the man behind the curtain

H's home bothers me so much. He lives with his daughter and his grandson (grandson is probably my age) in an apartment in raleigh, but no-one really lives in that apartment except H. There are still boxes everywhere... long since unpacked, but just empty and cluttering up the space. Opened and unopened envelopes scatter the floor around each place to sit- the chair, the sofa, the computer desk. Its mail half attended to.
The place is just so cluttered and stale. Its not a place to live, or die. And yet he is dying here. And dying alone. His grandson left yesterday to go back to California, so now H lives at home alone all day while his daughter is at work. He is mostly blind and in poor enough health to be on hospice. But, he would rather have it this way than to be in a nursing home. "Absolutly NO nursing home!" He is insistant. Can't say I really blame him at all. I would probably be the same way.

But I hate that its not more of a home. California is actually home for him, and he longs to go back, but he is too sick to travel. I wish he was in a place with a giant recliner and pictures of a life well lived all over the wall. Instead its just cardboard boxes. I broke a lot of them down today and hung his clothes up in the closet. I made his bed and brought him an ice-cold coca cola. And he asked to sit in the shower. When his wife died a few years ago, he said he had the hardest time sleeping. So he would get up in the middle of the night, 2am, and run a bathtub full of water and soak in the tub until morning. "the Sorrow would diffuse out of my skin, into the warm bathwater, and go down the drain" he said, "at least for a little while." "And right now, I am just so sad." he told me.
So we pulled a plastic chair in the shower for him to sit on. (sitting him down into the bathtub is pretty impossible for him right now) and filled warm water up around his ankles and sat with the shower water running over his head, his face, down his back and body. He sat in the shower for almost a full hour (How the water was hot that long I will never know). The water-conscious person in me cringed a bit, (scott harrison would have my head) but the hospice employee won out- "whatever makes him feel better". I sat on the toliet with the seat down as he sat in the shower, and we talked through the shower curtain for an long while about everything.. race, life, love, education, regrets. And then for awhile we both just sat, with the sound of water running, rinsing away the weight of the sorrow. at leaste for a little while.