FEET
by Maureen O'Hern
I watched my feet -- left,
right, left, right -- move mechanically over miles of hospital terrazzo, a
sameness that I trod back and forth, not daring to look up for fear I would see
how far it stretched and how it merged into the sameness of the walls.
The carpet in the hospital
waiting room was green and black, evoking bright slime on fetid water, and
hypnotic in a threatening, slithery sort of way. Sometimes that was the foil to
my feet. Left, right, left, right. Back and forth. I hated that carpet.
Where dementia led, we
followed, Dad and I. Step by numb step.
Sometimes I watched my feet go
down the stairs at home. Our house was an old two-flat, and the stairs were hardwood, overlaid with a tile path
bordered on both sides by ancient glassy varnish, ever evocative of the
apprenticeship I served as a girl, cleaning those varnished corners with the
point of an old paring knife carefully, carefully, so as not to scratch the
wood. It was inevitable that I should check those same corners as I watched my
slippered feet, up and down, in the night; my feet were tired, and their
tiredness seeped up through me.
Then there were Dad’s feet --
long, bony and strangely colorless. Sometimes they paced next to mine. One time
when he was in the hospital, I arrived at his room to
find him dressed and announcing his intention to go home. He was done with that
place. So there were my tennis shoes next to his Florsheims, marking the
seconds, the hours, pacing like the tedium of a metronome -- left, right -- back
and forth, until the doctor came that evening. Dad was angry. I was scared.
That was the night the doctor
explained sundowning to me. Sundowning. What an innocuous word. It
sounds like something peaceful and restoring, the prelude to sleep and renewed
life. But it is rather a night-time of the mind, a destructive, exhausting,
terrifying closure of consciousness and an awakening of demons and delusions
that well up and command. When night came, Dad was not Dad; he became Other.
The feet of this Other moved
all night. Back and forth through the house, sometimes down to the basement,
sometimes to the doors, as It tried to get out. Sometimes upstairs. But never
still. As the months went on, Dad’s legs became too weak and weary to support
him during the day but could not be quieted at night. Left, right, up, down.
One day he told me how at night
he looked for “someone in charge,” unwittingly describing his sundowning.
Consistent with his love of reason, he sought someone who could explain what
must have been profoundly frightening to him as his world was wrenched out of
his control each night. If the mind could bleed, Dad’s would have every night.
If the soul could vomit, Dad’s would have every night. Just so hellish was the
sundowning.
In his last weeks, Dad could
barely stand, let alone walk, and so I walked for both of us. I pushed him in
his wheelchair over those same terrazzo floors, feeling suffocated by the
sameness underfoot, the sameness closing in on all sides, as we searched for
quiet. As doggedly as Dad had searched for “someone in charge” at home did we
search for quiet at the hospital, and that quiet was the same Will-o’-the-Wisp
as “someone in charge.” As there had been no one “in charge” for Dad at night,
just so was there no quiet for us by day. I walked and pushed round and round
-- left, right -- to find a fragment of peace, but the hospital had filled
every corner, every nook with plastic sound that held neither melody nor meaning.
I walked and pushed everywhere to get away from it, but I couldn’t.
Dad’s feet propped uselessly in
the chair and my own useless in our quest, we looped endlessly to find the
unfindable, making our way to nowhere.
Until one night I walked with
the body bag into the cold clear midnight. Left, right.
Maureen O’Hern is a former English teacher, a botanical artist, a graduate of
Purdue and a member of the Indiana Writers Center.