendly man with a sweet smile.  Although he has the use of his arms, he is mostly paralyzed from the waist down by the slow degeneration of his vertebrae.  The gradual narrowing of his spinal column has caused him great pain over the last several years, making it difficult to move.  The more pain he had, the more beer he drank.

He didn’t mean to put on all that weight.

Or to become a diabetic.

Or to lose his lower leg.

He also doesn’t mean to yell at her so much, but she is always nagging him about the way he’s positioned and the fact that his diaper is soiled and that if he gets another bed sore he’ll have to go to the nursing home and they can’t afford that and if doesn’t start moving more he’ll die in that bed and blah blah blah.  

“Then just let me die,”  he mutters.

She tidily keeps her terror in check.   She continues to fuss, to wash, to cook, to medicate... and to snap to attention at his bedside at his every demented whim.

And she thinks to herself, “Not on my watch, fella.”

Three doors down there is another living room window, another gap in the curtain.  You probably think this house is abandoned.  

He is 38 and is living with his parents.  He has a good job and he is there by 6 am everyday, after a long, sleepless night.

At four o’clock in the afternoon he returns home to find that his mother has opened every can of cat food in the pantry.  She is nervously pacing around his father who is lying on a cot, naked, in a small space carved out between the stacks of newspapers, boxes, and faded volumes of yellow pages.  The path to reach him is so narrow that it can only be traveled in single file. A muffled meow is heard from deep within the clutter.

His father had been taking care of his mother during the first few years of her Alzheimer’s journey, but prostate cancer, radiation, a broken hip, pneumonia, renal failure, bowel obstruction, another broken hip, and a stroke have rendered him little more than a functional heart and pair of lungs in a beaten shell.

The son screams at the mother for opening all the cat food cans, which makes her shake and chant an unintelligible mantra.  He yells again to make her stop chanting, which only makes her chant louder.  

And pace.

He just wants her to sit down.  So he yells, in futility, "Go sit down!"

She rocks back and forth on her feet... bobs her head... wrings her hands... and chants.

She hovers over him at night too.  Chanting and pacing.  He never gets any sleep.

He has no friends, no girlfriend, no wife.  He has a brother who lives one state away who doesn’t help because he has a family of his own.  The mention of his name makes him want to punch something.

When Adult Protective Services takes his mom and dad away, he is shamed for neglecting them.  There is talk of criminal charges.

There is a new, nameless epidemic in this country.  It is caused, ironically, by the victories of modern science that prolong the human life span beyond the capacities of Mother Nature’s timeline... and beyond the resources of the caregivers stuck behind the gap in the curtains.