Bedroom Slippers

A blanket of frost coated the ground just outside of Ralph’s bedroom window. He watched as it glittered like miniature white lights buried in the bows of a Christmas tree. He heard Dot bustling around in the next room, having already taken a shower, dressed and put her teeth in, lest anyone see her without them! He knew that he too should begin the arduous task of dressing, shaving and making his way from the second story to the first for breakfast.

Ralph, struggling for breath in the early hours of the morning, had woken Dot as he rummaged in the dark for his inhaler. She listened, concerned, as he inhaled. She heard the mist of the inhaler and waited, with baited breath, as he struggled to regain his breath from the violent cough that trailed behind the use of the inhaler. Shortly, she heard a second mist of the inhaler. A second period of coughing. Ralph, spent from physical exertion, relaxed back into his pillow and slept.

Dot, in the kitchen, below the bedroom that she had shared with Ralph for forty-three years heard the clatter of the inhaler against the floor. Ralph had drifted to sleep before replacing the inhaler on the bedside table and as he shifted in his bed, preparing to rise, he knocked it to the ground. It would remain there, forgotten, until he struggled for air in the night. He would search blindly in the dark for it, cursing aloud, until Dot slipped from beneath her covers to retrieve it from the floor where it rested. This, sorrowfully, was the way of the night.

The tell-tale creak of the floorboard just outside the bathroom door indicated that Dot should begin his breakfast. Being Tuesday, Ralph would sit down to two eggs, sunny side up, over toast. Coffee. Black. In a cup, with a saucer on which to rest his spoon; never in a mug.

Exactly forty-five minutes post floorboard creak, Ralph emerged, to begin his descent down the marbled-brown, carpeted steps. The scuffle of his chair against the linoleum kitchen floor, as Dot pulled it from beneath the kitchen table, indicated that his breakfast was, as always, awaiting him.

Ralph wiped the crumbs of his toast from his mouth, but they escaped the folded napkin and rested in his lap. Dot retrieved his plate, set his pill bottles before him, and offered him the newspaper; perfectly folded, offering no hint that she had read it over her own breakfast hours earlier.

Ralph opened the paper and laid the expanse of it before him on the table. He read of inflation at the pumps, Desert Storm and the local obituaries as Dot, upstairs in their bedroom, pulled the covers of his bed taut, tucked the edges beneath the mattress and draped a hand-stitched quilt over the blanket.

Ralph, disgusted at his inability to bend and tie his shoes, curses. Dot, having begun her descent down the stairs, stops on the landing and peers through the window to the street. Taking a deep breath, she completes her descent, offering no indication that she overheard him curse, as she enters the kitchen. Silently, she bends to tie his shoes; he offers no objection. Why, she wonders in silence, doesn’t he just wear his bedroom slippers?

She retrieves her keys and quietly slips out the back door, slipping her jacket over her sweater as she goes. The garage, smelling of a damp cellar, shelters not only their car, but an array of shovels and rakes, pots that once housed flowers, but now house a community of eight-leggeds and a innumerable number of black garbage bags nearly bursting for the number of leaves that they are stuffed with. This afternoon she will drag each bag to the curb. Tomorrow is leaf day. Today however, she must back the car from the garage, to the Maggie tree that offers glorious blooms in summer, but today stands crooked and bends in the bluster that indicates a fast approaching winter. There, it will idle and warm while she helps Ralph into his coat.

Dr. Bergman’s front door is a short drive from their own dandelion yellow front door. Ralph carries with him an inhaler, knowing that the struggle of climbing from their car will leave him gasping. Sarah, Dr. Bergman’s nurse, greets Ralph and comments on the weather as he pulls for air, finding little. Ralph’s visit to Dr. Bergman today is to review the findings of a series of tests that he underwent the week before.

This day, despite his inability to catch his breath, is meant only for discussing his test results. Ralph is relieved that he does not have to display his barreled chest or provide a sample of the sputum that his lungs greedily horde.

The rustle of a chart is heard through the closed door of the consultation room. Dr. Bergman, with Ralph’s chart sheltered against his chest, as if to protect Ralph from his own results, enters and with a snap of his wrist he pushes the door closed. The click of the catch, though it must have occurred, could not be heard over Ralph’s wheezing.

A look of concern passes over Bergman’s face. There is no gentle way to introduce the results of the varied tests that Ralph had undergone.

Ralph greets Bergman with a grunt, as he lacks the oxygen to speak.

“Emphysema, your diagnosis is Emphysema”, says the doctor.

Though the diagnosis was not unexpected, the fear that accompanied it was. Dot’s mind was on fast forward, through the coming days, weeks…months?

Several months did indeed pass, with an increased reliance on medications and oxygen.

That summer, Ralph and Dot vacationed together in New Hampshire, as they had every year for as far back as either could recall. They spent two weeks sitting on their cottage porch, overlooking Newfound Lake. They tossed bread crumbs to the fish below them, delighted in the rising and setting of the sun over the water and dined at their favorite hole-in-the-wall pizza parlor. Their family came and went, visiting with them more days than not, knowing that this would be the final year that they would vacation together in that cottage on the lake.

“If you haven’t already, you will soon enter the third stage of the disease process”, said Dr. Bergman upon their return to his office following their vacation. “You will require continuous oxygen therapy and may find yourself hospitalized”, Dr. Bergman continued.

Within weeks, Ralph did indeed find himself hospitalized, in the ICU. His hospitalization prompted long distance visits from his eldest grandchild, a granddaughter. Lack of oxygen, perhaps narcotic medications, led to Ralph’s telling of several fabulous tales.

“My granddaughter is pregnant, carrying my first great-grandchild”, he would tell his nurses as they adjusted his IV’s.

“Later”, Stacey thought, as she drew her chair up beside him, “I will impart the truth on his nurses”. The truth didn’t matter to her at this moment, when what he believed to be true brought him peace and happiness. Ralph would flirt with his nurses, attempting to pinch their behinds and would, from time to time, succeed; his antics providing a glimpse of his former self. Stacey, present at his side for much of each day, recalled the laughter and happiness that she shared with him and her Nana over the years.

Tomorrow, she realized, she would catch her return flight from Boston to Charlotte. A lump, seemingly large enough to restrict her own airway, formed in her throat. Tears rushed forth. She stared, unblinkingly, past the nurse’s station at the exit sign, willing the tears away. The drops, despite her efforts, spilled over onto her cheeks.

With wavering voice, she said, “I will be back shortly”, and before her voice gave away her tears, she left the room. She rounded the nurse’s station; grief stricken sobs shaking the depths of her soul, and was captured in the arms of Ralph’s nurse.

She shared glimpses of her childhood with his nurse, told of the child that she was not carrying and cried for the life that her Grampa was losing to a demeaning death. She told of her desire to stay, but knowing that she could not, her desire to know that he found peace in death.

The early hours of an October dawn crept into the bedroom in which she had spent a restless night. Stacey closed her eyes, willing the sun not to rise. Knowing that visiting hours began at eight, she slipped from her bed. Steam from the shower filled the voids around the toilet and beneath the sink, as she wiped away a circle of condensation from the mirror. The time had come.

In her youth, her Grampa was invincible. He had taught her the names of the Great Lakes, that a straight line was the shortest distance between two points, known that computers were the way of the future long before computers were commonplace and been her support and encouragement as she enlisted in the service.

She had served, her country yes, but more importantly at this moment, she had served him. She had served to plant tomato plants and rows of beans with him in his garden on the hill. She had served to debate him on the events current to that time. She had served to fetch him a cold beer from the refrigerator. She had served as a companion, regardless of whether a word was spoken in the time that they spent together.

Throughout the night Stacey struggled with the knowledge that her final visit with her Grampa was upon her. Yet, it wasn’t until she stood on the other side of his curtained glass ICU door that she realized that saying goodbye would be a disservice to him.

He had provided her with perspective, encouragement, guidance (though backwards from time to time), and above all…love. She crossed the threshold and approached the sleeping figure of her Grampa.

“I love you Grampa”, she whispered softly. He stirred.

“Be a good girl”, he whispered.

Ralph was discharged into his wife’s loving care, under the watchful eye of Hospice. Two weeks passed, as did four. Six weeks came, as did the call. From the other end of the telephone came the words, “Grampa died”. He took with him the knowledge of his Granddaughter’s love and his bedroom slippers.

And so, the first chapter of Stacey’s life, the chapter of her youth, was laid to rest.