This Old House

Tonight is going to be the first time since October that I haven’t headed up to the hospice for an end-of-month Friday night session with the other bereaved Dads. The current coronavirus guidelines disallowing any meeting of more than two people would already make it impossible. On top of that, the hospice building is locked down for the obvious reason that any patients there are likely to be more at-risk than the population in general to this new illness.

I have mixed feelings about not meeting up with the group. I say “first time since October,” but that’s hardly a long-time tradition. We’re talking about a group I’ve met half a dozen times … and it’s never the same group of guys twice. On the one hand, I enjoy the sessions. On the other hand, there is a part of me that resists the group. Even though I know they must be as miserable as I am, there is a part of me that wants to be more miserable, that wants the world to recognize that, yeah, these guys are sad, but the real sadness is mine.

Which is nonsense, of course, but it’s there.

I get along with some of the guys. Some I still have friction with. Some … I have no idea what they’re saying. Some I wish would just shut up sometimes. Others I feel have things to tell me. Whatever, we’ll meet up again someday.

More than the group, I miss the annual trek up there to see his Superman stone. I had a shock in January because the stone was not where I had set it. Turns out it just got shifted when they cleaned the pond and I put it back in place last month. But the rock means something to me. I still have my problems with the gravesite. I have no resonance there. It’s Christina’s gardening project in some parts of my mind. Whereas at the pond … I made that stone. I sat there with my son. I spent three months of my life in a lockdown that is, honestly, making the current situation seem like a breeze.

So, I miss that.

I also miss the walk up to the hospice. It’s not a particularly great part of town, or a particularly bad one. It’s just a neighborhood. But there’s this familiar moment of walking up towards it and looking up to his old room – it’s the one on the top left, framed by the trees – to see if the lights are on, which means someone else is staying there right now. I can’t tell you why I enjoy remembering this site where one of the worst things in the world happened to me, but there we are.

Christina asked me as much a few weeks ago. “I don’t understand how you can go there regularly,” she said, after she’d spent part of a weekend there, getting the kids to a siblings’ program and back. And it makes sense. One guy in the group lost his son 15 years ago and his wife hasn’t set foot in the hospice since. There’s no way to escape that there are a lot of bad memories there.

But if you squint, you can look at it differently. Just about every time I go there I run into a nurse or an administrator or someone who spent a little time with me while I was there. Someone who made a meal for me. Or someone who cleaned up after my kids. Or someone who sat with Colin for a few minutes so I could go to the bathroom. Or a nurse who did everything he or she could to keep this poor child somewhat comfortable even when everyone in the room but him knew he was dying. And it’s depressing as hell. But it also reminds me that there are people in the world who go that extra length to make the world a little better. Who are willing to try to help out even when you just know there’s no happy ending coming. And it gives me a little hope – especially when I read about what medical staff the world over are going through right now – to know that there are these people out there. And that makes it good to see that building standing, even if I see the light on in his room and have to wonder if that means some other little boy or girl is dying up in that room right now. In the end, it’s better having that building there than not having it.

So, here’s hoping I can go back in April or May.