A Dog Walks Into a Nursing Home: Lessons in the Good Life from an Unlikely Teacher by Halpern Sue

Author:Halpern, Sue [Halpern, Sue]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

5.

Hope

Hope, as most English majors will remember, is “the thing with feathers,” and though I had not been an English major myself, these were the words that came to me when I entered Martha’s room on the east wing one day and found her staring out the window at a bird feeder planted on a pole not two feet away on the other side of the glass. The feeder was empty but drawing the interest of a couple of goldfinches searching for a stray seed or two. Martha might have been looking at the birds, or she might have been looking past them, or she might have been looking at something only she could see. Most of the time she seemed lost in her own world, sitting opposite her portable television, which was always on, and always tuned to one game show or another. We’d walk by and she’d be parked there with a cup of coffee cooling on a folding metal table in front of her, slightly hunched, a quizzical expression on her face that could have been mistaken for a smile. We’d walk back, and it was the same. When birds flew across her peripheral vision, though, they got her attention, and she’d turn away from the TV. A well-thumbed Peterson’s Field Guide to Birds of North America had been strategically placed on the windowsill by one of her many daughters, who hoped Martha would be inclined to consult it. (She wasn’t.) On this day, it was joined there by a single, plump, unblemished red tomato.

“What’s your dog’s name?” she asked, though by then she should have known, having asked the same question every week for nearly a year—“should” being a relative term, and one that did not apply to people whose memory was shot.

“Pransky,” I said.

“Fancy?” she asked.

“Pransky,” I said.

“Frisky?” she asked.

“Pranny,” I said.

“Oh, Franny,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Franny.”

“I had a dog once,” she said.

“The white one?” I asked, though I knew the dog was white, and looked like a wolf, and could be as ferocious as she was sweet.

“We called her a wolf dog,” she said.

“Was this the dog named Snowflake?” I asked.

“Yes, we called her Snowflake,” she said, neither surprised to find out that I knew her dog’s name nor interested in learning how I did.

I pointed to a photo on her closet door. “Is this the dog you mean?”

She said it was. She always said it was. We were on script; we’d had this conversation, or some near variant of it every week, for months. Not that Martha knew; her long-term memory was pretty good, but like many people with dementia, she lived almost exclusively in the present—the present being this very minute. Five minutes ago was often out of reach, and so was seven days ago. Week to week, Martha never remembered that she’d met us, or that she’d told me about her dog, or her eight children, or her seven siblings. From the outside looking in, it seemed an awful place to be, idling in a never-ending now, able only to go a short distance, and always in reverse.

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