as she cried at the window, banging on the glass.
Bringing Mia to a day care integrated in an old folks’ home had seemed like a good idea, since she hardly ever saw her grandparents. But twice a day, I walked through the halls, watching the staff line up the residents for medications and complain to their faces about the way they smelled. It felt like I was witnessing, firsthand, the end of life, and, in contrast to the Sad House, it might have been one of the most miserable ways to go.
* * *
The Sad House didn’t get dirty. Sometimes I had to scrub blood droplets off the bathroom floor, and the toilet was a disaster. Other than that, everything had a thin layer of dust on it. The old man was there most of the time unless he was in the hospital, but he seemed to use very little of his house.
Judging by their photos, his wife had died in the late eighties. At first, I had assumed she’d died recently, but I couldn’t find any photos of her that appeared to be from the last several years. Trinkets she’d collected remained on the windowsills: little worry dolls and bird nests, neatly lined up. Tacked to the corkboard over the desk in their kitchen fluttered to-do lists in her handwriting. The bathroom had two sinks, and hers still had a hair dryer plugged in and hung on a hook that I dusted during my visits. His had a cup with a comb and his medications—which were different every time I came. I’d checked the medications, wondering what his illness was. It felt more like a broken heart.
On a shelf in the bathroom, directly behind where he stood to look in the mirror, were the ashes of his wife and their son. In a photo, the son stood on top of a mountain and gave a peace sign. He wore a green bandana and had a long beard. Inside the frame was a familiar poem:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
Below, two small boxes rested side by side: one pink clay with molded roses and the other dark pewter. His wife’s picture leaned behind the pink one. I opened it to see what was inside. The boxes held ashes, and tags and statements from the funeral home.
He ate pastries and sandwiches from a grocery store deli, drank coffee with a lot of Kahlúa. He was probably in his late sixties or early seventies and still liked to golf and gamble at the Indian casinos. In the garage moldered a nice-looking speedboat and a Jeep CJ. On the living room wall was a picture of his wife in front of the Jeep, smiling and wearing sunglasses. He smoked unfiltered Camels in his bedroom, standing in the frame of the sliding glass door, or on his front porch when the weather was decent. His younger son, who lived a couple hours away, didn’t seem to visit much. He was alone, dying slowly in a shrine that hadn’t changed since his wife had passed away. He’d done everything right—good job, gorgeous house, married a woman he loved and traveled with—but despite all this he was still dying alone.
When I went home the first night after cleaning the Sad House, I couldn’t stop thinking about my client. It had just been a mindless job and something to pay my bills, but now it felt like the work had an unexpected imprint on my life, and the vulnerability I was exposed to somehow relieved me of my own. Though I never met or spoke to any of them, though many did not know that I existed, my clients began to feel like family members or friends I worried about, wondered about, cared for from a distance. I wondered what my clients did in the evenings. Where they sat. What they ate and watched the day before. How they felt day to day. My life had become so quiet. These people gave me something to look forward to, people to hope for and want good things for other than myself.
* * *
Mia kept getting switched from one classroom at the day care to the next because of the high turnover among employees paired with the ebb and flow of enrollment numbers. For a couple of weeks, every time I saw her morning teacher, she actively wiped away her own tears before taking my child, who was bucking and