The Clutch and the Gas
(Alternate Title: The last sad blog I plan to write)
Frank is a 68 year old man with Parkinson’s Disease.
He can’t move or talk.
When I hold his arms and legs they feel like cement, fixed at the joint.
He is always making eye contact with me, because he’s in there. He’s in there and he can’t move and he wants to connect.
I love Frank right away because he looks like Harry Dean Stanton.
Because I can’t stand silence, I just open up and begin to tell him things. I tell him about my husband. I tell him about my daughter who said “I love pigs so so much more now that I know they make bacon!” over breakfast. I tell him which nurses are horrible (though I think he already knows), and how the cook and the A-wing janitor were caught screwing in the staff bathroom.
He smiles, I have no idea how much effort that took him, like pulling on a stuck zipper.
I drop him by accident one morning. I was transferring him to the physio. mat from his wheelchair and he seized on me. Bodies are heavier than they look. We both fell onto the mat and he winced and moaned and I thought I had killed him.
He smiles.
I find out he was a truck driver from one of the RN’s.
During our arm exercise I tell him
“Put the truck into first,” he slowly (and I mean slowly) turns his head and looks at me, a huge smile creeping across his lips. His elbow extends, I tell him we are about to go up an incline and we have to shift again.
I see his feet starting to move, the clutch …. the gas…
I smile.
One morning I enter Frank’s room.
“Hello”
I look around.
“Holy Hell, you scared me.”
“My medication worked today.”
“This is weird.”
“You’re telling me.”
“Jesus. Don’t tell anyone about the shit I’ve been saying.”
He laughs, “I wouldn’t do that.”
That afternoon Frank walked.
He walked up and down the hall with a walker and one person on each side.
He talked. He could move.
He told me about his daughter, how she had moved to Toronto and was a History Professor. We talked about New York City and Empanadas.
His wife was coming to visit that afternoon.
I ran down the hall to greet her, I was ecstatic.
“Frank talked and walked today!! He walked all the way down the basement hallway and back with little help. It was slow, but it was amazing! He’s in a great mood.”
She sighed, ” Well, you know he used to walk and talk all the time.”
I felt like I had been punched in the gut.
What would it be like to watch someone slip away like that? Your man. I had been expecting her reaction to be of elation, but really she knew was no going backwards. These rare days when he did talk or move, it only made her heart hurt more. To see him as he was, when she had already dealt with the loss of him.
And the next day I walked into Frank’s room.
“Hey mister how are you?”
—-no response, Frank stares at me with his sad dark eyes.
I smile. I can’t cry, this is life, he knows and I know it.
I walk over to his side and put my face right above his, I hold his rigid hand and whisper,
“I swear Frank, I won’t drop you today.”
