MIRACLES IN THE MESS
James P. Stobaugh
July 1, 1991
"I want Evelyn!" a wizened, wheelchair-trapped man shouted. I had come to visit one of my parishioners at the nursing home. "I want Evelyn!" the old man with a two-day-old beard moaned. His left hand and foot were immobile, twisted unnaturally on his lap. With his right foot, he was pushing his wheelchair in ever-larger circles. Now he was weeping. "Please give me Evelyn. Won't someone give me Evelyn?" Come on, I thought, as the busy, expressionless nurses filled out their paperwork, why don't you get Evelyn? Later I discovered that Evelyn, the old man's wife, had died fifteen years ago. Welcome to the Allegheny County Nursing Home. I had come to see Betty, a member of my church for over fifty years. After she broke her hip, her absent family-suddenly present-placed her in a ten-by-fourteen room with faded plastic flowers and an indelible stench of urine. She would spend the rest of her life helping the old man look for Evelyn-and staring out her window at a playground whose nimble children she would never meet. Betty's predicament, the old man's woeful cry, and the indifferent nurses completely unnerved me. Lord, I thought, is this some kind of existential hell, a dwelling right out of Sartre's No Exit? I found Betty sitting next to her roommate, a stroke victim mute and immobile. Betty, in her wheelchair, was whispering, "Sh-h-h-hh" as her friend wept. "It's okay, honey," Betty whispered. Unable to summon a nurse in time, the old lady was soiled with her own feces. Betty stroked her hair. I stood at the door and watched, suffering my own emotional stroke. To assuage the old woman's humiliation, Betty sacramentally offered her a one-inch chocolate Easter bunny. Knowing her friend could not swallow the rabbit's ample ears, Betty bit them ...
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