Michael Kimball - Us

We moved through the rooms of our house slowly so that I could show her what things were. We turned doorknobs to open doors up and looked into the different rooms of our house to show her what they were for. We turned water faucets on and off. We turned the coffee maker, the lamps, the television, and all the other appliances on and off too.

She was still surprised that turning a switch on made the ceiling fan turn on or made the living room fill up with light. She was still surprised when she heard somebody’s voice through the telephone, or when the people on the television started talking or the voices on the radio started talking or singing. She forgot more and more about our house and us until she couldn’t always remember my name or why I was helping her get up or eat and then she forgot how to stand up or open her mouth up or say my name or move her arms.

She couldn’t get up out of her chair for our walk across the living room to the dining room with her walker. I couldn’t help her enough so that she could do it either. So I brought a small table from our spare bedroom out to her in the living room and set it down around her legs. I brought her food out to her too and set it down on the small table in front of her.

It was still too hard for her to sit up and she couldn’t lean forward either. Her head had gotten too heavy for her neck and it would fall back against the headrest of her chair and her mouth would fall open a little bit. I would sit down next to her to hold her head up for her so that I could feed her food with a spoon. She couldn’t open her mouth very much anymore and she could only chew slowly, but we still had all those long meals together. She would smile as much as she could after she had chewed and swallowed her food.

Our house had gotten too old and started to die too. The paint was peeling off it so that the wood was showing through in places. The wood had gotten soft in places too and there were too many moldy age spots growing on it to replace it.

Some of the shingles had come off the roof and I would find them in the bushes around our house and scattered around the front yard and the backyard too. There were cracks in the windowpanes and the drafty wind that came through them made us feel as if we were back in the cold air of the hospital.

There were also cracks in the ceilings and in the walls. Our house was settling down on its foundation after all those years that we had lived inside it. Our house had started leaking too — through the roof and the ceiling, but also through the basement walls where there were cracks in the foundation. There were water marks on the ceilings and the walls and our house never dried out.

We had roofers and builders and a handyman come out to look at our house, but none of them thought that it should be fixed. They all said that our house was too old and that too much of it needed to be replaced. They didn’t say that we shouldn’t keep living in it, but they were afraid that part of the roof or the ceiling might fall down on us. They were afraid that our house might flood in a heavy rain and that the foundation might be washed away.

But we couldn’t see any sky or anything else except for darkness through any of the cracks in the ceiling and we didn’t worry too much about too much rain. We wanted to float away from all of this anyway.

My wife moved less and got worse, but she didn’t want to go back to the hospital. I got her to go to a doctor, but she couldn’t walk enough with her walker to get out to our car and I couldn’t lift her up to carry her that far either. She didn’t want me to call an ambulance again, so I tried to think of ways to move her.

I thought of things that would roll. I had a wheelbarrow out in the garden and a dolly out in the garage, but she wouldn’t have let me help her get in or on either one of those. So I rolled an old desk chair out of our guest bedroom and into the living room. I helped her move from the seat of the living room chair to the seat of the desk chair without her needing to stand up. I raised the seat of the desk chair up so that her feet didn’t touch the floor or catch in its wheels. I turned the desk chair on its swivel, held onto the armrests, and pushed her across the living room floor, through the kitchen, and out the back door.

I rolled her down the back walk and around to the passenger side of our car. I helped her slide out of the desk chair and into the seat of the car. I buckled her in, closed her car door, and rolled the desk chair away from our car so that I wouldn’t hit it when I backed our car out of the driveway.

The people in the doctor’s office brought a wheelchair out to our car so that my wife could get across the parking lot and into the doctor’s office. I signed my wife in and we waited in the waiting room. There were other people there who were dying too and we had to wait for them to go first. We waited for them to call my wife’s name and then we waited in the examination room.

The nurse helped my wife take all her clothes off. I folded them up and held them in my lap. The nurse helped my wife put a hospital gown on that was cut open down the back and that had little ties on it to hold it together.

The nurse helped my wife get up and lie down on top of the table with the paper stretched over it. It crinkled and ripped when she moved. We talked to the nurse and answered her questions and then we waited for the nurse to come back into the examination room with the doctor.

The doctor told us that she just needed to sleep more. But we told him that we had become afraid of our bedroom and our bed and afraid of sleep. But the doctor told us that she needed to keep taking her pills to keep from having any more seizures and that she needed to take some other pills for sleep.

The doctor told us that she needed to go back to the hospital, but he let us go back to our house. We drove from the doctor’s office to the drug store to get her prescriptions filled and get her some other things that we thought might help her.

We bought her pills to reduce pain, to maintain her immune system, to improve her memory, to keep her body tissue from shrinking, and to keep her heart and her lungs healthy enough so that she could feel and breathe. We bought her pills for her joints so that she could move her arms and her hands more and straighten her knees out enough to stand up again. We bought her skin cream to rub the wrinkles out of her skin. We bought her everything else that we could find that might help us keep her alive.

My wife only lived in the living room after we got back home again. I kept thinking that might somehow help keep her alive. We were afraid that if we moved her to anywhere else that she might die, so my wife stayed on the couch in the living room and did the rest of her living there. She slept there and I slept next to her on the floor.

I brought her vitamins and her other pills to take. I put her pills on her tongue and tipped the lip of a glass of water over her bottom lip so that she could swallow them. I fed her food with a spoon and waited for her to chew and swallow. I cleaned the extra food off her lips and her chin with the spoon and then with a napkin after she couldn’t eat any more food. I gathered her bottles of pills and the food dishes all up and took them back into the kitchen.

But none of the food that she ate or the pills that she took helped her feel or get any better. We called the doctor up, but he said that he couldn’t help her anymore unless we took her back to the hospital. But I couldn’t take her back there or think of any other way to help her anymore. She couldn’t get up to walk anywhere even with her walker and she couldn’t move or talk much anymore either. She didn’t want to live as little as she was then, only sitting up or lying down.