Arnold

One day while making beds in the nursing home where I worked, I noticed that we had a new “patient”, as we referred to people then, moving into the male semi-private room near our dining room. He would be living on the hallway side of the room, not the window side. Unlucky, because privacy would be hard to come by there. By his silhouette, I could tell that he was short and well-dressed in trousers, a button-down shirt, and Angora cardigan. His back was to me and he held a small suitcase in his right hand. He did not need a cane or a walker. His posture was both relaxed and sturdy. When he turned around, I noticed by his facial features, that he had Down Syndrome. He caught my eye and gave me a chin nod hello and then went quietly about the business of unpacking. He had only a few pair of striped pajamas, some leather slippers, a bathrobe, and two or three changes of clothes and underwear. Lastly, he reached into his suitcase for a photograph in a frame. It was a picture of a small, fluffy, black and white dog, which he placed carefully on his nightstand saying, “yeah.”

I must have looked dumbfounded standing there in his doorway because I was dumbfounded. I had had some experience getting to know and learning to help children with Down Syndrome when, in elementary school, I volunteered in a classroom where my mom worked. I always wanted to play with and help these giggly, rambunctious kids that were funny and incredibly affectionate. They mauled me with affection, plowed me under with hugs and joy. One, named Shelly, called me “Lahs” yelling my name from across the playground whenever she saw me. “Hey Laaaaaaaahs!”

The teachers warned that sadly many of the children with Down whom we cared for would not live to grow up or if they did, they probably wouldn’t live to old age due to congenital heart defects and other serious health problems that can affect them. In fact, one little boy who had already had many surgeries and was perhaps the most adorable and loving of the bunch, a superstar toddler among toddlers, didn’t survive one of his surgeries one Christmas holiday. So, when I saw Arnold’s face in the nursing home, an old man’s face with lines and wrinkles, and his white hair, it stirred a kind of awe in me.

But the place where I worked was strict, and orderly, not the chaotic playground jumble that I had experienced in my youth, and Arnold was solitary and organized. He was not going to maul me or anyone else with joy. We were instructed by our head nurse that his parents, who had been in their 90’s, had recently passed and he was now alone without siblings, aunts, uncles. No one. He had routines for morning, noon, and evening that he would do himself and that we were to learn so that we could assist if needed, and that was it.

He never seemed to need anything. 7 o’clock, time for pajamas, robe, and slippers. In bed by 7:30 with a light still on and the radio playing softly. If he felt misplaced, adrift, and how could he not, he didn’t show it. He rarely smiled, was a man of few words, so there was no way to know with certainty what he was thinking or feeling. The picture of that dog, though, got me. A Shih tzu, probably, in retrospect, with that underbite, the dog the Buddha is rumored to have carried.

I have helped, by now, hundreds of people get settled into their rooms or apartments in long-term-care settings, many of whom I remember fondly, tenderly, even sorrowfully at times. There were the 94-year-old twin sisters who wore matching dresses and favorite leather “pumps” and who each immediately sat down on her respective “twin” bed and began cleaning out her purse, or the people who hit their beds with relief, legs outstretched, head resting on a cocked arm, in a posture that says, at last warmth! Care! Three meals! And, of course the many, many, mostly men, who carry a photograph of their young wife, or a wedding photo, to place on their bedside stand where it will be the first thing they see every morning and the last thing they see before sleep.

Arnold was unforgettable. Though not the only person with Down Syndrome that I’ve met in these settings along the way, he is one of a rare few. I don’t think that is why I remember him, though. It was something about his comportment, his dignity, and the way that he bore his obvious grief, that affected me and still does. Not that I think stoicism is the remedy, necessarily, for woe. But for me, personally, in the laboratory of woe that I’ve been privy to in my lifetime, it strikes me as an excellent choice. Wise. Some people choose an exhausting, honest struggle and go out snapping and snarling at everyone. That’s an option, too, and a noble one, as a great poet once suggested: "Rage, rage…” We choose our own adventures for myriad reasons with thousands of inputs along the way. In speaking truth to power, rage and despair are illuminating. I would never want to try to jolly someone out of those feelings and rub salt in their wounds. Still, the people who have been able to cultivate equanimity have left me with a strong expression of the nature of power itself.

The picture of the dog, “Buddy” is the name that I remember, though I am sure I’m probably making that up, spoke of Arnold’s nostalgia for better times, a depth of feeling, and love. The striped pajamas, Angora sweater, leather slippers and long life bore testimony to a legacy of care on the part of his parents. But his routines, the scaffold of his days, and his reliance upon them were a testimonial of both sacrificial love and diligent practice. I wish I could have met his parents. In a way, a small part of me grieved them with him. I could feel both their presence and their absence as he went about his business and knew that because his routines had been constructed, taught, and enforced by them, they were, in a way, representative of them which is why it was so important for us to get them right. If Arnold balked at the way we trimmed his nails—I can’t recall that he ever did; he probably trimmed his own—it could be that we were violating something more sacred than mere physical comfort in that moment. It would also be a violation of the memory of deep and consoling comfort.

I didn’t know Arnold really, at all. He spoke very little. I knew his belongings and his simple morning and evening rituals. I think once I might have tried to sit beside him on his bed where he often sat in darkness (and what some felt was heartbreaking silence) in the evening staring straight ahead before he got ready for sleep. We tried to invite him to dinner in the dining room where the dining room manager played classical records on the Hi-fi every night and people still gathered in their best clothes to share supper, but he wanted none of it. He was, by then, entirely self-contained. If he had been a wriggling, giggling friend of Buddy’s at one time in his life, I couldn’t tell it from the 70 year-old person in front of me. He was simply a diminutive, elegant elderly man, completely in possession of himself in his final days, and he was evidence to me of the courage that can be possible when one has been profoundly loved.