An Ode to Lost Flowers

I had never seen a room so littered with coke cans. They were everywhere. Literally. Everywhere. On the desk, under the chair, in the closet, under the bed, on the bed, in the bed. Room 107 of the Alzheimer’s ward was the aftermath of a thirsty man’s war on coke cans. If you close your eyes, you can almost hear this man sucking, no, consuming the insides of these coke corpses with aggressive aplomb. Any regular person would be terrified at the sheer scale of this mess, but not me. I only chuckled to myself as I placed these coke cans one-by-one into a plastic trash bag, relishing at the thought of the late Mr. Linton’s furious face raging from the afterlife at the idea of somebody touching the collection he had accumulated in his room.

Mr. Linton was this room’s resident up until just last Sunday night when he passed away, much to the “surprise” of his son and daughter, who were sobbing loudly just outside the door. Longstanding stomach cancer had done him in, which wouldn’t really surprise you if you knew the kind of a junk food addict he had been, but of course, only I knew that. Tonight, his children will go on with their lives with dry eyes. Give it a year, maybe two, and this tragic memory will fade, its painful grip begin to loosen its hold. But I will remember. I, a college-bound, part-time senior center worker, will remember the man who was Mr. James Linton.

Six months ago, I came to the sudden realization that I would need money to pay for my college tuition (crazy right?). My first thought was the lifeguarding position at the local pool: an easy, mostly static life, nice shades, a low-hanging red tank-top to show off my oh so sculpted pecs, my firm biceps, my… I looked down at the skeletal figure that made up my scrawny 5’7” body. That, coupled with my asthma, would deter me from saving a drowning duck, much less an actual person.

            After a week of job hunting through the supermarkets, restaurants, and department stores of my town, I found myself at the doorstep of the Blossom Court Senior Center, as massive housing complex encompassing a golf course, a restaurant, and the facilities of what I’d imagine to be a country club resort—quite the life for a retiree, if you ask me.

            I was assigned after some training to care for a certain Mr. Linton of room 107 in the Alzheimer’s ward from four to nine PM, four days a week. The front desk wished me luck as I embarked on my long trek to this man’s abode. 

            Nobody answered the door when I knocked, so I figured that I’d keep knocking at 20 second intervals for another minute before I’d use the room key from the front desk to enter. The minute flew by, and before I knew it, I was opening the door. 

“Mr. Linton, I’m so sorry, but I—”

My face split in pain as a series of coke can shots ricocheted off my face, chest, and crotch with pinpoint accuracy.

“Who the hell let a mutt like you into my room?! Get the hell out, you mongrel!”

When I finally came to, my hand still clutched over my throbbing crotch, I found before me an orderly man in his late eighties, wearing corduroy pants and a snow-white turtleneck sweater, an appearance quite in contrast with what appeared to be an explosive nature. He was sitting at his study, his back straight as a washboard in astute discipline. His desk was littered with pens, papers, and—

“Hey sir! Food is strictly prohibited in the dormitories!”

“Oh, first you come barging in like some maniac, and now you have a problem with my stuffed turkey dinner? You get out, you—”

“Mr. Linton, I don’t mean any trouble. I’ll just help you clean up, make your bed, and I’ll leave as soon as—”

“That SERGEANT Linton for you! And I can make my own bed, no thank you!”

Sensing another barrage of culinary containers, I quickly took my leave, half running, half frantically crawling my way out of the dumpster that was Mr. Linton’s room.

I would later discover that Mr. Linton was a particularly troublesome resident at the center. It was said he was dragged kicking and screaming to the center by his two children a few months prior after he had nearly shattered his hip from a fall down the stairs of his old home. The lavish dinners he had in his dorm was the center’s way of bribing him to keep a lid on his temper, though I guess that deal had gone out the window when I entered his room uninvited. The cokes he got himself from a local convenience store.

The following day found Mr. Linton in a much more docile state as the staff had apparently threatened to revoke his turkey dinner privileges should he explode on me like he had the day before. I went along with my job, collecting the dirty laundry and cleaning the food and coke from his bed, but I couldn’t help but notice just how quiet the room was save the mealtime noises of Mr. Linton as he chowed down on his usual turkey-coke dinner. There was no small talk, no lengthy stories about the “good ol’ days”, just the smacking of eager lips and the gulping noises of aggressive swallows. 

The wall just above his study was lined with military and athletic awards. Beside his desk sat a compact bookshelf which he had repurposed as a coke storage. Aside from these, a closet, and his bed, there wasn’t much else as far as necessities go.

“Touch my coke and I’ll strangle you.”

Oh, and yes, the bookshelf wasn’t nearly enough to store all his coke, as there were coke cans in just about every nook and cranny of the room. I had unconsciously picked up an empty can while my eyes roamed the room. I tentatively placed it down.

“So, Mr. Linton—”

“Sergeant.”

“Sergeant Linton, sorry. I’m Decklyn, but you can call me Deck for short. I’ll be helping—”

“Shut up, don’t need your help, never asked for it, never’ll need it, Johnny.”

“My name’s actually—”

I stopped out of habit, half expecting and interruption, but it never came. He had stopped eating, and his eyes were now fastened to the naked oak branches outside his windows. Winter had long conquered the landscape, and not a hint of foliage was left to dance on the oak’s barren boughs. It was kind of a sad scene, but I figured the leaves were always meant to leave the mother branch every winter anyway. Or perhaps the leaves had been clinging onto the branch for dear life but were tragically unable to resist the cutting winter wind? I guess that would be a better explanation for the gloomy scene before us this afternoon. They say winter branches look more rigid because they no longer droop with the oppressive weight of its former leaves, but what I saw was more of a frantic skeleton reaching out for its lost foliage. 

“Just go home already. I don’t need you here.”

Of course, I couldn’t just go as my shift wasn’t nearly over. I spent the remainder tidying up the room, sanitizing the bedstand, and other sorts of menial cleaning tasks. I left the room so I could vacuum the hall outside, but I remained sort of on stand-by for Mr. Linton’s room as was my job. All the while, Mr. Linton stared out the window, his turkey dinner forgotten on this study, silent. When the sun finally set, I grabbed my cleaning supplies from his room and crept out, too afraid to disrupt the strange silence that had pervaded the room that day.

And so this continued for another three months. I would arrive at his door promptly at 4:00, knock, wait for a minute, then enter his from to a barrage of insults and, occasionally, coke cans. Then, I would clean his room and vacuum the hallways, all the while keeping an eye on Mr. Linton for any emergencies. Thus, when I opened the door to room 107 to find Mr. Linton doubled in pain on the afternoon of February 13^th, I was shocked in more ways than one: surprised that nothing came flying at me, verbal or otherwise, and mortified at the limpness of his once-rigid body.

            “Help!”, I cried down the hall.

            “Get a doctor to room 107! Ser—Mr. Linton has collapsed! Help!”

Mr. Linton was coughing blood over his dinner. Even so, he made feeble attempts at profanity between the coughing fits that racked his body. I leaned his body against a wall and grabbed handfuls of tissues for him to cough into. Shortly after, the paramedics arrived. I was promptly escorted outside and dismissed from the remainder of my shift. The last I saw of Mr. Linton that day was his helpless from carried out of the Blossom Court Senior Center on a stretcher.

After that incident, I was assigned to a different elderly in the same section. Mr. Linton was transferred to the emergency care unit of the center. His episode that day was caused by an aggravation of the cancer in his stomach that had been exacerbated by his horrid eating habits. It irked me that the center hadn’t taken better care of him. If they knew of his condition, why didn’t they do something about it? Restrain him? Maybe do something about all that coke?  Just maybe?

            My fist slammed against the wall, scaring the elderly resident of room 210, the room to which I was now assigned. The grandma I now kept company was the sweetest person the planet. Every day, there’d be a tray of cookies waiting for me on her desk, and she would tell me stories about her grandchildren and her life growing up in the Midwest while I was cleaning. But I couldn’t help by feel guilty during the two months during which I cared for her because my mind was elsewhere, fixated on the enigmatic Sergeant Linton and the episode that occurred that day.

            That image of his feeble form bent over his turkey dinner, one hand clasped around a coke can, the other desperately holding in the blood from his mouth, the shaking of his body as he fought to retain consciousness—

“Honey, are you okay? You seem a little tired today. Let me help you out a little.”

“No, no, I’m fine, you stay where you are. I apologize for zoning out. I promise it won’t happen again”

            I must’ve unconsciously stared off into space again, but when you see man in such pain, in such a struggle against his own body, all alone, the vision never leaves you. It haunts you, as if telling you: 

            “Your time will come. And you’ll be alone, just like him.”

            I couldn’t help by feel as if I should’ve done something, anything, to help him out that day, but that’s only my naivete speaking. Nobody could’ve done anything against the cancer within Mr. Linton’s body. I shook the thought out of my head. For now, I needed to focus on the task at hand.

It was late spring before I bumped into Sergeant Linton again. He was rolling around in a wheelchair in the courtyard after apparently having cursed off the worker who had pushed him out here.

            “Good morning, Sergeant Linton!”

            “So you’re showing that ugly face of yours again, Johnny.”

            I didn’t even bother correcting him. Having had nothing to do at the moment, I sat next to him silently, watching as the cherry blossom petals danced on the wings of the spring breeze. I had read in some poem that spring was truly the cruelest season, but seeing the flowers, feeling the warm breeze, hearing the chirps of the birds returning from their long migration—whoever wrote that poem couldn’t have possibly meant this.

            Beside me, Mr. Linton was sneaking something out of his pocket. When what I found in his hand turned out to be a shiny red coke, I immediately snatched it out of his reach.

            “What are you doing?! You can’t keep eating and drinking like this! Not after—”

            “Oh hell, give that back to me, you brat!”

            He flung his arms at me, arms that were nothing but thin sticks at this point. After he had wrestled me to the ground, I couldn’t help but notice that his skeletal frame weighed close to nothing, a frame that could no longer support his once-straight back. Even so, he wrenched the coke out of my hands like his life depended on it.

            I gave up and watched as Sergeant Linton guzzled down the beverage with zeal.

“What’s with you and that coke anyways?”

“I drink coke ‘cause I like it.”

Well, no duh. I guess I must’ve looked pretty dumb because he chuckled.

“Bet you don’t like your high and mighty corporate job as much as I like my coke. Bet you don’t even love that little girl you call your wife as much as I like my coke!”

He took another swig from his coke can, sucking on it like a baby on a mother’s breast.

“I’m sorry.”

I don’t know why I said it, but I guess it just felt right. I think it’s something Johnny would’ve said. I hope it’s something he would’ve said.

Sergeant Linton erupted into a peal of bitter cackling.

“Oh, you’re sorry? Oh, is little Johnny boy sorry? What, are you going to buy me another car with all that cash you’ve got on you, or is it going to be a watch? Or are you going to ship me off to another resort so you won’t have to see me again?”

A coughing fit racked his body, but luckily, he had only choked on his coke this time. After he had coughed it out, he sat in silence. Somehow, the spring scene before the two of us didn’t seem quite so peaceful. The silence between us felt oppressive, almost sinister. 

“Bet you think the spring is nice, huh?”

I was certainly enjoying it a lot more before bumping into him today.

“Johnny, you’ll understand one day.”

He pointed to a nearby tulip.

“See how beautiful this is?”

I nodded.

“Everyone loves them flowers. They always talk about it around this time of year. But they never bother giving their flower a name. You give a girl a flower, it doesn’t matter if the flower was planted in a Minnesota farm or in someone’s bathtub, so long as it’s beautiful. And then it dies, and you give her another flower just as beautiful, and she’s just as happy, so long as you keep giving flowers. You can name it Barbara, or Emma—it doesn’t matter. Next year, it’ll be replaced. Ever frickin’ spring”

The scene before us suddenly seemed more fragile, more ephemeral, like an ice palace just waiting to melt; the man beside me, so strong-willed, yet frail enough to feel at home among the delicate flower petals riding the wind into oblivion. The coke can he had clenched in his hand so tightly had fallen from his loosened grip, the sound of its clatter lost in the rustling of the leaves. Here we sat for another hour until I had to go.

“Good bye, Sergeant Linton, it was nice seeing you again.”

            There wasn’t an answer, but I wasn’t expecting one. After I had walked a little distance, I turned back to give him a last look, just see him off, I guess.

            His eyes were fastened on some cherry blossoms, but I could tell that his mind was in a world of its own, perhaps a world only the flowers could understand, crazy as that sounds. There were tears in his eyes.

No, I never liked the guy, and after that spring morning, I understood him even less. I was done cleaning the junk out of his room in an hour, mostly just picking up coke cans and scraps of food. That being done, I sat on a bench in the hallway just outside of his room, enjoying a room-temperature coke Sergeant Linton had never had the chance to devour.

“Mr. and Ms. Linton, is it okay if you remain behind for just a little while so we can go over some of the details of your father’s funeral service?”

            Oh, right, his children as well as the caretaker and senior center director were still there to go over some formalities.

            “Sorry, I’ve got a flight to catch. Urgent business matters, you see. It pains me so much that I wasn’t there for him during his last moments, and now, even now, there’s so little I can do…”

            “No, now, Mr. Linton, don’t you worry, we’ll take care of it here. Your dad is in good hands. God knows that kind of emotional roller coaster you and your sister have been through these past couple of days.”

            After some rushed good-byes, Mr. Linton turned to leave. I don’t know why I did it—maybe some sinisterly cynical side of me took over—but as he was running down the stairs toward the lobby, I screamed at him:

            “Hey Johnny! You like your job as much as this coke I got here?!”

            He froze in his steps for a moment, but only a moment, then proceeded to flip me off before running out the door. Uncontrollable laughter burst out of me, as if some floodgate had been breached. I lay on the ground cackling for what seemed like an eternity before I pulled myself back onto my bench. Man, he and his father are more alike than they’d like to admit. I took another swig of my coke. It sure tasted good.