I visited my late grandmother’s home for the last time today and saw the man I believe to be responsible for her sudden decline. Though I view her death as a release, recent events in the last four weeks all point to one cause that actually brought along her passing.

In all assisted care living situations, I assume that nurses and care managers are scheduled back-to-back with shortened shifts – or anything that will allow the corporate structures to support fewer full-time employees and benefits packages. I’m sure people are less likely to entrust their elderly family members with assisted living these days since prices are so high. I’m guessing assisted care facilities see this in a decrease in residents, and the idea that they’ve got to hold on to whatever residents they have while introducing new itemized charges per feeding, bathing, medicating, etc. Everybody’s just trying to sustain. There’s no one person or party to blame. I get it.

In the last couple of months, a new male resident came into the dementia-suffering wing that my grandmother lived in. He is a war veteran, huge in stature with permanent damage to his frontal lobe. This means he can’t make decisions, plus he’s probably suffering from some degree of post-traumatic stress. The man, like all the other residents in that wing, is not right.

He has a history of throwing a resident up against a wall. He has barricaded the only exit into the rest of the facility, insisting that they were all at war. He has demanded everyone – nurses and residents, included – to follow his drills. He has broken doors off of their hinges. In short, he has a violent history.

About four weeks ago, my grandmother was found in bed, unable to get up. She was moaning in pain. They found a huge bruise on her knee (Her bruise was as big as one of my trapeze bruises.), and she couldn’t bare to extend or strain her leg in any way.

They told my mom she must have fallen to get that bruise.

Logic: When an elderly person falls, he or she typically lays where he or she falls. This is what my grandmother did the three times she previously had a serious fall.

They couldn’t explain to my mom why the heat was turned up all the way on my grandmother’s thermostat, or why her door was wide open when they found her.

One week later, the morning staff found that the man had urinated all over my grandmother’s floor. My grandmother was still in bed. She couldn’t move.

Shortly after the pee incident, my mother went to visit my grandmother. The brand new comforter we had brought to her wasn’t on her bed. We asked where it was. They told us it was in her closet. We asked why. They said my grandmother had an accident and defecated on the comforter. They said they tried to wash it four times and it needed to dry, so they stuffed it in the closet.

Logic: It’s nearly impossible for an elderly person whose Depends are changed on-the-clock and as-needed to make such a mess on the outside of their covers when they are essentially bedridden. Further, why would you stuff a comforter into a closet to let it dry?

After her death, we tried washing the comforter in our washer. The stains came out and had clearly not touched water, let alone soap, beforehand.

Every time these and other similar stories came up, I thought of that man. My gut didn’t deem him fit to live in a group setting. Such a situation is unsafe to fellow residents and part-time employees. He needed a more specialized facility, one even more high-maintenance than what was designed for the dementia-addled residents in that wing.

This whole time, my mother was apprehensive about voicing the feelings in her gut. We all told her it must be that man. “But it’s not his fault,” she said. Of course that is true, but that doesn’t change that it was him.

He was a hazard, a danger.

It seemed that once my grandmother was bedridden for good (For a while we tried to keep her up and about, meaning she sat in a recliner in the common area all day long.), this man was given more and more drugs. My mom talks about how she sat across from him at lunch and he was struggling to count past three. The day my grandmother died I saw him hunched over a coffee book, bumping it up against a door jamb as he circled a piece of paper over the end papers. I guess they didn’t move him out. They just subdued him instead.

For the safety of others, he is now a shell of  a man.

*

I spoke with him the afternoon after my grandmother died. I propped a box of her belongings against the wall as I waited for my mother to discuss some business of death stuff with the manager. This man came around the corner, probably standing 6′-something in his day. I estimate he was wearing a L-XL flannel shirt whose sleeve cuffs he actually filled. His hands were absolutely huge, especially for a senior citizen. He used the wall for balance and looked at me.

“So,” he said very slowly, “Should I call you ‘sir?’ Or should I call you ‘mister?’”

With my curly hair hanging down to the middle of my back, I pointedly enunciated, “You may call me ‘miss.’”

“Oh,” he said, sitting into a nearby armchair. He looked at my moving box. “Are you an electrical engineer?”

“No,” I said. “This is just a box of knick-knacks.”

Silence. He kept looking at the box and looking at me, trying to make connections.

“Is that what you studied?” I asked him.

“No, I just haven’t seen you here before. The other ones, they might come here twice a week. But I don’t know you.”

“Yeah, I don’t come here that often,” I responded. In fact, I pretty much wouldn’t be going there anymore at this point.

Looking at my box again, he asked, “So those are special memories?”

“Yes,” I said. That was the end of our conversation.

He was eerily on-point.

Aging is a delicate thing.