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Lurana, You Were on My Mind at the Nopeming
Daydreaming of My Grandmother at an Abandoned Tuberculosis Sanatorium
You’re on my mind as I time travel inside the Nopeming (Ojibwe for “in the woods,” which it is).
“Strange,” I think aloud. “Because you never contracted tuberculosis.”
As far as anybody knows, anyway.
“Your brain, however,” the thought continues in my head, “did slowly contract the Disease of Forgetting — after Grandpa died — and that was challenging to watch.”
It was, even if only for the brief hour I experienced it when we said goodbye at the nursing home in a Seattle suburb.
Upon reflection, my experience of watching you, Lurana Anne Persing, suffer from dementia, was nothing exceptional; the CDC projects that “…by 2060… about 14 million Americans will have dementia, which is about 3.3% of the population.”
Still just as troubling to see it happen to your favorite grandmother.
“Grammie,” I whisper while I peer past the curtains, breezy hostages dangling in a closed window, rough pieces of fabric abducted from the late 1960s and brought to the present, coated in an elongated oval pattern that’s colored by muted earth tones: brown, beige, pub-mustard yellow. “Lurana.” I can’t see the giant metal cross stitched to the top of the sanatorium entryway, but I know it’s there. I try to remember if you and I ever went to church together, and I’m sure we must’ve, but I honestly don’t know.
I glance around the room and catch my jagged reflection in a beat-to-hell, moldy Fort Howard paper towel dispenser on the wall. A sticker that screams, “E. COLI HAPPENS | WASH YOUR HANDS” from the St. Louis County Department of Public Health sits next to my face in the makeshift mirror. Accurate, though the City of Duluth has never reported a single death from E. Coli; long-time Duluthians are essentially 100 times more likely to die of heart disease or cancer, a figure also gleaned from the CDC.
“Still,” I hear you scold, softly. “That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wash your hands. You should always wash your hands, young man.”
You taught me I should scrub between my toes and behind my ears too. I’m sure my mom did as well, but it’s your voice I remember telling me when I was still young enough for you to help me take a bath. I look down at a tall, industrial bathtub, no doubt installed after the building evolved into assisted living in the early 1970s, and jiggle the handle of the Safetymix Visu-Temp water temperature control handle, turn the on/off knobs underneath “Reservoir Fill” and “Tub Fill” lines, and press the “Whirlpool” button on, then off, then on, then off again. My mom told me that it used to drive you crazy, how much I loved pressing buttons: elevators, cashier stations, controls for the VCR.
“I wonder how many times this basin was actually deep cleaned before the facility closed for good in 2002,” I ponder.
“I still sponge down my kitchen sink after each use, just so you know,” I say to you. “Because I know how important that was to you, and now, it’s important to me too.”
I stare down a long, sharp hallway, passing almost spooky graffiti of black handprints and the words “THEY MADE ME” painted across. I stroll by fading letters on the opposite wall that almost spell “X-RAY LABORATORY” (except the “ORY” at the end of of the word is gone), and I come face to face with a small General Electric lightswitch, circa mid-20th century, connected to yellow caution tape, underneath a handwritten notecard taped to the wall that says, “Please Do Not Turn the Two Switches Off.”
I turn the two switches off.
Young man, I told you — don’t touch those switches.
“Sorry, Grammie.”
I don’t know if you ever saw what a mischief-maker I became (of course you did). I know you watched, unknowingly, the beginning phases of my plunge into alcoholism. It’s what led to my termination on the Boston Harbor cruise, the one you were supposed to come see me perform on, which you did, technically, even though I’d already been fired. My boss was gracious enough to let me board the boat and sing to you. While you didn’t know the details — that I stole liquor from the downstairs galley cabinet — I knew that you knew something wasn’t right. By that point, though, you were either too far down the dementia hole or you were too old to care.
“Or both,” I hear you gently laugh.
I walk into the forgotten theater and look up, missing your wicked sense of humor. Even as a kid, I knew that you knew how to laugh — and that you had a sharp wit about you that you rarely showed, or at least that’s the way my memory has always projected that part of you. It’s the reason I’m proud of my own day-to-day repartee. I study the bland ceiling tiles above the proscenium and listen to the cooing and flapping of the pigeons who live on the pipes above, and I imagine a room filled with bleeding lungs, observing a sad talent show put on by patients — and I picture you, watching me, on stage as a child, too short to convincingly play Enjolras in Les Misérables or too queer to play Lancelot in Camelot.
And then, I close my eyes and picture our last ten minutes together.
It was also a nursing home, and it also felt gray inside. We sat together in the dining hall, and I don’t remember if we said much. I know at one point, I looked at your hands and couldn’t help but draw lines and create shapes between the spots, bruises, and wrinkles covering each hand like the top sheet I fold over my blanket and tuck underneath my comforter when I make my bed, the same way you taught me to make it. I’m sure my mom did too, but it’s your voice I remember telling me when I was old enough to do household chores. Really, I never thought about your earthly departure because that thought would’ve been inconceivable to my sensitive little brain, even if I’d had the capacity to be conscious of your mortality.
I wonder if you looked at my hands, too, when I played the piano for you that last time, echoing throughout the dining hall. It didn’t occur to me until you started bragging to your friends, “That’s my grandson playing the piano,” that I would likely lose you, soon. As with so many moments in life, it’s impossible to prepare for that kind of reckoning. You were my first major loss, the kind that altered the way the air feels in my lungs, shifted the manner I feel things in my body, and tweaked the chemistry in my brain to protect itself against the mind-numbing notion that I have no idea if I’ll ever see you again. The cross above this empty sanatorium-turned-nursing home tells me that there are those who would say if we both took Jesus as our Lord and Savior, we’d see each other again in Heaven some day. I know you went to church, and I know I did too, yet somehow, even though I can’t be sure, I imagine that you and I had pretty similar thoughts about Judeo-Christian system of faith.
Before I head back outside, I walk past a room filled with empty bedframes. I cast a doleful look up at the windows, cracked and covered, and I think about your last bits of oxygen. I wonder if the chair where you died was comfortable.
Somehow, I begin to convince myself that my understanding of our deep connection was erroneous, but a few months go by, and my mom tells me that, at the nursing home, you kept a photograph of me in your room — and only of me. Not of my mom, your daughter. Not of your two sons, not of any of your own grandchildren, not even your own husband. Me. My mom told me that one time you demanded, out of nowhere, that she take my photograph out of your room. My mom asked you why.
“Because someone’s gonna take it.”
After my mom told me that story, I stopped trying to convince myself that our connection was anything less than celestial and extraordinary.
“Grammie.”
Outside, I speak your name into the blue Minnesota sky. The ground is covered in artifacts, and I’m careful not to step on anything. Despite the fact that I have the property owner’s permission to be here, I still chuckle at the “POSTED NO TRESPASSING KEEP OUT” sign, then immediately wish you’d gotten to see me sober. I think we would’ve had a lot of fun together. I climb into the caretaker’s van to leave the property, and as the vehicle circles around the parking lot and starts down the long driveway to the main highway, I take one last peep at the building.
I look for you in the windows and can’t find you. For some reason, that makes me smile.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:
While written exclusively for My Fair Lighthouse, this piece is part of a larger multimedia travelog called All-American Ruins, a body of work that recounts my experiences exploring abandoned spaces across the United States (and around the world) and reimagines them through personal, multimodal storytelling. Learn more: allamericanruins.com
