Gazette: "Local Nursing Home Resident Attacks Volunteer"
Let’s be honest - The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility smelled bad. Everyone knew it yet to admit to its foul odor meant coming to terms with the sad inevitability that most in its care and on its staff chose to ignore during their (for some) waking, (for some) caffeinated hours: you only leave in a body bag. Thankfully, due to advances over the past hundreds of thousands of years in the human olfactory system, this was a smell that most of Lenwood’s residents quickly got used to. It would hit them again if they left to go spend the night in one of their child’s spare bedrooms or in the hospital bed of a lover, but for the most part, the aroma folded itself in with the air that they breathed, each breath more and more difficult, the darkness of the world slowly closing in around them. Occasionally a resident would get so tired of this recognizable jolt of the aforementioned inevitable, that he or she or they would stop leaving entirely, preferring to keep up the delusion that one day, probably in spring time, they would hop out of their hospital bed and bound of out the place. Of course they never said that this was the reason they no longer wanted to leave. Instead, they would telephone their children and shout into the receiver that they were “just too tired,” or that they “had a lot going on here” and why didn’t their children just come visit them? And so of course their children would come, and breath in through their noses for most of their visits and then remember their parents fondly whenever they smelled the combinations of decay and disinfectant long after their parents were no longer under The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility’s charge.
This bit of writing is not directly about the way that the inside of “The Facility” smells but rather about a news article published in the local Gazette a few years ago. In only a few paragraphs, said article described how the local police had been called one Thursday afternoon after a facility resident, Marc Huffman, attacked a volunteer, Stacey Ringwald, with his walker and reportedly told her that he wanted to murder her, although Mr. Huffman vehemently denied this later. At the time it was an article of little consequence. Most people who even bothered to read it chuckled to themselves and then moved on with the rest of their day: “I mean, have you ever heard of a nursing home patient being arrested and thrown in jail? Absurd! But I guess this is Trump’s America, after all.” It was a blip on page ten of a local rag that has no unsubscribe option.
Marc had only been a resident of “The Facility” for about a week and a half when Stacey Ringwald came on her monthly afternoon visit. She was there to instruct the residents on the practice of meditation. (Here, our lawyers inform us that we must note that Ms. Ringwald was not affiliated with any of the major meditation institutions or teachers and had seemingly picked up the little that she knew about the practice from the regrettably popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. Furthermore, the board of directors for The Lenwood Memorial Nursing Home Care Facility would also like it to be noted that they were unaware of her lack of qualifications at the time, and that, “for various reasons,” Ms. Ringwald is no longer permitted on the premises.) Marc knew she was coming, and had had several enthusiastic staff members ask him if he wanted to sign up, to which his response was adamant and unwavering: “Fuck no!” It is policy at “The Facility” to not force any residents to take part in any of the enrichment programing. However, staff have also been known to gently coax residents who spend most of the day in their rooms and who seem to have a hard time socializing.
None of the presently living residents or staff that was at that afternoons meditation instruction remember Marc being there. Nor is his name listed on the official list of attendees that “The Facility” provided to the police. As far as anyone can remember, between the hours for 2-4pm on Thursday, January 23rd, Marc sat quietly in his room, mostly staring out the window. This was typical Marc Huffman behavior, and so no one thought anything of it.
At around 3:50, the class was finishing its final meditation. Everyone’s eyes were closed, and they were generally attempting to not have any thoughts and of course were wildly unsuccessful in this endeavor. Long time resident Patricia Goodman remembers actually sort of being successful in clearing her mind, until she was jolted back to reality by the sound of plastic coated metal rods connecting with hair and skull, and then the sound of a body falling out of a chair and hitting the linoleum floor. Patricia remembers opening her eyes to see Marc, wielding a folded up walker, and repeatedly bashing it against the motionless body of Stacey Ringwald, yelling “Fuck you and your fucking meditation! I’m going to fucking kill you, bitch! Time to fucking die!” Marc, being a feeble old man, was quickly subdued by orderlies, and soon arrested. Stacey was rushed to the local hospital and treated for a possible concussion and minor cuts and bruises.
Later, when questioned by detectives at the local jail, Marc denied beating Stacey with the walker and went so far as to state that he never even left his room.
One detective turned to the other and shook her head: “These fucking old people are goddamn crazy. Oh well.” The next Monday, Marc appeared in front of a judge and was formally charged with attempted first degree murder. He vowed to fight it, but died before the trial could take place, maintaining his innocence up until the day that his heart quite literally exploded.
At his hastily thrown together funeral, his estranged son Geoffrey got up to Eulogize his father:
“Dad was not a good man. I think he tried to be. I think he wanted to be. But he wasn’t. I remember him taking me to Little League games as a child and bragging to the other parents about how well his meditation practice was going.
“‘I’m meditating fucking twice a day for twenty minutes for twenty fucking years,’ he’d tell them. ‘Fucking changed my goddamn life.’ I don’t know that it really did though. I think he wanted it to. Hell, he wanted it to change not just his life, but him. I don’t think it did any of those things for him. He started out life as Marc Huffman, and that unfortunately never really changed.”
Someone coughed in the gathered crowd.
“I have no doubt that my dad attacked that poor woman and that he had every intention of killing her. She was the living embodiment of something that he thought he had wasted his life on. And while I of course do not condone any of his actions, I can imagine his anger. I think that maybe you can, too!
“Imagine devoting forty minutes a day to something every day for ten years. I did the math. That’s almost two hundred and three days. More than half a year. So yeah. I get the anger and I get the rage. I only wonder why he kept at it so long. Probably because one day he hoped it would start to work.”
Marc Huffman is buried in a cemetery as is Patricia Goodman. Stacey Ringwald is a VP at Amazon. Life has a tendency to work out sometimes.
