Live and Let Die

"Welcome to Laurelton, we are so happy to have you come live with us."

It was one of the first things said to me after gracing the doorstep of the nursing facility that would become my abode for the unforeseeable future. Unfortunately, the phrase was a bit of a misnomer.

The nursing home is not where you come to live, it is where you come to die. I do not mean to sound melodramatic or harsh, but very few people that come into an institutionalized situation such as the one I found myself in on December 7, 2006 ever leave that facility or the nursing home system. There is a part of the building in which I live (notice that I choose not to call it home, because that word implies that it is a place of comfort and reverence) that is a rehabilitation and physical therapy center in which people are only present for stays of short duration, for the most part an enormous percentage of the residents will live here until they are either carried out on a stretcher in a body bag or will leave for the hospital and never come back alive. It is merely a way station between abandonment by one's family and one's eventual demise.

I could not even allow myself for a second to imagine that situation for my life. How could I imagine living another three or four decades surrounded by octogenarians who had lost their grip on reality and been reduced to shells of the people they had been when they contributed to both their families and society. How could my dreams be reduced from grandeur, success, and accomplishment to merely the simple fantasy of an extravagant dinner rather than the bland sustenance that graced the black and scarlet meal trays that left the kitchen three times a day.

My original plans were to finish my bachelors degree, write the Great American novel (making myself instantly famous and wealthy), and then leave this godforsaken place in lieu of a beach house in Mexico where I would have a militia of beautiful Mexican women take care of me for the rest of my days while drinking nothing but spirits with umbrellas in the glass. I had forced myself to give up on the dream of recovery from my injuries. I had given up on the dream of a cure for paralysis. I had no disillusion that my family would ever come to their senses and come back to rescue me from the hell that I was facing. My stepfather had made it oppressively clear over the past decade that not only was I not welcomed in my own home along with those that shared my genetic makeup, but he was under the guise that I was the sole reason his life had not led to riches, happiness, and success. I was gladly biopsied from the family that he now claimed as his own under the firm belief that I was the sole malignancy in the life he had always pictured in his dreams. I was nothing more to him than a source of income that he had dried up and, therefore, I was of no longer use to him or HIS family. So he sold the rest of his family on the idea that the situation had called for me to be discarded. It took a decade of constant bombardment of these views to finally tenderize the heart and minds of my bloodline to accept, but that is the situation that led me to the prison that I now faced.

My only solace came in the evenings when I could pull a blanket over my head then daydream. Those dreams were constructed of reliving an ever-growing cavalcade of timelines of my life if allowed to return to the fully functioning body I once had 15 minutes before I fell off the balcony forever dooming me to a life that led to my current imprisonment and reliving the previous 10 years as a constructive member of the able-bodied world. This was my only entertainment and perhaps the sole function that that kept my sanity intact. The few instances that I would find myself alone on the back porch of my stockade and would hear the not so distant sound of the train whistle I would long for the ability to slip from the gray walls and linoleum of my captors to find a place to park on the train tracks and await an impact that would free me from this reality.

I had not come to a nursing home to live, I had come to a prison that would contain my body and suppress my soul until a miracle would free me or death would come compassionately calling. I have not had caregivers that nurture and take care of me. I have had underpaid and overworked corrections officers that have taken out there frustrations upon myself and my fellow prisoners. I did not come here to live, but barring a miracle this is where I will die.