I don’t much like the food here at Pulmonary Rehab.

The hatred of hospital food is pretty much a universal, and so I imagined that all the other residents would share my point of view. But no, I was dead wrong. The people I spoke with liked the food, even the simulated pork thing that had been pressed to make it look like ribs.

The reasons for this are simple enough. Many of the people here– by virtue of their condition– are unable to work and have little money. Many of them are older and live alone, lacking the will, funds or ability to attentively feed themselves, and are thus entirely grateful when a meal is delivered to them three times a day. This food, regardless of its quality and regardless of whether it’s “Instagrammable” or not, is a good thing.

Its presence is a relief, a daily stress crossed-out.

People enter into this program eroded and depressed, little more than shadows of who they once were. On Fridays we’re allowed to go home for the weekend, but not everybody does. Some people are too sick or live too far away, but others stay because they have nothing they want to return to.

One man, heavy with sad eyes, said to me as he settled in before the TV, “Why would I want to go home and just sit there, staring at my four walls? I like it better here.”

Sometimes people forget just how breakingly lonely illness can be.

But soon enough, people are reanimated. Men who wouldn’t make eye contact when they entered are shortly cracking wise, singing along to the oldies while working out, and women who hadn’t played cards in years are laughing together over Euchre.

Collected from disparate lives and thrown together in common cause, we get to know one another gradually, through the honesty of proximity rather than the spin of words. You see the pain first, because you know the pain, too. But gradually, that’s chipped away to reveal the person lost inside, the person capable of joy and wonder. It’s a gift, this, and all of us here gathered beneath the mortal cloud of our illness become family, and will linger as family long after each one of us has stepped out the door and receded back into the mysterious worlds from which we came.

And so I did.

The place, stripped to a skeleton staff and now loosely populated by the permanent residents– most of whom were confined to wheelchairs of varying complication– was pretty empty. The days, now shapeless and free of plot, offered little and so I wandered hallway after hallway. Seeming more memory than music, the theme song to MASH drifted from one room I passed,

while another was antiseptic and empty but for Trump/Pence banners taped defiantly to the wall, and then through a doorway, I caught a glimpse of a nurse changing a patient’s tracheotomy tube– so intimate and tender as to be virtually erotic. Downstairs, scattered like islands, I came upon people who sat anchored and voiceless in wheelchairs, each one stationed near a window, watching.

There was a church service later in the morning that took place in the same space that hosted Bingo, Pub Night and all our other events. It was Catholic, which occasioned a few religious props being removed from a box and placed on a cafeteria table, and somehow this act was achingly beautiful.

A strong, elderly woman dressed all in black walked in, made the sign of the cross, and then nodded warmly to all who made eye contact. She went directly to a middle-aged woman who was frozen and strapped into a wheelchair, and touched her with a tenderness that exceeded language. Gently, she pulled a favourite sweater over her head, and then smiling,  began to brush her hair—a mother’s imperishable, radiant love, holier than a saint.

An impossibly old woman was reclined, almost prone, in a wheelchair. Blankets and knitted things covered virtually every inch of her body, and her skin was so very thin, her body so frail, that it seemed as if a soft gust might be enough to push her through the veil. A couple of hospital staff tended to her, telling her that her brother would be there any moment now. Her eyes flickered open at his mention, and as if surfacing through water she said, “Oh, I hope so,” and then she fell back down and in to sleep.

Ten minutes later a tall, elderly man, clearly ill himself, entered and sat stoically beside her. With a bible open on his lap he mumble-prayed along with the priest. He never touched her, nor did he say anything to her while she slept through the service, but it was clear that he was her brother. He was her tie to this world, the one now disintegrating around her into a living mist. Drifting in and out, all of time swirling around her, what version of her brother might she have hoped to summon, what memory returning in dream, what ghost to see her home?