The Paper Recluse

After his wife died he became obsessed with the need to maintain his life the way it was when she was with him. For he missed her cruelly. It was almost ten years since she had left him for the Grim Reaper, at that point in her battle with cancer, a more attractive suitor to her than he was, and she seemed to decide against remaining with him.

Holding on to life, even if she was capable of doing it, throughout the months of her treatment, after that useless surgery, just meant ongoing pain, even if he did everything his feverish, grieving mind could think of, to ease her torment. It just wasn’t enough, loving her as much as he would and would and did. She needed something he could not offer her; complete release from the incessant darkness the future offered; pain surmounts cherishing love, he learned. And she finally greeted death thankfully, full release straight ahead.

And he was released from the burden of caring for her. His tender ministrations, gently awakening her to pain in the morning, after a long, restless night of coping and aching for sleep that finally came too late and too briefly to offer a reasonable period of energy replenishment. True, it was late morning when he brought her back to pain, and she did so much appreciate the baby-warm water that he used to cleanse her wasted, wrinkled skin and limbs that he so well recalled were once smooth and wonderfully curved and inviting to the touch.

He fed her, spoonful by spoonful, the broths he learned to prepare that might give her lapsing stamina a brief surge of strength to face the day ahead. He knew his close attendance on her needs meant much to her. It could not be otherwise, since his own life was now shaped by the need to tend on her, be with her, bring her the comfort of his loving presence.

She hadn’t, until near the end, lost her curiosity about everything occurring about her in wider society. Wanted him to read the daily news to her, for she oddly had no willingness to listen to the news, view it on television. She had never been an avid news-watcher, television bored her. She wanted to feel the paper of the newsprint firmly in her hands, turn each page with growing anticipation, often reading out to him brief bits of news she felt he should be knowledgeable about. She had always felt he hadn’t paid sufficient attention to the daily news, the newspapers; too reliant on the evening broadcasts.

“They’re just the tip of the news iceberg”, she scoffed.

“That’s enough for me” he would respond, defensively.

“Well, you’re not getting the details, the details are only provided when they’re shabby and shoddy and tinged with sensationalism; they're anti-social in nature, because that’s what the little minds watching television want to be regaled with”, she insisted.

“I am not invested in the news the way you are. I’m satisfied with a broad outline, I don’t need all the gritty details”, he’d repeat by rote, for this was an ongoing irritation between them. Her, the newshound, he the diffident reader.

“You’ve no social conscience”, she would sniff, rebuffed and patronizing.

It was just her way. Part of her character. To be critical of everything he did. A bit of a harridan. He knew the bargain he had, with her. She was intolerant of so many things about him. She was a relentless nag. But she was his nag, and he loved her. And he knew how vital his existence was to her well-being. She depended upon him, always had, right to the very end. And he was there, right to the very end.

He felt utterly crushed, devastated beyond any sense of loss he might have imagined. His world and his life suddenly become meaningless. A void where his sense of being, his balance, his idea of the meaning of life had been. He was adrift, confused, disbelieving that despite the cancer steadily consuming her, she would prefer death over life. In death he was absent, no longer at her side, ready and eager to perform all that she commanded of him. How would she manage without him, in that dark kingdom?

More to the point now, how would he ever live without her presence close beside him? At night he groped in the dark for meaning and it eluded him. He wept into her pillow, the white no longer white but a murky grey, for he never changed the linen as often as she did. She so assiduously looked after all the minutiae of housewifery before her decay into nothingness. When she was ill to the point of physical incapacitation she would instruct him when and how he must proceed with taking care of the household chores she was formerly invested in. She had been a meticulous housewife.

He’d always notice when she’d gone through the house like an efficient whirlwind of cleaning-activity. And he always expressed his admiration and appreciation to her for that, and she in her turn appreciated that. That was before his retirement. It seemed as though the moment he had the time and the leisure to spend himself in close communion with her, she suddenly collapsed, became a faint shadow of her former robust, bustling, critical self.

It had not even been a year that elapsed after his retirement when she began to complain of feeling ill, and then the swift diagnosis of cancer. It wasn’t fair. He had worked all his life to produce comfort for her, companionship for him, and as soon as he had the opportunity to delve more deeply into the nest he had helped her to produce for them both in their declining years, she was gone.

He held her close beside him, still. He was convinced she was there, hovering about him in death, a busily-engaged wraith. Just as she had been in life, a vigorous and complaining presence. He adored her still. She loved him still. He spoke with her incessantly, and he could hear in the deepest places within his viscera, that she responded.

Oh, her responses weren’t always calm and approving of him; they were weighted with her usual picky observations and pithy denunciations. She upbraided him for his untidy mind and untidy work habits. Her own most placid and satisfying times, it always seemed to him, was when she was busy with her housework. And those were the times when she would endearingly, hum the melody to that old Disney-produced film from Alice in Wonderland. She had thrilled to that silly film, and the rabbit's song always possessed her when she was busy: "I'm late, I'm late, for a very important date, can't stop to say hello, goodbye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late, and if I stop...I lose the time I save..."

He could hear that refrain at the oddest times of night and day. It seemed to serve as a prelude to her addressing him. And when she did it was invariably to remind him of his obligation to become what she saw in him.

“Too bad, Ted, that you’re so loathe to become a better person than you are. I know you have it in you, you’re just so comfortable being a sophist, a cynical social critic viewing the world through that conservative lens. Try to think a little more compassionately”, she would urge him, “of the great mass of humanity whose existence is wrought with the despair of indigence.”

He no longer shrugged off that kind of patter. He thought more deeply about human nature and humanitarian impulses came slowly to him, but they did emerge. And he began to respond to the never-ending requests from every imaginable source for charitable donations. He even once, went out himself in an effort to give himself over to door-to-door solicitations for local charities, but he found the experience so psychically debilitating, he never repeated it.

It did, however, encourage him to give more generously himself. And when he discovered that some of the charities he responded to with such generosity were nothing less than scams, he felt cheated, angry, and he took it up with her in an evening conversation.

“Hazel, are you there? I’ve tried, you know, I’ve tried to be a more generous person. I know you were always the one who gave to charity, not me, and I scoffed at the meaningless of it all. You know, don’t you, that I’ve changed. But Hazel, I think I was right in the first place, it’s a conscience-sop, nothing more; those charities have no real function other than to drain people of their hard-earned savings. I think I’ll give it a pass, now.”

How she berated him, making him feel badly about betraying her values in death as he had in life. “Ted, you can’t do that! There are legitimate needs out there that have to be met!” she wailed. And he quailed. But adamantly refused to himself to tolerate the thought of wasted savings going in some social-deviant posing as a humanitarian’s, savings account.

He turned instead to honouring her commitment to the news. He took out newspaper subscriptions once again to the many papers she had insisted on subscribing to, and once completed poring through them, meticulously placing in the garbage, insistent that neatness and comfort required that one be merciless in getting rid of items no longer needed. Whatever she read was securely stored in her head, her memory banks had never failed her, and she had no need of retaining waste products.

He, on the other hand, did his best to consume the news, but nothing seemed to stick with him. As soon as he read anything, he would let it slip past his consciousness, and be forgotten. And, unlike his wife, because he knew he might have to resort to checking back on news items if she ever decided to quiz him about the daily news, he maintained a stack of them. At first it was only one stack, and then it grew to two, and kept increasing until the living areas of their home became a warren of newspapers with narrow corridors from the rooms he used most for access to the bedroom, kitchen, bathroom.

All other rooms of their modest home had become utterly stacked beyond access with years-worth of newspapers. Growing yellowed and brittle, but still legible, if he could but make his way through to them, somehow discover the whereabouts of specific issues. He had stacked them with care; all the papers of one publishing source stacked in one room, by date.

It had become a mindless compulsion. He no longer even glanced at their contents when he draw the day’s papers in from the front porch. He left them sitting on the kitchen counter throughout the duration of that particular day, then before withdrawing for bed, he picked them up and carefully tucked them into any remaining interstices in the rooms assigned to them.

If there were insects or mice or rats curious about the news of the day, nesting within these opportune stacks of paper, he would have no knowledge nor any curiosity about their presence. But he was aware of his wife hissing at him that he was not being neat and tidy, cluttering up the rooms of their house in this manner. "My dear", he responded gently, "everything is neatly and tidily stacked".

He lived the life of a recluse. Distant family members took little interest in his presence beyond occasionally dropping a note. With no response, even that tenuous contact stopped. Neighbours, long accustomed to his curious manner of retreating from society were comfortable in greeting him familiarly on the rare occasion he was seen on shopping expeditions, or cursorily caring for his property.

He was known as the “Paper Hermit”, for people had glanced on occasion into the front vestibule of the house when he would answer the doorbell.

It was only when a considerable length of time had passed when he hadn’t been seen around and about and the weeds on his untended lawn had grown to startling proportions that anyone thought something might possibly be amiss, and contacted the authorities.

No one heard Hazel admonishing Ted about his lack of housekeeping skills. But he was thankful to be with her again, and grateful to be the subject of her never-too-tedious remonstrations.