The Year a Corpse Came Calling at Christmas

I’ve probably told this one before, if so feel free to jump over to a Blog that makes more sense like CJ’s.

Many years ago, my beloved Grandmother was placed in a Nursing Home, against her wishes I might also add. When she first ended up there after living many years on her own she really didn’t like it. She asked me to break her out— and I had flashbacks to my time at Summer Camp in the 2nd Grade where my pleas to get me out of this bug infested tounge depressor craft obsessed madhouse were met with “Just give it a chance.” I needed a hero back then and I didn’t get one.

So it was a bit of cruel irony when I pretty much told her the same thing. The fact of the matter was she had given my mother and my aunt the Power of Attorney so they had the final say, and they had placed her here without consulting either myself, my siblings or my cousins (at least as far as I knew). The place itself seemed relatively harmless. Her room was nice with a view of the woods. The community room wasn’t the usual horror show I’d seen at other Nursing homes— yeah the TV was too loud and it was playing some horrible daytime game show and most of the people watching it were asleep. Several people were setup at tables playing games or doing puzzles and my interactions with them were all pretty pleasant.

It didn’t seem like that bad of a place.

Our annual family Christmas Party had been held on Christmas Eve for as long as I could remember— it’s a tradition I carry on to this day only the focus is mostly on my own family so there are no aunts or cousins or uncles. The year my Grandmother was put in the home she and my mother and my aunt had arranged to have our Christmas Party there. It was about a 14 mile drive outside the City but we all went to make the best of it.

The staff had decorated the event room beautifully, with a buffet and ornate table settings— I was impressed. Until we found out this wasn’t for us— we had been bumped down to the Employee Breakroom for our celebration, which was far less ornate and in fact I think the only decorations were some flimsy paper ones hanging on a piano in one corner of the room. This was a far cry from the carpeted candle lit room we’d been ushered out of. They apologized and once again, the arrangements had been made by my mother and aunt so I just made the best of it.

At one point a one legged man wheeled himself in and started eating with us— we all assumed he was some new friend of Granny’s but eventually learned she didn’t know him. My aunt and mother did their best to make it bearable and if they were upset I clearly couldn’t tell. My youngest son Adam was pretty young and I was doing my best to make him okay with this bizarre setting. Veronica entertained him, I talked to some of the staff about possibly getting some of the lighting lowered a little bit— again trying to keep a happy face on the proceedings I was annoyed that we’d been promised the room upstairs and we had to contend with this offering.

I don’t know what we did to pass the time, I know there was a time when we did a Yankee Swap at these things that my Aunt and my sister were both big fans of— and I’ll say it’s funny the first round— everyone tried to find gifts that were either funny or useful—but my aunt and mother each brought MULTIPLE secret gifts because they were certain (and correct) that my deadbeat cousins and whoever they’d hired to join them for the evening would come empty handed so the farce went beyond funny and into painful.

I stepped out of the circle and back up to the buffet for meatballs or whatever was in that crockpot when I noticed two attendants pushing a stretcher down towards us, making a sharp turn and heading down a long hallway that looked like it went underground. On the stretcher?

You guessed it— a recently deceased resident, covered in a sheet, but, I would later find out, on the last ride because the hallway ran underground and connected to a morgue under the mortuary next door. How I’d never noticed the irony of a mortuary next door to a nursing home is beyond me. I stood in the doorway watching them push the gurney down into the darkness, my plate in my hand,

I turned and saw Adam and Veronica’s faces— they had seen it too. I don’t know that anyone else noticed it- I’m pretty sure my other two sons did too. I shrugged and went over and made some innappropriate joke, probably that the one legged man didn’t seem like such a party crasher by comparison.

We all stayed in reasonably good spirits for what we had to contend with— and we hoped that maybe next year we could somehow sign Grandma out instead of coming back. I’m not sure if we only did one year’s Christmas Eve at the home or two. I do know my Grandmother passed away in November just shy of her 90th birthday but I’m unsure if that was the following year or the one after.

With the Death of My Grandmother my committment to the Family Christmas Eve party ended, and I began hosting my own, much smaller, party, with the relatives I wanted to spend time with, and that’s how it’s been for the past ten years.