(Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals).
Patience requires memory.
They cannot remember and they cannot wait.
Their husbands and wives and children wait for them in houses that were sold years ago.
The sun has set. It’s getting late. They need to leave.
They have decided I am in charge.
I am the one who holds the key, the one who can open the door and send them back to the 1970s.
“Hey, what’s your name again? Can you give me a ride to Muncy?” Paula says.
“Hey, Jim, pull your car around and let’s get the hell outta here,” Carolyn says.
“Hey, Tom, I’m not staying here, am I?” Janet says.
“Hey, Rich, can I start carrying my stuff out to the car?” Jerry says.
Jerry has all his clothes packed in plastic bags.
He thinks he works on the memory care unit with me and his shift is over.
Why the hell won’t I let him go home.
“Come on, Rich, I worked two shifts in a row. My wife’s in the car waiting for me. She’s right out in the parking lot.”
There is no wife. There is no car.
He calls her phone. The voicemail has been disconnected.
“This phone service sucks.”
The only thing I can do is delay, delay until he forgets.
Why tell him his wife is dead? No one, no one would want to wake up to that news, that fresh wound, day after day.
Tell him instead she’s home now and she’ll come get him in the morning.
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
“She was in a hurry.”
The deceptions are thin. They don’t last long and they don’t always work.
“Lies. You’re telling me lies. Every day with this bullshit and I’m sick of it. I think I’m going to quit … What’s to stop me from walking out that door right now?”
“It’s locked.”
Me. I’m to stop you. It’s part of my job as your certified nurse aide.
I guess I’m a C.O. of sorts, a corrections officer for those who committed no crime.
Their brains betrayed them, deleting data randomly, memories lost like dreams.
“You cannot leave, Jerry.”
He picks up a chair and throws it across the dining room. Then he stares at me, and stares at me, and flips a table.
This, a memory care unit for confused little old ladies, is not the place for him. We are not trained for this.
He’s bigger, he’s stronger, he’s more “with-it.” He’s dangerous.
“I’m gonna keep doing this until I can leave,” he says. “I’ll hurt people if I have to.”
He chucks another chair and it crashes under the television playing a Hallmark Christmas movie.
The nurse calls the supervisor who says to call 9-1-1.
Then she tells me to clear the area of residents and keep them away.
They’re too oblivious for fight-or-flight. They’ll head straight into the fire.
Marie goes by with her eyes closed like she’s taking a rolling nap. I grab her wheelchair and push her away.
“What the hell are you doing?” she says.
No sooner do I have her safe than Dorothy walks right into danger.
“Dot, you can’t go in the dining room right now.”
“And why not, K.? Is it a restricted area?’
“Can you for once not give me crap and just do what I need you to do?”
“Fine, K. Whatever you say.”
I’ll take the sarcasm as long as she listens and she does.
But no matter how many times I remove a resident, another one comes back.
They move and they forget. They move and they forget.
Attention requires memory.
While I’m busy, Jerry has run out of stuff to chuck so he starts throwing chairs he’s thrown before.
I try to imagine what it’s like to be him:
You wake up. You don’t know where you are or how you got there. You look around and see some of your things: yesterday’s jeans, your shoes, a TV, but you don’t recognize the room.
You look over and see a second bed, feet behind a curtain.
Is this a hospital? You don’t even remember being sick.
You go to take a piss. Whoa, a bit unsteady on your feet. Must’ve had one too many.
The first thing you want to do is call someone, call someone to come get you because You. Do. Not. Belong. Here.
But your phone isn’t working. It turns on but you can’t get any service.
You leave the room and see a man in scrubs. He looks familiar.
It’s Rich. Your boss from work. That’s right. You worked the overnight shift and must have dozed off a bit.
“Hey, Rich?”
You tell him you don’t feel too well and it’s time to go home.
As he starts in with the excuses, you get deja vu.
“Sorry, Jerry. Can’t afford to lose you right now. We need you to stay here another night.”
You’ve heard all this before. He’s giving you the same bullshit, the same reasons he gave you yesterday.
You’ve tried to reason with him. You’ve tried to explain how tired you are, how overworked, how you haven’t seen your wife in days, how you desperately need to hit the road and he just won’t listen.
Dementia. Agitation. Violence.
Jerry’s tossing chairs.
It’s his first night back from the psych ward in Pittsburgh.
He was supposed to be better.
The doctor and director of nursing try to talk him down.
“I’ll punch you and her, too, if I have to,” he says. “I’m not stopping until I’m out that goddamn door.”
The overt aggression isn’t a shock, as it’s been there the whole time in his eyes.
Police finally arrive. Seven! I’ve never seen so many policemen answer a call at a nursing home.
After a few bluffs, Jerry realizes he’s surrounded and gives in.
He even climbs onto the stretcher himself and they strap him down and push him out.
The episode ends with all the savagery of a cat nap.
Nobody got hurt.
He didn’t want to injure anyone.
It was a show, a show of frustration, and who can blame him.
I thought they’d keep him at the hospital for observation, to experiment with different medications, but no.
Next day when I come in, “Hey, Rich.”
The sun has set. It’s getting late. He needs to leave.
There’s no violence this time, however, because he believes. He believes he’ll go home in the morning.
K. Uwe Dunn is a former newspaper editor who has turned his investigative energy toward the field of healthcare. His patient profiles and stories have been featured in The Northern Virginia Review, The Petigru Review, and Kestrel: A Journal of Literature and Art, among other publications. He is fluent in the German language, has a master of fine arts degree in painting, and lives in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, Isabella.