Not Love
Older nurses say he has the gift. A particular stillness, cultivated every morning on the floor of a small flat in Hobart — a stillness that calms dementia patients, that makes rooms go quieter when he walks into them, that the people around him learn to match without quite knowing why. He is very good at noticing, in that quiet, who is the hungriest. He tells himself what he does with the noticing is kindness. Sometimes it is.
His mother was a Korean geriatric nurse. His grandmother died at home of Alzheimer's when he was a boy, and he learned at her bedside that presence was the last gift you could give somebody whose name for themselves was dissolving. He trained in aged care before he was nineteen. The rooms he walked into went quieter.
He meditated every morning. He kept a bonsai. He wrote calligraphy at night. The practices were his mother's and his grandfather's, the same ones that had always cleared space in quieter men. What he did with the cleared space was notice. Which residents had nobody coming on Sunday. Which colleagues were thinking of leaving their husbands. Who, in any room, was the hungriest, and why.
What he did with the noticing, he told himself, was kindness. And he was kind — to the dementia patients, to the colleague whose partner never picked up the phone, to the new orderly who kept looking at him across the medication room, to both of the last two at the same time. One of them eventually disappeared into a mystery the facility never explained. Benjamin was genuinely concerned. He left the place the following year and went on working elsewhere. The mind still empties every morning, as cleanly as it ever did.
