Rosh Hashanah with the Jews in my family.
Five obese relatives crammed into a Cadillac with a pudgy girl (the sixth relative) hovering in a yoga pose in the middle of the front seat. Grandma cruising down Rte 4 at 9pm on a Friday evening while doing 53 mph. Traffic passing us at 70+. She\’s straddling two lanes while I\’m straddling the parking brake without a seat belt. There\’s a giant motorized wheelchair strapped to the back of the car, scrapping across the ground every time we hit a pot hole. Considering this is Orlando after three hurricanes, there are a lot of pot holes, and I am wishing I had a lot of weed. I don\’t smoke but I am currently considering eating a brick of even the worst home grown shit available in order to get through the inevitable descent upon Yet Another Steakhouse.
Central Florida for days on end, shuffled around by my grandmother, and I have yet to see anyone who is not honky white and of middle class descent. I feel uncomfortable surrounded by so much airbrushed paleness.
I am dragged from outlet mall to steakhouse to nursing home and back again. Bed time is at nine o\’clock every night, but not until ice cream has been consumed around the kitchen table; I pass. There is no food in the house other than take out and processed packages of fat free snacks. I underweigh everyone here by more than 100 pounds, which is no easy task considering my voluptuous heft.
I am cranky and wishing I wasn\’t so nice as to have volunteered to come down and help.
My grandfather was my physician the first few years of my life, until he moved out of state (like all good Jews, my grandparents migrated back to a land of sand, in this case, good old Orlando, home of at least one retired relative of practically every Jew in the US of Ass). Now he\’s deteriorated to a belly and stick legs, trapped in a wheelchair, Parkinson\’s having set in. He gets electric shock therapy and is shuttled back and forth between priorly mentioned steak houses and his nursing home, where he is unceremoniously plopped into bed, nurses on their way to delivery meds and change his diaper. Though we can all sit around the table and discuss colonoscopies, colon hydrotherapy, and colon cancer with ease, we all skirt the issue that the poor man has been sitting in his own shit for about two hours.
The whole nursing home smells like shit. People sitting in their chairs in the same positions day after day, wearing the same gowns. Heads lolled back into the corner. Asleep or dead? Barely breathing, at any rate. There\’s a man in his manual wheelie spitting on the ground in the hallway. Sitting and spitting. The nurses ignore it. Their gold teeth shine — the nurses, not the patients. Patient muttering, doing their little Alzheimer routines. Visiting relatives gabbing on their cell phones while feeding their parents, not bothering to communicate. People openly complaining about the time it takes out of their lives to be there. This is one of the better nursing homes out there, or at least, one of the most expensive. I\’ve had ample experience in them in the past year. In this class they all look the same. Just shoot me.
I am feeling like I have done nothing but face death and old age since getting back from Seattle. When my other grandmother fell ill for the last time, went into the hospital, never came home again. Died this past summer in her sleep in a nursing home. Visiting her in her delirium while she mumbles about how we hate her and are trying to kill her. I want to kill her, just to give her the peace she wants and no one will let her have. She\’s hooked up to machines and refusing to eat in protest. She doesn\’t want to be here. Neither do I. Why are they keeping her alive? The wonderful miracles of modern medicine, keeping our bodies going while we have deteriorated into a miserable existence of bed bound illness that can not be reversed. Science keeping us alive because our relatives are feeling greedy, guilty, selfish, whatever. Can\’t let go. No one knows how to let go anymore, and so no one ever gets to say goodbye. Don\’t make me end like that.
Little baby salamanders coming back after the storm, climbing over the kumquat tree that managed to hold on to a few pieces of its fruit. From green to orange soon. A pelican floating over the sky toward the canal. The waxing moon shining on the water of the many lakes. The stars at dawn. A few things still give me hope. If I could get the theme to Hair out of my head, maybe everything would be alright.
I came home to an empty house after a long trip. No one is coming home to me tonight. When I try to sleep at night, the hunger aches in my body for the comfort of another. As much as I generally dislike sharing a bed, it\’s now hard to sleep by myself. It\’s unfamiliar. Tomorrow, the girls. Wednesday, back to New York. Never stop moving. Never slow down. Then I won\’t have to think about us getting old, and who will have to have their ass wiped first. You say it\’ll be me, but I ain\’t going out like a spineless jellyfish.
