Checking Out

 

This was just another room in another care home that had to be emptied hastily and on short notice of the few personal effects of the departed occupant who had ceased to have any need of them since the early hours, and who had exchanged, also hastily, this temporary dwelling for that other more permanent one.  

They were there to empty the room. He had come along as an auxiliary, as an escort, in support to the bereaved next of kin. He lent her a hand with the packing and removing. He was there because he was needed by her side, the grieving daughter, doing a husband’s duty, sharing in the grief. But while there, he found the room stifling; the task morbid and the place forbidding. With things cleared out and only some paperwork remaining, he excused himself and walked out in need of fresh air, saying to her he would wait in the car park.

It wasn’t his first visit at the care home. He had helped when moving in and had visited many times since, and was now helping with checking out. Yet the air never felt so heavy inside or so fresh outside. His memory of the first arrival, not very long ago, was vivid and he sensed that this last visitation would be equally deeply imprinted in his mind with all the tension and sadness of the day. The irony was not lost to him. Memory was so noticeably absent inside those walls in amongst the residents, and its loss a prime reason for why many of them where there at all.

In the cold late December night, days before Christmas, the dim crescent of the moon, having traversed the sky, was coming to the end of its toil and was almost touching the western horizon, while the twilight was fading and the first stars in between the clouds were flickering, barely visible over the city sky. No birds broke the quiet of the night, and if the cosmos intended its deeper meaning out, it was content to speak it in silent darkness.  But though the cosmic voice beyond the clouds was mute, there was somewhere a voice behind those walls, quite audible. And as it was faceless and nameless, it felt almost incorporeal, as if spoken not by one person in particular, but by the care home itself, crying in the night on behalf of all those souls, then present at that place (or other places like it) or long departed.

First he paid little attention as he paced up and down the car park. He ignored it thinking it might have been a child, a toddler perhaps, crying for his mother. But soon he realised no children’s homes were about. The voice was unmistakably coming from inside the care home. His ears and then his senses were drawn to it. There was a poignancy about the call. And a stark (almost brutal) intensity in its intent.

One word, repeated, again and again and again and again.

“Mummy”, “Mummy”, “Mummy”, “Mummy”!

… deploringly at first. Pleadingly, as if mummy was in the next room, listening to the cry. As if able still, as of old, to be moved by its plea, to answer it, whether promptly or eventually (as the case may have been so very long ago)!

… angrily at times. “Why aren’t you coming”? “Mummy, why aren’t you coming”?

… in genuine puzzlement at other times. As if in dismay or astonishment, that the cry should remain unanswered.

… in fluctuating intonation or intensity, but in depressingly consistent repetitiveness and desperation.

No Poe, no Kipling, no poet’s eloquence, to place mother on the pedestal of the muses. Just a single word, cried out with so much meaning and emotion, summing up the human condition, shouting of frailty of body and soul! A mixture of sadness, disappointment, fear of abandonment, anger, panic. A pulpable longing for the mother’s cuddle, her comfort, her love, her caress, her soothing lullaby.

How after and under layers of pealed and discarded memories of a long life, that primal memory stood unwilted, of how only mummy can make all pain go away! How mummy can make tomorrow a better place!

Her crime, her absence.

He paced the car park, and he paced. And he listened to the harrowing cry and he listened.

Half hour must have passed or more, which felt much, much longer. And the voice would not cease or abate.

Angels would weep, if angels could hear, though evidently mummy could not hear.

The admin eventually done, he was reunited with the bereaved daughter and together they drove off.

The harrowing voice, piercing the dark silence, eventually dissipated in the distance.

The piercing in his heart would not fade and the echo of that voice remained as a kind of background theme to the Christmas celebrations. It remains still. A reminder of our transience and fragility.