Try to Remember

I’ve been working a lot recently. I’m a home health aide, which means I assist old men with the activities of daily living. In the past two months I’ve learned all of the ways you can dress, clean, feed, bathe and move people who can no longer move for themselves. I’ve had comical moments, poignant moments, and experienced the fleeting boredom of sitting in comfortable silence with a near stranger.

Some households run like a machine, drawers labeled, supplies replenished according to a definite routine, schedules enforced. Some have accreted a way of functioning as the illness or infirmity advanced, the evidence of past vibrancy visible underneath a layer of harried improvised solutions to emerging realities.

I sing to one of my patients because it calms him and helps him drift off to sleep. Another is all business — I ferry him from recliner to bed, attend to his immediate needs, plaster the holes in the boat. I’ve grown attached to some of them, probably all of them, which is bad news in this economic climate, where people are loathe to change their hairdresser but not their employer. I worry that when I leave it will be evidence of some sort of negligence on my part, a failure to see it through to the end. I understand better why so many choose to remain aloof.

I try, when I have the time, to give time to creative projects and read when I can. I still have to attend to the quotidian mess of living, laundry needs folding and dishes scrubbed. My hands are perpetually dry; this week I plunged them into a bowl of hot sauce and chicken breasts while preparing meals and my fingers sung all night with the humiliation of my carelessness. Lord knows I’m not short on gloves.

I can’t imagine I’ll do this work forever. Already I’m getting tired of its rhythms and routines. For now it is steady work, all I want, and I’m making it to the gym at night for sweat therapy. When I’m driving I’ve been listening to show tunes — I’m tired of the motivational podcasts I subscribe to and their insistence that there’s a golden tipping point within my grasp that let will loose the true abundance and meaning of my life.

I’ll leave you with Jerry Orbach singing “Try to Remember” from The Fantasticks. It is my latest obsession.