Dumstruck (This I Believe)

 I believe in finding a quiet place to gather strength in the face of suffering.

I pressed the red button that silenced the alarm to the memory unit, and walked through the double doors.  Outside dark clouds dumped sheets of rain.  I had just visited my father-in-law, and thought the deluge must have triggered his warning for me to watch out for submarines.  He once commanded a Sub Chaser in World War II, and probably had been through storms like this.  Perhaps the cyclone fence that surrounded the facility reminded him of the ship’s railing that separated him from stormy seas. 

As I walked the long hallway towards the exit, a social worker stopped me, and chuckled that my father-in-law had offered her $500 to let him go home. “He just wanted to see his wife, his dog, drive his car, and trim his shrubs, “ I said.  He had whispered all this to me during our visit.  He knew he was somehow trapped in this place, but much of the time, he thought he was in an airline terminal, and couldn’t find his gate. His brain filled with imaginings that replaced the vacating spaces of his brain.

On my way to the car, I noticed I could delay walking through the torrents of rain by taking a route through a large windowless series of parking garages.  The security lights glowed amber through the dark, cold cement-surfaced building interior. I made my way slowly past old cars, discarded sofas, old TV’s and stereos, mildewed shower curtains, plastic bags of clothes, a rusted-out snowblower--remnants of what I imagined to be dead people’s stuff.  So this was what remained after the bodies were shipped to the embalmers and cremators--a big, smelly mess for the janitor.

At the far end of the building, I was dumbstruck by a ten-foot high pile of aluminum walkers.  They were all thrown together at different angles.  There were so many of them that they formed the shape of a bell.  I crouched down and stared at this symmetrical assemblage of rubble. It looked like a mountain of white bones, leftover sacrifices laid on some ancient stone altar under a copper sky.  Then I remembered the pile of shoes I had once seen in Jerusalem at the Holocaust Museum.  

I wept in this sorriest of places for the cruelty, confusion, and general misery of people who suffer.  Then I wept because I felt powerless to help the fenced-in father-in-law I loved.  I felt like I was a jumble of walkers in a dying world, where my father-in-law was dying. What would become of his wife, his dog, his car, his shrubs that he had cared for? It would soon be time to get practical and solve problems, but for now, I bent over like a folded-up lawn chair, and rocked rhythmically to the rain on the sheet metal roof.

Submitted to This I Believe, Inc. (Sept. 18, 2011)