Nursing Homes and Elizabeth Jennings

Ministers spend a fair amount of time in nursing homes. I look forward to my visits, however inept or inadequate my care, or anticipate them with anxiety or depression, not only according to the person I will be seeing but also depending on the nature of the place itself. Where the architecture is pleasing if not grand, and the interior decoration considered rather than haphazard or maudlin; where the people are not herded like cattle into a single sitting room, some alert, attentive, conversational, others wilting or wailing and wasting away; where the staff are called and committed, not doing a job but following a vocation, not calculating human dignity by beauty or utility, nor, eyes on the clock, attending to residents as if they were inmates, discourteously or peremptorily; where the meals are occasions that not only break the boredom but also bring folk together, the food tasty and tastefully presented, the pace leisurely; where the atmosphere is fresh and not odourless, but where the smells of unwashed skin and clothes, or antiseptic, don’t stick to the walls; where cheerfulness, if not hilarity, may move through the corridors, and death itself (if you like) has a room and is not shunted into the attic or cellar - these are the good ones, not just humane but truly human.

Here is a poem - “Old People’s Nursing Home” - by Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001), an English Roman Catholic whose faith was both interrogative and sustaining, and whose art (indebted to Herbert, Hopkins, and Eliot among others) is prayerful, sacramental, containing, amidst shadows, moments of astonished disclosure. “I am concerned with three things,” Jennings said - “the making of poems, the nature of mystical experience, and the relationship between them.”

The men have ceased to be men, the women, women.
Or so it appears at first.
Here are children dressed for a meal, napkins in collars,
Here are meals from the nursery, here is the nurse.
So it appears to one who is half
Within this house and half outside.
“It will be calm,” someone suggested.

And so it seemed at first - tidy and calm
With the weather outside tidy and calm,
The carpets, pressed to the walls, forbidding noise,
No smell of a hospital, no smell at all,
And that is what I longed for first, the scent
Of a hyacinth bypassing sickness and pungent with growth,
Perfume thrust on the wrist and rising in clouds
In circles of foreign summers.

But there was no smell, not even the deathly sick
Odour of death. And then I realized:
Death is shut from this house, the language of death,
The accoutrements of dying.
A ghost would be lively. Ghosts are not allowed here
And neither is talk of birth.

The faces differentiate themselves,
The men half-women, the women half-men
And each entirely children
Except in anger, except in ignorance.
These wrinkled faces know too much, these gnarled
Hands have touched the pulse of love, have known
The family increase and birth’s harvesting.

But that was the past and this house has shut out the past
And it dare not face the future:
So it lives in a perilous present that could be cracked
By a broken cup or a laugh.
Cups are unbreakable here,
Jokes are in print too small
And the noisy future, the passionate past are dammed
Partly by deafness, partly
By doctors’ decisions and nurses’
Hiding the stuff of life and death away -
Tear-heavy handkerchiefs, the whiff of pain.

And I who carry compassion find it useless,
I who am very young here feel part-guilty,
Part-helpless. Most, out of place.
For my past and future spread throughout my present,
Time is a scheme of light and dark,
“What is time?” an old woman whispers.
Nobody answers and I,
With a load of compassion to scatter, refuse to tell her
For to do so would set the rainbow over this house,
Of movements and mornings which lead to death, and death
Is an outcast here for a night, for an hour, for how long?