by Casey Golomski
Hand-less, arm-less
Clocks analogize what remains of time
Here—night is a blue moon affixed in smoke-grey surrounds,
Day an orange sun winking “you’ll see,” another partition
With an image of sandwich bread expresses when it is lunch.
Such dementia clocks do not tell the actual minute or hour yet
Visualize, graphically depict what must matter in the moment,
The now.
I remember though,
It was Tuesday April 7. I count 45
Seconds between each bite of vanilla ice cream. More so,
It is a slurp away, softening mound of churned milk and cane,
Its shallow silver vessel lifts within the pink, dentured cave, shovels
Gently to the gullet as the spoon pulls in reverse. The sound of success,
The scrape:
Tooth against silver.
“She enjoys the vanilla,” says Susan
Who watches the dessert’s orchestration with compassion.
Merle, another tannie: “She must have been beautiful,”
Remarking on Bea’s blue eyes, remaining blond, as if she were not there.
They tell me they’ve never seen the woman smile.
I remember though,
It was then Tuesday April 28, and breakfast-time.
We—Lindiwe and I—pass out plates for each: Merle, Susan, Oosthuizen.
“Oxygen” they call this last tannie cannula-strung to a tank or, laughingly, “LaMoya.”
Bea’s lucid, more aware than I have ever seen her before.
Now perhaps, because it is the time of the orange sun’s winking. She eats
While I stand. Noeline, the former prison nurse, enters, commands me to sit,
So Bea and I are eye to eye.
Shame,
Or something like it wells in my reflection in the blue infinite gaze,
That I hadn’t faced her before as one should, assuming that
Staff who sat to feed their client-residents were tired or lazy.
I realize that by not sitting I am not engaging with her, or existing as human myself:
A disembodied hand with spoon careening toward mouth,
Discerning the scrape.
Noeline drops a white pill onto the plate:
Porridge, egg, bacon. Again,
Somehow, we know how to accomplish the matter. Again,
Waiting for a nearly-minute long chew to conclude,
A less-gentle exhale, a chin’s tilt, to say “no more, dankie”
To egg and bacon. She releases from our embrace,
Another date complete.
I withdraw the spoon,
Remove her bib.
I remember though,
It was then Friday May 29. Ronel tells me
Bea died on Sunday.
“I fed her every day,” is all I can say, a tingling grey-ness rippling through me.
Ronel: “The night before, she was fine, and at sunrise, when they went to wake her:
Gone. Still warm, but gone.”
The Kardex reads that Bea’s toenail had come off. A sore from a nappy. Paracetamol—nothing Serious—but eating or drinking far less in the last two days.
Lindiwe brings us Ricoffy: packets empty, water steams,
Spoons scrape the cups’ sides.
At the end of the hall,
The clock depicts:
“It was time.”