Last week, I spent 80 minutes sitting fifteen feet away from where a man spent the last four days of his life in agonizing, painful, and humiliating misery and excrement before dying two weeks to the day before my visit, and the room was as peaceful as a clean slate is bare. There wasn’t anything there to sense, and there was no lack of anything to sense.
You know how a recently washed plate will smell of the cleanser, even if it is only water, but how a clean plate from the cupboard just smells of being there. That’s how that room was. It wasn’t just that there was nothing, there was a lack of having been scrubbed into nothing.
I have no idea why that bugs the hell out of me, even though it is a relief that his passing was complete.
In contrast, there was another room in that house, that I never approached, that I could sense from outside and I thought that was the room where he died at first. That’s the room where the [many expletives and no small number of curses goes here] assholes who had moved into the home to take care of the elderly couple lived. Come to find out, they heard the ailing couple calling for help and ignored them because they didn’t want to deal with the sick couple’s literal shit.
If the house could cut that room away from itself and drop it into the Abyss, it would. Instead, the house itself warned me away from that room, the way you warn a visitor about an unstable plank on the deck. (I heeded the warning.)
I have been to that house twice, and the lack of anything related to his passing hitting my radar is still one part relief, and one part disconcerting. I feel like I should have sensed something because of the shenanigans I find myself in. Woo-inadequacy, perhaps? And yet, that my services are not required in that sphere of concern is always a welcome thing.
I think I’m brooding about this because the grass in the yard where I first did psychopomp duty is dying due to lack of watering. Except for one small place which is as green as it ever was. The place where the man died holding my hand. I wonder if I have to burn the jersey again.