Note: This essay is nonfiction based on true events and contains depictions of elder abuse and hoarding. Names and locations have been changed to protect the innocent. Some dialogue and details have been reconstructed for clarity and narrative flow.
“Ms. Blackmoor, can you tell me who the President of the United States is?”
“Trump!” responds my mother enthusiastically.
“Can you tell me what year it is?”
“1925.”
The paramedics exchange a quick glance.
“Your son is here. Can you tell me his name?”
“William… no, Jude. Hello, honey,” she says casually.
This is the first time we’ve seen each other in four years.
“Your son has been trying to call,” says Sergeant Jansen.
My mother screws her face up into an expression of naiveté that instantly tells me she is lying. “Jude tried to call?”
Sergeant Jansen frowns. “Are you able to get and make phone calls with your friends and family, Ms. Blackmoor?”
“I’m blind.”
“Then Mr. Colgrave assists you with calls?”
“I couldn’t do anything without him.”
“Does he let you know when people are calling?”
“Sometimes he forgets.”
I make eye contact with Sergeant Jansen and the female paramedic and shake my head. There is so much trash in the room that only a path leads to my mother’s side of the bed. Dirty clothes spill across Costco boxes. Half-empty Ensure cases, paper plates with dried cookies, Charmin Wipes, and empty oatmeal cream pie wrappers choke the floor. To my left, with a towel hanging off it, stands a china cabinet stuffed with family photos. Mementos of another life stare at me, begging recognition, and I ignore them.
If I look, I will remember.
I will remember this is the mother I used to love. I will remember this is a woman I used to speak of with honor in my heart.
But remembering makes me tired. Pride exhausts me, and I feel the weight of the house’s bones upon my shoulders.
I lower my eyes to watch a fat brown cockroach crawl across the carpet in front of my knees and disappear between the box springs.
“Ms. Blackmoor,” says the male paramedic, “Can you tell me what month it is?”
“February. No, March!”
The other paramedic leans down with a flashlight, checks my mother’s eyes, and says, “Pupils equal and reactive to light.” Her tone shifts,“You said you were blind, ma’am?”
“I can see light and dark shapes.”
“I understand.”
“You look like a big lump.”
“Right.”
The paramedic turns to Sergeant Jansen, “A&O X2, it’s on the fence. This is pretty bad,” she says, gesturing to the room.
The male paramedic asks, “How long have you been in bed?”
“Not long,” says my mother. “I was up this morning. Dale cooks me sausages. He made breakfast.”
“Okay. I’m going to sit you up for a second, ma’am. I’d like to check your back.”
“Sure.”
They pull my mother forward and lift her purple shirt, then lay her back down.
“I’m calling it,” says the lead paramedic statically. He steps around me and tells Sergeant Jansen, “Pressure injuries. We have to take her in.”
I take one last look at the blood on my mother’s sock and stand to get out of the way before they have to ask. Old newspapers crinkle underfoot as I walk.
Jane is taking pictures behind us and calls me into my mother’s dressing room.
The framework of the room I knew as a child is still there. Two of the three can lights are missing their bulbs. In the third, a spiraling CFL flickers intermittently in its fixture. The light it produces is cold, weak, and blue.
Her dressing room vanity with a broad counter sits below family photographs which hang on the original, sage-green wallpaper from 1972. There are pictures of me as a child, my brother, William, my legal father, Martin, and my blood father, Grant Kellor. Even my grandfather, Admiral Monroe, made the cut, along with my grandmother and my aunts. The photos are askew, covered with water stains and must. The counter still holds my mother’s makeup lights and jewelry box buried under old containers of Jergen’s lotion, Bounty rolls, food wrappers, and towels that look like they were used to polish furniture decades ago. Febreze cans, Ziploc bags filled with prescription medications, and Nature’s Way vitamin bottles colorfully accent the clutter. Every drawer is half-open, crammed with old lipstick, Band-Aid boxes, and hairbrushes. The medicine cabinet is stuffed with orange medicine bottles, too many to count. All the bottles contain pills.
Pills. On every surface. This is the one thing that has been the same since before Dale Colgrave.
The green dressing room carpet is stained and burnt. It’s impossible to say if the stains are from blood, grape juice, motor oil, or teriyaki sauce. A couple of the burns are from an iron. Another burned patch looks like a dollop of lighter fluid was set ablaze and extinguished with a rubber boot. The accordion doors to her closet have been removed from their hinges. They lean in a corner of the bedroom. Her vanity stool has been replaced by a cheap, weathered office chair covered with a blue towel that looks like it was a curb find.
Sylvia’s closet shelves sag under the gravity of never-worn clothes. Shoeboxes marked glue, string, tape collapse beside unopened bulbs and crumpled garment bags. Dust powders the shoulders of her dresses. A bin of dirty laundry spills across the floor, where slippers, nightgowns, and mismatched pajama parts lie in ruin.
I swallow my pride. I am embarrassed that my wife has to see this. She cannot read my mind. She cannot see my memories of the way these rooms used to be. She has never known anything but the trash.
Jane takes my hand, “Honey, have you been in here?”
I walk around the corner and gaze at the jack and jill bathroom that separates my dad’s old dressing room from my mother’s and immediately cover my nose and mouth. Jane touches my shoulder softly, then leaves to continue taking photographs.
The is where the buzzing sound was coming from.
Six 35-gallon lawn bags of soiled adult diapers cover the bathroom floor. None are tied off. The top diapers, streaked with shit and urine, glare at me. The bags bulge, threatening to tip. Ten, maybe twenty flies buzz about drunkenly. I watch one land, vomit, and eat. A can of Raid sits on the window sill. Hundreds of dead flies line the wall and litter the floor. Only a narrow trail to the toilet is clear.
Above the toilet, a calendar of classic European art hangs frozen in time on August of 1988. This is the month and year that he died. The image is Paris Street; Rainy Day (1877) by Gustave Caillebotte. The calendar, the walls, and my father’s vanity all look as though they have been splattered with bleach. The once dark wood of the wainscoting and baseboards are dotted with opaline spatters of an unknown chemical. It is as if someone took a paint sprayer and swung it in a wild, abstract effort to destroy anything of meaning.
Jane comes back in, “You okay?”
“I’m good.”
“We should go look at the rest of the house.”
“Okay.”
My pocket vibrates and I answer the phone, “Hey dude.”
It’s a follow-up call from my brother, William on the east coast, “Hey man.”
“I’m looking at bags of soiled Depends in her bathroom.”
“What the fuck?”
“I know.”
His voice is pragmatic and efficient, “Hey, just remember, the assault rifles should be in the closet of my old bedroom.”
“Okay.”
“Show the cops.”
“I will. They’re taking her to the hospital.”
“Where’s the asshole?”
“A couple of cops have him out in the driveway.”
“That’s a thing of beauty. I hope they arrest him.”
“Me too. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Okay, man, talk soon.”
I return to the hall. Jane has disappeared again into the bowels of the house. She is filming and taking pictures. The curious daughter-in-law / photographer in her can’t help it, and I am grateful. The carnage needs documenting, but I have seen most of it before.
I walk into my brother’s old bedroom. It has been bombed with a plethora of objects and garbage. I navigate around a large cardboard box labeled beef-sausage lasagna and a 24-pack of toilet paper to reach the closet.
The guns are there like my brother said.
I pull out a long black case and open it. The firearm inside is an HK416. A young cop pokes his head around the corner and starts watching from the doorway. His body camera points at me inquisitively like a third black eye as I start pulling more weapons out of the closet and leaning them against a dresser. The officer disappears. Suddenly I feel the press of time. I hurriedly keep pulling out weapons in cases without unzipping them. They could be AK-47s or AR-15s.
The glistening skull of Sergeant Jansen appears as I am lining up rifle number eleven.
I look up and say, “These are the guns.”
I reach to make it an even dozen, but he stops me with a nervous chuckle, “Okay, we get it. Let’s just put all those back for now.”
“You guys don’t want these?”
“Not now. Detective Piolar needs to complete her investigation.”
I shrug, “Okay,” and begin putting the guns back, wondering about a world where a dozen assault rifles are of zero interest to the police.
“Thanks,” says Sergeant Jansen. “Here comes your mom.” He backs into the doorframe of my old bedroom across the hall to make way.
I step over the box of lasagna and watch as the sweating paramedics carry her past us in a brown polyester bag, each holding one end. The top flaps are closed, so her body is invisible. It looks like they are smuggling a gigantic sweet potato down the hall.
“No stretcher?”
That’s how I’m used to seeing bagged bodies leave the house.
“We can’t get a stretcher through this mess,” huffs the male paramedic.
Of course they can’t. I feel silly.
I watch them carry my mother around the banister and down the stairs.
“It’s called a flexible litter,” says Sergeant Jansen, pursing his lips.
“Got it. What hospital is she going to?”
“Lightstone,” he says.
I nod knowingly. Lightstone Hospital is where it all ended last time. Another wave of déjà vu sweeps over me.
“She been there for this before?” he asks.
“Four years ago.”
He nods curtly, “I’m very sorry.”
What else can a reasonable person say?
I make eye contact with the shining lens of his body camera, mumble, “Me too,” and descend into the childhood labyrinth of the great house to find my wife.
For the first time in decades, it feels like we might win.
To be continued…