This is what all the therapists at my Pulmonary Rehab Class are telling us. There’s more moisture in the air and that makes it heavier, harder to breathe in, harder to push out. The class, made up of roughly a dozen people, most of them twenty years older than myself, are struggling. People sit slumped, breathing hard. Scratchy, hospital towels around their neck, dixie cups full of water in their hands.
The instructor continues to lead us through our paces, but gently. Beside me a woman in a wheelchair has fallen asleep. The intimacy of that. To look over and see the flaked, yellowed skin exposed above her black socks. Her face relaxed to the point of formlessness. Her glasses smudged, fallen. What dreams now forming and dispersing within. And across the room a very elderly man, so old and thin he looks like a fledgling, has fallen asleep, too. Almost fetal in his wheelchair. And the instructor says something with her eyes, perhaps, and we all begin to exercise so gently. Nobody speaks. Everything softer, everything hushed. And as we pretend to jog in our seated places, we’ve become as silent as ninjas. As cats hunting. As clouds touching in the skies above.
Our quiet, a blanket we put around the shoulders of those sleeping within this wounded circle.
The doors open on the sixth floor and directly across from me is another elevator, it’s doors opening to reveal just one person, too. We look at one another, this woman about my age and I. The plot device that launched a thousand Romcoms. A moment so random yet particular, that it doesn’t feel random at all. We know this. It’s the invisible line connecting us. We’re probably a little amused by it, but maybe a little saddened, too. Each of us in our 50’s– me with my oxygen, she with her IV pole. I wave over at her. A small, rueful wave. She smiles, looks down and away, waves back. Our losses connect for just a moment, and then the doors close, and we vanish, ghosts falling away to the past.
A college-aged woman is making her way through the crowds. She’s wearing a big sweater over which she’s pulled a down vest. Her smile is warm as she cuts through the crowd, a long skateboard tucked beneath her arm. She looks so healthy, so confident, so effortlessly beautiful. It is impossible not to imagine her life, to see her her boldly meeting each new challenge she faces in this fresh world. She must skateboard through the city each day, her foot slapping the pavement as she goes faster and faster. Popping over streetcar tracks and swerving around trucks, she is the glowing velocity of youth. And then she materializes in the hospital like an answered prayer, and for a moment all our boring suffering falls aways, and there is nothing but the hope of spring.
]]>And then closer, there’s birdsong. A long winter finally breaking. Something remembered in the bones, something hopeful returning. And everybody in the elevator at the hospital feels this, too. We’re packed tightly together, but everyone is boisterous and chatty. Like we’re going on an adventure. The porter flirts with another worker, both of them speaking in accents the other can barely decipher. But it doesn’t matter. People are smiling and feeling pretty. Making eye contact and laughing. And the doors open again and a middle-aged couple walk in. The woman, who looks bulletproof, like she commands vast industries, is crying. The man beside her holds her hand. Biting his lip, he looks down. And the way she stood there, looking straight ahead while the tears ran down her face. So unashamed, so brave. The rest of us fell silent in the face of their suffering. Shuffling about we made a little more room for them, letting them penetrate through to the middle. And so we quietly encircled them, and knowing not what else to do, we stood with them and their grief as we descended through the hospital, and then watched as they stepped out into the day, their lives forever changed.
A couple who look like they’ve been together for a very long time sit in a waiting room at the Western Hospital. The man looks anxious and uncomfortable, maybe even angry, and his wife will not intrude upon that. Holding her purse primly– like she was in church– she sits with her knees together staring straight ahead. She will not say a word. She will not move a muscle. They don’t look at one another. The tension in their lives a living thing, a creature that travels great distances and will not go away.
And in the foyer there is a Book and Bake sale taking place. A very skinny woman in a motorized wheelchair is looking at the cupcakes. She’s wearing a pink kerchief on her head, in honour of Valentine’s Day, and she is thumbing through a book called Rogue Angel.
All the donated books there. Books thumbed through on beach vacations, books that changed lives or passed right through them. All these stories moving through time, intersecting, and ultimately reducing to the same story: How will I live, how will I die? And at the kiosk beside, there is a long lineup for the Lotto 6/49. Doctors and patients alike. Pretty nurses are scrolling their phones as they wait, men in hospital gowns clutching IV stands, people visiting loved ones. Each person having a plan for the money, each one hoping for something–a candy apple red Corvette, a promising drug, some safe horizon. Past them and outside, through slush and snow I step into a taxi. I am tired and my oxygen tubing has caught on the door, and as I am trying to disentangle it, the sudden astonishment of a female driver speaking to me. Her accented voice from far away, the subtle trace of her perfume, like light falling on water.
]]>It’s the coldest day of the year and somewhere within, each one of us feels a premonition of mortality shudder our bones. The foyer of the Western Hospital has more homeless people than usual. Mostly men with jagged, unfashionable beards, they curl into the hospital’s available lounge chairs. Shapeless under their winter gear and salvaged miscellany, they appear to be melting—whatever had lived inside, now collapsed and unsupported. These people, so candid, they doze all around us.
Because of the intense cold, my Pulmonary Rehabilitation class was sparsely attended. Pop music, meant to summon our younger, more vital selves, echoed in the mostly empty room. I looked at the cut-out articles on Bristol board that had been pasted to the walls as I walked on the treadmill:
SAVING ENERGY AND MAKING WORK SIMPLE
10 STEPS TO BECOME LESS ANXIOUS
IS IT THE FLU OR IS IT A COLD?
As the class went on, more and more people showed up. People with walkers, people on oxygen, people bent with age and other maladies, each one coming through difficulty. Each one still trying to keep that fire lit. As the class is ending, a video is played where an instructor leads us through a short, cool-down routine. Betsy is sitting in front of me. On oxygen. Perhaps 90 years old. Unaware that the video has ended on a stalled frame, she sits there with her arms outstretched, just like the frozen-instructor on the tv. She just sits there like that, anticipating more instruction. Betsy, she looks like an evangelist taking the stage and greeting her audience. Like an Olympic athlete about to dive off the high tower. Like a bird, waiting for the wind to come up from behind and gently lift her back to flight.
One in red scrubs, the other in black.
These women, they are attractive. Around thirty, they look like they’re used to getting hit on in bars, to knowing what it feels like to have a man watching carefully as she leans over the pool table to take a shot. Neither woman makes eye contact or acknowledges anyone else in the elevator. There is an unspoken hierarchy. We all know it.
They continue their conversation, which had likely followed them all day, as if nobody else was present, as if nobody else was visible. And so we all stand there, subordinate now, pushed just a little further to the margins while they talk about the perfectly normal privileges of being young and desired.
And then the elevator doors open and we walk out into the foyer. A classical quartet is playing beneath the Shopper’s Drug Mart sign. All the players in black suits and ties, all concentrating. The music is familiar and dislocating. Like a dream memory. Listen carefully. And yes, yes it is a classical interpretation of Under Pressure. And suddenly you are transported to when you first heard the song, back to when you played pools in bars and your heart was inexhaustible, back when within each day the premonition of true love was ever-present.
The elderly husband is in a wheelchair being pushed through the hospital by his elderly wife. They’ve probably been married for 60 years, but he’s presently vanishing before her eyes. No longer the man she met chasing a dog down a street so many years ago. Now he’s frail and stooped, his shoulders curling forward as if some magnet within his body was compelling them together. But in spite of this, in spite of his immobility, the hospital slippers, IV bag and bruises crawling up his legs, he’s trying to be cheerful, trying to make the best of things. He says something to his wife, but his voice is a whisper and she can’t hear him. He tries again and it’s the same result. And then he stops trying to talk, and the two of them, so bound, move in silence toward whatever comes next.
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