PTSD

 

I grew up in a large extended family that included a nursing home so popular in a small town that it often had a waiting list of over forty people. 

My grandmother was kind and wanted each person treated like they were your own mother or grandmother and yet: I remember older ladies with sheets tied around their waists crying for help. They were confused and terrified and I was taught to feel sorry for them, even try to comfort them.

But how do you comfort someone who is homesick, confused, ailing and being forced to live out their days in the death warehouses we call nursing homes?

Grandma's Ladies home was one of the best, but it was far from perfect. I experienced small versions of this homesickness when I went away to college, but without the inability to do anything about it.

Today I fell asleep in the late morning and had the most terrifying longest dream I've ever had. 

I was sitting in my desk chair when I discovered I couldn't move my arms and my voice didn't respond correctly either. It was as if I had had a stroke. I cried out for help but a whole procession of people came and went around me without doing anything at all. 

I would recognize them and know they were kind people, but they would lean over and look at me trying to sob out, "help me." Then they would come to their own conclusions that did not include any kind of help. I was so terrified. I begged my sons, their friends, even my Dad and no one would offer me a hand. I felt like I would be okay if I could just get someone to help me stand up for a minute, but no one would.

This dream felt like it went on for hours and in fact I woke up nearly two and a half hours later, stunned, exhausted and terrified. It probably took me twenty minutes to feel normal again.

Thinking about it, which I haven't been able to stop doing all day long, has brought back all those memories from my childhood. Not the sweet afternoons listening to stories from grammas who lived in the eighteen hundreds, but the misery of the confused and homesick forced to live out their days in terror.