In all Greek tragedies, the
hero of the story is defeated by his own personal faults. For me, the pursuit of these ideas, and the
increased confusion on the faces of my friends should have led me to notice
that something was wrong with me. As I
left High school, graduated in the four years they gave me to do it, I began a
short stint at community college as a full scholarship recipient for
music. At the same time I had grown
weary of working at McDonalds, and began a new graveyard-shift job at a local
old-folks-home. I was working
front-door security from one a.m. until eight a.m. This was not a nursing home, but a retirement community. The kind of place that had a full-kitchen
and dining room, individual apartments, and various t.v. rooms, bridge rooms,
et al. It was very posh, and very
nice. I found the midnight hours very
useful in my quest, even if I did not have a distinct path to travel yet. Then
people began to die on me.
It’s
not really that surprising, if you consider that I was in the right neiborhood
for the natural death. My Job was to count all the meal-menu’s from
breakfast at seven o’clock, and then visit the apartments that did not attend
breakfast. Most of those who did not
attend would call me at the desk and tell me to mark their name off the list:
Yes, we are alive, and will probably go to the club, and play golf. Most of the time, those who were not at
breakfast were not at home, and forgot to tell anyone. I would need to enter the apartment, call
for who ever I was looking for,and search the apartment toconfirm that no one
was there. Occasionally I would get the
large lady who fell of the toilet, who could not reach her life-line button on
the bathroom wall, and neglected to wear her panic button necklace. The life-line machine was the network that
connected to the front desk, and printed out a little slip of paper that told
me when someone had activated it, and in what apartment. The ones I really hated were the late
sleepers. At first, it did not bother
me. You have to be careful, waking an
old person when you have entered their apartment. I have found many of the tenants to be a little skittish
anyway. Put me in their home during a
deep sleep, and they do not know it, and you have what doctors might call just
cause for di-fibulation. When I had
found my first deceased, I thought he was just asleep. In my opinion, he was one of my
regulars. (“Hey Joe, it’s me, you
alive…yuk, yuk, yuk…”) He would always
wake up, bark something at me about how he used to be a cop, and it should be a
crime, before he would go back to sleep.
On that morning, I just watched them carry him away. I could not help but think that it made him
happy to heat the sirens once more, and the ambulance drove away; but they ran
silent.
There
was an eirie feeling that would come across me right after I finished the shift
change, and I was alone in the building with eight hundred sleeping elderly
people. Most of them were in bed,
asleep four or five hours before I even showed up. I always felt like I was guarding vessels, not people, as they
were not there. I felt like the souls
were all off doing other things, in other worlds or visiting other lands, and I
was guarding more than just their apartments, but their homes.
In
the six months I worked there, eight people passed away on my watch. Although I do not carry any responsibility
for their deaths, I still feel oddly attached to those who passed away. One of them was 109 years old, and still
full of life the night before she died.
A few others had cardiac arrests’ in the middle of the night. On those particular calls in the middle of
the night, as I was summoned by “The Machine”, I had to locate the apartment,
asses the situation, and call for help.
(Ambulance, Fire-men, ect.) Most
would be taken to the hospital, back in a couple of days. It made for a busy half-hour in a black hole
of a job. “The Machine” summoned me
quite a bit during the nights, but only three had died during the night.
One night, as the rule, I was required
to call the next-of-kin to tell them that their mother was being rushed to the
hospital, a woman I could tell was passing before my eyes. I had to call a dear friend of mine in the
middle of the night to give him bad news; a friend that had been a role model
to me as I was growing up, and an incredible emotional pillar in my eyes. After six month, I had enough of the
retirement center. I had made a lot of
friends in the elderly and wise occupants of the village; and, despite the ones
who passed, I had enjoyed the job for the people I met. To me, it was more proof that people know
what people need, and life marches on anyway.
Instinct and emotion ruled over logic and science, even though it is
still not a popular study. After that
six months, I was dismissed from the college and told that I would never have a
good enough sound to be a professional trumpet player. I had to restart everything in my life, and,
in an old fashioned rebellion, I spent the next two years destroying everything
I held dear to myself, and to life in general, while still trying to maintain
face in front of the others. It would
seem that the final person to pass away from the village before I left was
myself, and I still had the rest of my life to go.
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