I attended my first work-related funeral yesterday. It could have been my second; a resident died a couple of months after I started working at The Hotel. I only met him a handful of times so I passed on attending his memorial. He came to visit once, after moving to a hospice. This little old man wheezing up the stairs, half-collapsing into a seat after the single flight up to the office. I remember looking at him and assuming he was in his late seventies. My coworker knew he was 52.
Anyway, we'll call her Melanie. Melanie moved into The Hotel about two months ago. An imaginary file on her would tell you that she was in her late twenties, bipolar and had a raging drug habit. She'd often comment that doing drugs was her job. After she died, one of the other desk workers commented that he had never seen anyone go on so many long benders, staying awake for days at a time. In this place, distinguishing yourself by drug use is even more impressive, like commenting you're a fast runner when you live with an Olympic track team. I remember one of the last conversations I had with her...
"Do you think I'm pretty?"
She was standing in the half-open door, a sweaty slick mess of hair and unwashed clothes. Her face seemed tight, swollen pick marks on her cheeks. Someone had explained those pick marks to me: some people, when high, think something is under their skin. They try to get it out. Not finding anything simply makes them pick further. Her question is unexpected, I'm left fumbling for an answer.
"I think you look tired. Why don't you grab some sleep?"
She muttered something in the tune of negative, heads towards the mirror and starts picking at a swollen spot on her cheek. We talked about Courtney Love, debating if her career had pretty much ended back in the '90s. Music was a safe topic: distracting but neutral. I regularly inserted comments suggesting sleep and, finally, when the conversation took too much of a left turn into her ranting about her ability to control everyone, a firm suggestion about returning to her room.
At the memorial, there's a circle of chairs and a table with candles. Her picture is next to a book for you to write words in. A brown wooden guitar is lying under the table. It looks functional from the front but walking behind it, I notice the back is splintered and separated from the body. When the memorial service begins, most of the chairs are filled. Aside from her mother and her aunt, the other people are support or social workers.
When she was new to The Hotel, Melanie showed me one of her online profiles. Once, she had a job at a big name music store, played in a band. Like me, she grew up in a small town and moved to the big city. I'm still surprised at how often these conversations come up, that people want you to know who they were before they came here. Even the first time someone explained how they had had a job and a 'fully furnished three bedroom apartment', I wasn't shocked. Everyone was somewhere else before here, I think. Why wouldn't you have been fully functioning in society before you were here?
For the memorial, I had picked some music. Recalling our conversations and her online profile, I had a list of heavy metal and grunge, none of which would be appropriate background music. I settled on acoustic covers of grunge music and string covers of heavy metal songs. There were long pauses as people told stories about Melanie. During one of those pauses, Hole's 'Malibu' filled in:
Crash and burn
All the stars explode tonight
How'd you get so desperate?
How'd you stay alive?
Help me, please, burn the sorrow from your eyes
Oh, come on be alive again
Don't lay down and die
Hey, hey
You know what to do
Oh baby, drive away, to Malibu
The Sunday before last, I was at work. Melanie had been back from the hospital for a couple of days. I hadn't seen her. Since her being taken to the hospital had been a mess of her going off her medication, going on a bender and threatening to shoot me, I chalked her non-appearances up to avoidance. I wouldn't want to see me, either. There was this smell in the hallway: ripe garbage, a broken sewer line, take your pick and multiply it. I checked the rest of the hallway, couldn't figure out where it could be coming from. By the end of my shift, it had dissipated. Apparently, it was worse on Monday and the staff started checking rooms.
At the memorial, people are tactfully pulling up memories about Melanie. Tactful because, hey, that's their job. All these people are employed through various companies and organizations to look after people, like Melanie, when their life goes off the rails. I wonder where are all the other people are, Melanie's friends and visitors. She was popular in the building and, the weekend before the memorial, I had talked with some residents that were upset about her death. I talked to a co-worker who reassured me that, yes, he had reminded people about the service that morning.
The distance between The Hotel and the service was a couple of blocks. Most of the people who live at The Hotel are on welfare; constraints on their time is minimal. I rushed out of my morning class, skipping my afternoon class, grabbed a train and still arrived. I hadn't slept with her, done drugs with her, borrowed her clothes or called her my friend. But I was here and those people weren't. Being angry about this surprises me, still. When I talk to Max about this, he points out a range of reasons for people to not go. Justifications can range from slightly delusional (if I don't go, she isn't dead) to avoidance (the drugs I'm doing won't kill me). If at the heart, addictions are about avoiding pain then I guess it makes sense not to show up.
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