The father had gone missing and I couldn't stop checking my facebook feed to monitor his safety.
As if, by checking, at 4:00a, I could will him to return.
I was at least three degrees separated from the situation, but it bore a hole into my heart.
My daughter's friend's father had gone missing and, naturally, it led me straight back to 1965.
When my 17-year-old birth mother had to leave.
And to 1981 when that same mother got into a car and drove away from her hollowed-out children (my half-siblings, not me; I had landed elsewhere.)
These holes.
These complicated, terrifying, somehow better-than-the-other-thing chasms.

I've been away from my two youngest teens for two months. Not by choice. Thankfully, I found a new, superlative therapist.

That my teens are inserting distance into the distance (unless they aren't; they allow slivers of connection) makes it exponentially harder. It is, I remind myself, their job. This business of separation. Of individuating.

Of poisoned wells.

Pain = growth, I mantra.

Leading with my shoulder, I go to the nursing home. In this week's session, the seniors do a sing-a-ling with a bright yellow "SUNSHINE" songbook. Never mind that the Activities Center has no windows and they rarely get outside. I'll Be Seeing You, Glow Worm, Billy Boy. Songs like that.

A dozen or so residents, each in a wheelchair, around a long table. Like strollers, only wheelchairs. At once, sad and beautiful.

"Move over next to me, Annabel!"* shouts resident Marlene with her new salon-down-the-hall hairdo, "I want to hear you sing!"

Annabel, who sits each week with her soft hands folded and her paper-thin eyelids closed, next to her husband, Harold, remains serene but unresponsive to the request. The CNA (Certified Nursing Asst.) takes this as consent and wheels her around to the other side of Harold, next to Marlene.

The songs are loud. Because. Ya know. Annabel's eyes, nevertheless, remain closed. I'm seated directly across from her, when, during the tenth song, Loch Lomand, a haunting Scottish ballad, she beccomes illuminated from within, reaching over to caress Harold's hand, singing, a la songbird, each and every lyric with precision and surreal projection, eyes sealed shut, voice filling the room and our hearts.

"She was a soprano!" exclaims the all-knowing Marlene, "which is why I always ask her to come closer!"

She was and is, I thought, splendid and spectacular and temporarily residing in (not resigned to) a wheelchair.

Not to be discounted, like the father ... or the mother ... who went missing.


Come.
Closer.
Let.
Us.
Hear.
Your.
Voice.
And.
Your.
Story.


​
*no real names here, per usual. 

Close ... and far ... and reward. 

Let's call this fiction. 

Within 30m of watching a required training video about elder abuse and neglect as part of my volunteer training at a senior center, I witnessed elder abuse and neglect. The "face flicker," as I'm now calling this employee, has been around for awhile (#queenbee). I noticed right away that the residents, mostly wheelchair bound, avoid eye contact with her. 

No wonder. 

Just before it happened, I was chatting up Tina (we'll call her), a highly entertaining conversationalist resident who repeats herself a lot (early dementia) and likes to talk inappropriately about the sex she had in high school. She's not obscene, and rather funny. She tells jokes about the nuns and the stories her older sisters used to tell her to avoid predicaments. "They told me to tell the boys that if they take it out, they will catch a cold!" She has a great laugh. Tina had repeated that particular one-liner several times (I laughed every time) when the face flicker stood over her wheelchair and flicked her face with her index finder. Off the thumb, like we did in second grade.

"Don't use that voice," was the admonishment accompanying the corporal punishment.

Formerly feisty, animated Tina, crestfallen, looked down and away. Blinked in slow motion.

And indeed stopped using her voice for the remaining rounds of Bingo that day.

Silenced. Shamed. Abused.

In a wheelchair. 



(They scheduled the wrong volunteer that day. I made a plan.)