“Get me out of here! I never want to come back to this dump again.”

Her voice blurts through the blue anti-Covid hospital mask. I look up from my tablet and adjust mine. Grey bangs hang over her forehead. She crosses her arms and covers her purse as if to protect it from sudden ambush and loss. A young man—maybe her son—with his mask placed under his nose instead of over it pushes her wheelchair out of the elevator and down the corridor. I am waiting to see my orthopaedic surgeon, the first visit since the amputation of my left foot four weeks ago. More accurately, a portion of the foot was amputated. The procedure is called a trans metatarsal amputation. Despite being wrapped up in bandages, courtesy of regular visits by a community nurse, and protected by an orthopedic boot, I cannot walk on it. I hop on the good foot with crutches. The nurse noticed reddening of the skin and a slight swelling on my heel and said the doctor should examine it. So, I came to the hospital.

Living alone, I depend upon the kindness of neighbours, and my adult daughter, Angela, who is also a nurse. She lives an hour’s drive away in the east end of Montreal. Angela can only come to my home once a week, on Saturday or Sunday, sometimes a Monday or Wednesday morning, depending upon her shift. During her visit she puts away the groceries she brought, changes the bed linen, vacuums, and then makes a cheese and ham sandwich for my lunch. Finally, she sits down with a tea tray and cookies, knowing how much I love Darjeeling and Fig Newtons, and asks if my foot hurts, what’s left of it.

Sometimes it does. I often wonder if the missing part hurts more. She informs me that she and her boyfriend have separated. Co-vivant was the actual word Angela used. I am always amazed that I have a fifty-year old daughter who still wears a pony tail like a teenager, has a tattooed neck, and no children. A Chinese dragon. She and a previous co-vivant, whose name I can’t remember, travelled to China several years ago, and strolled hand-in-hand along the Great Wall. I have a picture. Then she comments on the food in the house. My freezer is filled with ready-made, microwavable dishes.

“You should think about moving into a condo in the city, dad. Or hire a housekeeper. This place is getting too much for you. It’s too far from the hospital, and I can’t come here all the time,” she said on her last visit.

She emphasized hospital, as if it was a place I’d often need to be even though the amputation was my first surgery in years. I don’t consider a five-hour visit once a week as taking up all her time. People exaggerate. A nine-room house on an acre of land, though, is too large for me. I pay someone to cut the grass, a field of weeds, if truth be told. I only use three rooms, a large screen television occupying one wall of the living room, and wall-to-wall bookshelves another. I read several books a week, mostly novels and history. I have passed a lifetime on the printed page. It’s also true that I can’t clean house by myself, especially now when I must keep my leg with the amputated foot raised most of the time.

When my wife was alive, it still took us an entire day or two every week to clean house. She died eleven years ago. You never get used to the empty space in your life. Showering is an awkward, contortionist event, with one leg wrapped in plastic and sticking out the door as I sit on a stool and hold the shower hose over my head, but I refuse any assistance. When my wife could no longer raise her arms, I used to wash her hair and give her a warm and fragrant sponge bath. Even though a nurse comes to my house three times a week to change the special bandages on what’s left of my foot, usually in the early morning, I am alone a lot and don’t attempt what I cannot do. From freezer to microwave is no great distance on crutches, and I lean against a counter for support when I need to wash a dish. Lowering myself on the toilet takes strategy, but I manage. I haven’t yet reached the point of decrepitude.

What is that woman’s complaint aside from an aesthetic objection to the ancient hospital? It’s in the midst of expansion and renovation, a project that will take several years to complete, so crowding and delays are inevitable, and Covid has added complications. Perhaps she’s unhappy with her doctor or treatment or the number of patients ahead of her, or chronically complains about the necessity of masking. Medical problems of one kind or another, of varying degrees of discomfort and severity, dampen high spirits. I am not by nature a cheerful man, but I don’t rant and rave against inconvenience. Well, I might on occasion, but never in public. Indeed, it’s crowded outside my doctor’s door. I cannot extend my leg in the hallway. Wearing a mask doesn’t bother me, and I understand its importance. I don’t feel less free and I am concerned about spreading disease. We don’t exist in isolation, do we?

The elevator door opens again and the largest man I have ever seen, also in a wheelchair, is pushed by another man, a son presumably, much lighter in build, who bends over and kisses the older man’s bald head. A touching moment. I smile behind my mask.

My daughter doesn’t kiss me anymore. A habit she dropped in university for unknown reasons. I don’t insist. I never insist she do anything. People in Quebec often greet each other with a peck on both cheeks, at least they used to before the pandemic.

I can’t remember the last time I kissed anyone.

Except.

When I kissed my dying wife on the hospital bed.

I tasted her breath.

It takes agility and strength to maneuver three hundred or more pounds through a crowd of waiting patients. His flesh overhangs the arms of the wheelchair. How does an enormous man stand without collapsing under the sheer volume and weight of his bulk? He suffers from a serious condition, no doubt. What is the term? Morbid obesity. He has help and that’s everything.

I have a wheelchair stored in the garage. My wife used it for a couple of years before her death. After my operation, I didn’t eat much for a few days except bone marrow broth. My appetite has returned to some degree. One sandwich, soup—not bone marrow broth—and Fig Newtons. It’s not great fun eating alone in front of yet another murder mystery on BritBox. My wife loved them. I’m still astonished to find myself in this situation. Everyone will eventually. The suddenness of it all, you understand.

I have a 9:30 am appointment. It’s 10:15. I rarely wait for more than an hour. My orthopaedist is efficient and doesn’t overload appointment times. She has little time to spare for friendly chitchat, nor am I inclined to say more than is necessary. The elevator doors open again and three nurses talking to each other in French follow an old man in a hospital gown, not wearing a mask and dragging his dripline on a wheeled tripod. He doesn’t seem to know where he’s going. One of the nurses speaks to him, her words muffled by her mask, then takes his hand as she waves to her friends and escorts him back into the elevator. His gown is not tied behind his back. His buttocks look like elephant knees. What a sad thing to be old, alone, disoriented and exposed in a hospital.

I am old myself, although I rarely use the term, at least not until I happen to meet an acquaintance or two whom I haven’t seen in a few years, and realize that since they have aged, I must also have grown old. Aside from a neighbor who has helped on occasion, I don’t very often see the people I used to know. Most friends, those left, have grown distant or indifferent or both, and colleagues with whom my wife and I worked in the civil service have disappeared into their own retirement years, or died. I’m reminded of the gingko tree, dropping all its leaves at once. I don’t believe my behind sags under the weight of wrinkles, though, not yet at any rate. I am taking medication for an enlarged prostate.

Because I can’t operate my car, my daughter has offered to drive me to the hospital and wait, but that would mean taking time off work, and I don’t want to trouble her. People have their own families and obligations, and really, my amputation shouldn’t be a disruption in anyone else’s daily routine. The return trip by taxi costs more than a hundred dollars, but I have enough money to take care of my needs and prevent myself from exclusive dependency on someone else’s efforts and time. Before the amputation, I had been planning to move to a more convenient location. I can afford granite counter tops in a condo, if I must.

A year’s worth of antibiotics failed to eliminate the bacteria responsible for the chronic infection, so amputation was the last resort, pernicious bacteria spreading beyond the foot a risk too great. Several visits to the doctor and X-rays and swabs. The end result is more disquieting news, although I haven’t told my daughter that, or how often I’ve been here in the past year. As a nurse, she must have some understanding of what’s involved. I drove myself on those occasions, except for the day of the operation. My daughter drove me then, grousing over the wheel about the difficulties facing hospital staff these days, Covid protocols and exhaustion. She returned twelve hours later to take me home, and spent the night, making sure everything was in order the next day while she waited for the community nurse to make her first visit.

Angela is unable to stay with a partner or companion for more than a couple of years. I say partner or companion because the word lover strikes me as too indiscreet.  Since she never married, I never had a son-in-law, and she chose never to get pregnant. It’s just something she didn’t want. My late wife and I, saddened, didn’t argue the point. It wasn’t our place. I am bereft of grandchildren. It is possible to miss what you never had. It’s the possibility that something might happen has been cut out of your life before you were even given the choice.

The French word for husband is le mari or l’époux, but for wife it used to be la femme, which also means woman, as if female and marriage were inextricably connected. My wife died, as I said. I was proud to introduce Louise as my wife, this is Louise, my wife, which means I was saying “my woman” the way I’d say my house or my land. Even now, I cannot disconnect from the word. I simply cannot…disconnect. Unlike my amputated foot, a mere physical appendage, the word wife can never be excised from my body, heart or mind.

People often say conjoint, or conjointe if referring to a woman, which can imply a spouse, or une épouse if referring to a woman, because the word, the conjunction, isn’t sexist. When Louise and I married in a country wedding, I didn’t know the word sexist, and Louise hadn’t objected to taking my last name. I would have had no objection to taking hers; in fact, it was a much more interesting surname than my own, but that wasn’t how things were done in those days. So many unquestioned premises have been, well, questioned, found faulty or obsolete by succeeding generations and abandoned.

Angela has her own problems with co-vivants, I guess. It saddens me that I can’t do anything for her except leave her money when I die.

How the infection even started is beyond me: put it down to the arbitrariness of chance and the nature of the universe. The red spot on my heel is troubling. Something’s always waiting for the opportunity to strike. Disease and other enemies are rampant like Covid. We all have a responsibility. I don’t wonder why that malcontent in the wheelchair clung to her purse.

A patient with an arm in a cast, sitting a few chairs away from me, is called over the PA system. His eyes fixed on his phone, he knocks against my orthopedic boot, makes no apology, and opens the doctor’s door next to my chair.

Angela said she’d phone after today’s appointment. She calls twice a week between her visits. I know that she cared a great deal, maybe still does, for her latest companion or partner or conjoint or co-vivant, and perhaps was expecting more of him than he was prepared to give, but not a child, of course. Many people drift in and out of love affairs and co-habitation, creating a history of truncations. Louise and I stayed together a life-time. Maybe we were conjoined, in a manner of speaking, inextricably more than partners.

And we had Angela. A pregnancy three years later ended in a still birth, and for years we mourned the missing girl. What a joy Angela was as a child, often creeping into our bed to begin a fabulous story. We applauded her soccer games, attended her graduations, and invited her boyfriends to dinner, sometimes getting their names confused. Oh, she went through an existential crisis of sorts in university, as so many do, and emerged confirmed in her various decisions of how she wanted to live. Our opinion wasn’t required. My wife and I absorbed the rejections and lived with them. And now that life…my wife….is over.

Angela said she’d help me declutter—how breezily she pronounced that verb—and find a new place closer to the hospital.

The rude young man emerges from the doctor’s office, not glancing up from his phone. After the doctor examines my surgical wound and the swelling in my heel and I describe the pain, I will call a cab. I do not want to worry my daughter. Angela really is the end of things. Behind her I see no connections. I hope she finds another co-vivant or conjoint, but I can’t help wishing there had been more of us, if only to provide help when needed.

Hearing my name called over the PA system, I adjust my blue hospital mask and struggle to rise.

A two-time recipient of the Quebec Writers Federation award for best English language fiction, Kenneth Radu’s, last collection of stories is “Net Worth,” published by DCBooks (Canada). A former teacher at John Abbott College outside of Montreal, he currently writes occasional essays and reviews, which often appear in the online magazine Salon II.