Funny how often, all these years later, I still think about a solitary napkin placed on a side table. On the napkin was a dog on a skateboard with the question "What's the most OUTRAGEOUS thing you saw today?" Next to the table sat Dick; it would be the last time I saw him. Somehow, he looked almost the exact same as I remembered him from thirty years earlier, when he was only 65.
When you live far from your hometown, visits like this aren't so unusual- visits that you know will likely be the last though none of that is said in the presence of the other. There's a greeting and an exchanging of memories and eventually small talk. Full of heart, really, because your purpose there is just to be there. A choice in how to spend an hour after years or decades of absence. That afternoon, I was there.
Dick's wife had died years before and he had moved from the home I remembered to a small apartment. When we arrived that day he was sitting in his living room in complete silence. There was little else in the room besides the chair he sat on, a TV that was not on, and the napkin on the table beside him.
What was he doing before we arrived? Where was his mind? He was not sleeping; he had been simply looking straight ahead. Not a rosary in hand. Not a book folded over. Simply sitting.
"I just don't understand why I'm still here. I pray every day to understand why. I just don't know why the Lord is keeping me here." At talk of the Lord, I deferred response to my mom who delivered the assurances of reasons and purposes we cannot understand that are the natural refrain in those circles.
As they spoke, I became stuck on the juxtaposition of that napkin's question and my elderly friend, who had only likely seen the four walls of his own empty home and would likely see nothing surprising or outrageous today or possibly ever again in his life. Had he noticed the question? Did it stir anything in him? A sadness? Nostalgia, ennui or delight? In a small empty apartment, is it even possible to ignore a question and a silly little dog on a napkin? It was quite literally the only thing to notice.
The sad, silly absurdity of it struck me in a quiet way that I didn't voice to anyone else, though I did snap a covert picture at the time. When I went to look for it now, it was lost to the overstuffed archive of all my years of outrageous documentation. But a quick search lead me right to it again, where I learned in a seven year old Reddit thread r/mildlyinteresting that it was part of a pack of "Conversation Starter" napkins designed by Mike Lowery Studio for the Mardi Gras brand. Just an ordinary grab from Meijer that happened to land on Dick's table began an interior conversation that I've returned to randomly ever since, asking questions and guessing at answers.
What is considered outrageous when you are 90+ years old and, no matter how the world may be changing around you, you rarely receive input outside of the soft humming noises in your small empty home? What happens to us when we go years without seeing one outrageous thing... a dog on a skateboard, anything surprising or shocking at all... where does a mind go? What becomes of a person when nothing is new anymore? Once you've seen it all before?
But as much as I'm confounded by the scene of our last visit, wanting to understand it as a little sad, maybe it's me who's missing something fundamental. Being of a generation that can hardly sit with their own thoughts for any length of time without reaching for a screen or distraction, the stillness and quiet was almost as jarring to me as a home full of clutter and noise. Maybe the reality of his last years only feels so absurd or hard to understand because it's stripped down of so many false fillers that we've become used to crowding into our hours. But who's to say that all of the constant communication- the podcasts, the texts, the BREAKING NEWS, the trash reality show binges, the going places, the busy doing and seeing and saying- who's to say it's all a net positive? In so many ways, Dick sitting alone in his apartment, asking "Why am I here?" into the stillness of an empty room seems incredibly, outrageously brave.