Dancing with Mr. Grim

“How long has he been stalking me?”

Ginger shuddered with the thought that she may have been oblivious to his presence for years.  On the other hand, if one has a benevolent stalker, maybe it is best to be unaware.  Is there such a thing as a benevolent stalker?  She shook her head in defiance as she sat there in the chemo parlor.  If she was going to indulge her imagination, it should be in visualizing those drops of chemo killing the cancer cells.  She would convince herself that the stalker was a fantasy.

In fact, Ginger’s stalker had been present and biding his time since the beginning when Ginger’s head emerged covered with red fuzz that promised to be curls.  She cried before she was fully born, and as they appeared, all four extremities began to flail vigorously.  The doctor pronounced her “a force to be reckoned with.”  Keeping up with this child, who approached life exuberantly and brought much amusement and joy to her parents, was a daily challenge.  Her parents were much too busy with Ginger’s antics to notice the stalker’s presence, but as she grew, Ginger herself gradually became aware of him.

He was there on the day when she was two and rode her little car off the porch and down the front steps managing to hang on for the bumpy ride.  He watched her pitch over the handle bars and hit her head on the concrete sidewalk, but she did not see him.  He hid behind the large maple tree and sighed with relief when she began to cry.  He saw her father scoop her up.  He knew it wasn’t his time to touch her.

On the day of her grandfather’s funeral, she rode from the church to the cemetery in one of the undertaker’s limousines.  She had never been in a heavy car with great suspension before and was impressed with how smoothly and quietly the car moved.  It gave her a strange and eerie feeling, but there was something else going on which she struggled to understand.  None of the family members in the vehicle spoke.  In that silence, Ginger felt weightless and encompassed by a strange presence.  Suspended in sadness and loss, something or someone tugged at her heart.  She was ten years old, and this was perhaps her first conscious but vague awareness of him.

As Ginger grew into her teen years, she excelled in her classes and volunteered in the community.  She was always busy racing from one activity to another.   She was far ahead of her time in her enjoyment of physical activity.  In that era, girls nearly always wore skirts, and no equality of opportunity existed regarding sports.  So, Ginger’s peers thought her strange, because she enjoyed running and biking.  She was exhilarated by the feeling of the breeze rushing past her as she pedaled or jogged.

The multiple bee stings she got while riding her bike back from a visit to her grandmother’s house did not slow her down until the intense itching started and her tongue began to swell.  She had not known she was allergic to bee stings.  She stumbled in the door of her home, and her parents rushed her to the emergency room. As she lay on the stretcher, people and objects began to dim and spin.  She recognized the feeling of weightlessness.  She thought she might drift out of her body, and she felt a presence brush against her arm and her face.  She was being lured toward a cloudy figure, but she insisted that she was too busy to follow him.  As soon as the epinephrine kicked in, her heart raced, and the cold gray cloud slipped silently away.

Ginger did not give much thought to these incidents assuming they were the product of her active imagination.  At that point in her life, the notion of a stalker never entered her mind.  She graduated from high school and then from college and married her college sweetheart.

Ten years later, she was a young mother driving home at night in the dark of a winter evening.  The roads were slippery, and she was driving cautiously, but the on-coming truck wasn’t.  She saw the headlights coming straight at her.  She screamed, “No….not yet.”  Those were the only words she got out audibly before the crash, but in her mind she had added, “My kids need me!”

Milliseconds before the impact she jerked the wheel to the right and plowed into a snowbank.  The truck smashed into the back driver’s side of the car, but she escaped without injury.  Ginger stood next to her car and shook in the freezing air.  As she waited for the police and tow truck, she watched a shapeless gray shadow slither off through the trees.  She realized that it was not only the freezing air causing her to shiver. She was beginning to think that the shadowy presence was not her imagination.  Later, she felt foolish to think she had seen something in the trees and never mentioned it to anyone.

When Ginger was in her fifties, the doctor saw a spot on her routine mammogram.  A biopsy was quickly ordered, and when the results came back the next week, she was told the mass was malignant.  She went home and cried.  The gray specter sat next to her on the sofa in her living room and slipped his arm around her.  Her children were grown, but her husband still needed her, and she had no grandchildren yet.  She certainly wanted to live to see them.  She was still working; still active in community organizations.  She had hobbies to pursue.  She was finishing a quilt to enter in a competition and another one to donate for a silent auction.  She was much too busy to die.  She told Mr. Grim that she had every intention of fighting off his seduction.  She had no time for such foolishness.  She was enamored with life and would not be unfaithful to it.  

When her husband arrived home and she shared her sad news, he thought that her diagnosis was the reason she clung to him so tightly.  He never knew about the “other man” pursuing her.  Ginger could not verbalize her concern about the strange presence.  She felt that speaking about him out loud would make him more of a reality, and she preferred to believe he was a foolish fantasy.

 Surgery and chemotherapy followed.  Everyone who knew Ginger marveled at her strength and resolve.  She embraced the pain of living through the experience, because she refused to embrace her stalker.  She repeatedly ignored his whispers and shook her red curls in defiance.  As she sat in the chemo parlor and visualized her body and the chemo fighting the cancer cells together, she also visualized herself running away from Mr. Grim until he faded into non-existence.

When she was seventy-four, Ginger’s husband died slowly of cancer.  Many times as she cared for him, she felt as though the stalker was wrapping his arms around both of them.  As much as she loved her husband, she did not want to run away with him.  She recognized his need to be relieved of pain and be whole again, but she still felt well and did not wish to go on the journey with him.  There were days when she was exhausted caring for him and felt as though a hand was wrapped around her ankle trying to pull her into the grave along with him.

Only about a year after her husband passed, Ginger sat on the kitchen floor in a heap trying to reach the phone.  The pain in her left chest, jaw and arm, along with nausea, had caused her to be so weak, that her legs buckled under her when she was just steps away from making the 911 call.  She could barely catch her breath and felt perspiration on her brow.

She was alone in the house, since her husband’s death.  Her children and those precious grandchildren lived miles away.  No one would miss her until she didn’t show up for her routine hair appointment.  She had refused to go gray and still had her flaming red tresses….although they were now artificially created.  Would her hairdresser Sally suspect there was a problem, or would she just think Ginger had forgotten the appointment?  With her busy schedule, she had, on a few occasions, missed an appointment and later called with profuse apology. There was a retired teachers’ luncheon she was supposed to attend at noon, but would anyone miss her there and think to check on her?

She could see him standing in the doorway…..the gray specter seemed more formed than when she had seen him on previous occasions.  He was less cloud-like and more human in shape.  He still wasn’t the least bit attractive.

For the first time in her experience, he spoke.  “You really should have signed up for one of those emergency call systems,” he said in a soft mellow tone.  Her children had encouraged her to do so, but she had felt she was too young and vigorous to get a device for “old people.”

Ginger growled at her stalker.  “I am still too busy for you!  Go away and leave me alone!”

He shrugged and nodded toward her cordless phone.  The base unit was out of her reach on the table, but it was plugged into an electrical outlet near the floor.  She managed to reach the cord, and jerk it hard enough that the handset shot off the table and fell within her reach.  She dialed 911 and a soothing voice assured her that help was on the way.

Her impertinent companion hopped in the back of the ambulance with her.  The EMTs didn’t seem to see him.  He followed her into the Emergency Room and right up to the bed in the Coronary Care Unit.  He tried to hold her hand, but her mind remained strong, and she repeated within herself, “Go away!  Go away!  GO AWAY!”

The pain medication gave her some disturbing dreams.  The gray human shape floated in and out of strange scenes.  Someone was throwing a dark blanket over her face, but she startled and awakened in time to toss it aside.  A gray fog crept under the bed and rose up around her.  She forced her eyes open, and it was gone….just a nightmare.

Later, she noticed tendrils from a gray mass like wisps of smoke creeping up the sides of a bed within her view.  Eventually the patient was enveloped and was soon carried off on a stretcher covered with a sheet and encompassed by the ashen fog.

After spending a few days in CCU, she was moved on to the PCU.  Then, since she really wasn’t quite strong enough to go home to an empty house, a couple of weeks in a skilled nursing facility to start some cardiac rehab seemed to be in order.  She had no specific evidence that he had followed her, but after she arrived in the rehab facility, she did see him occasionally.  He was now in the shape of a muscular young man, and he roamed the halls passing her door dressed in slate colored scrubs.  She wondered which patients he was courting and felt sorry for them.  He seemed to be avoiding her and did not even glance into her room.  Apparently there were others more in need of his attention.

Every day, Ginger went to physical therapy and tried to build up her strength.  About three weeks after the heart attack, she was on the treadmill feeling pretty good about her increasing speed and stamina.  She was talking cheerfully with a therapy aide, when without warning, her right side suddenly refused to cooperate.  The aide caught her and lowered her to the floor as she slumped.  Ginger said, “Hep…hep…..whas wrawn?”

She was lifted to a stretcher and hurried through the tunnel connecting the rehab building to the main hospital.  She found herself in the Emergency Room again.  The orderly dressed in gray scrubs stood in the corner shaking his head.  She was annoyed by his presence there and yelled, “NO!” over and over again.

As doctors and nurses tended to her, she heard the word “stroke,” but she didn’t understand what they were talking about.  She did not know that her speech was slurred, and that she was saying nonsense words.  She kept calling for her daughter “Oodie” thinking she was saying “Judy.”  She was sure Oodie would understand her, and these other people were just fools. 

She was hustled off for a CAT scan and MRI.  When she returned to the ER room, Judy was there.  Ginger was greatly relieved to see her and tried to explain to Judy that her legs had just become weak on the treadmill.  Judy didn’t seem to comprehend.  She looked at Ginger sadly and made a circular motion around her mouth, as though mixing something.  She said, “Mom, your words are all mixed up.”

The enormity of what had happened hit Ginger, and she began to scream.   A sedative was hastily given to alleviate her agitation.

Later she awakened to some lucid thoughts.  Her right side felt numb and was immobile.  She tried to move the fingers on her right hand without any success.  She reached over and picked up her right hand with her left one.  She released her grip and watched her right hand fall to the bed.  She slid the toes of her left foot under the back of her right ankle and tried to lift it.  She struggled and the right foot dropped to the bed.

Ginger tried to recite the alphabet and count to ten.  What she said made perfect sense to her, but the gray clad orderly standing in the corner shook his head and smiled.  She took note that he had a pleasant enough face, and that his expression was indeed a sympathetic smile and not a mocking smirk.  She realized that she had never seen him as hostile to her.  His presence had at times scared her, but he had never seemed to frighten her intentionally.

After a few day in the hospital, Ginger was returned to the rehab facility.  As days, weeks and months passed, she made no progress in speech therapy.  She did not regain the use of her right hand or leg in spite of therapy.  Sometimes she cried in frustration at the betrayal of her body. 

It was bad enough that she could no longer control her right arm and leg, but the worst of it was that she no longer had control of her bladder and bowels.  A catheter kept her from lying in a puddle of her own urine.  She tried to call the staff when she needed the bedpan or commode for a bowel movement, but they did not always arrive on time.  Soiling herself and having someone else wipe her backside was a huge indignity for Ginger. 

No one thought about her hair.  They brushed it and braided it so that it did not become matted, but no one thought about the color.  She could not bear to look at herself in the mirror as the gray roots grew longer and the red locks began to disappear. 

Ginger saw the orderly in the gray scrubs pass her door nearly every day, but he didn’t come in to talk to her.  She considered calling out to him, but she wasn’t sure how to address him….perhaps, Mr. Grim?  She had come to think of him that way, but she wasn’t sure that was actually a name to which he would answer.

Ginger had great difficulty feeding herself.  Picking up a utensil with her left hand, getting food on it, and having it successfully reach her mouth was usually an exercise in futility.  Aides would come in to feed her, but the food was often cold before they got around to her.  She lost her appetite and lost weight.  Poor nutrition effected the health of her skin, and loss of weight meant she was not as well padded.  Poor staffing of the facility resulted in her position not being changed frequently enough.  Eventually with all these factors conspiring, Ginger developed painful bed sores.

In her misery, she started to call out, “Pleash, pleash, Missergim.”

The staff discussed what she could possibly mean, but no one thought of Mr. Grim.  Certainly, they were aware that he lurked around in the corridors, but they could not see him and did not know him by that name.

Ginger tried to think it all through in her mind.  She had always been too busy for him.  Was he now too busy for her?  Were there others who went with him cheerfully the first time he appeared?  That didn’t seem likely.  The desire to survive seems to be innate and powerful. 

She saw him pass occasionally.  Each time he seemed more handsome, his physique more toned.  She tried to call to him, but he didn’t answer.

Her children “Oodie” and Jim came to visit her each week.  Sometimes the grandchildren came with them, but teenagers are involved in lots of activities, so she did not see them often.  Neither Judy nor Jim knew what “Missergim” meant.  They were grieved when their mother seemed agitated, but could not figure out how to help her, other than asking the staff to give her a sedative to calm her down.

Ginger could not speak coherently, but she could still think.  To pass the time, she wrote a poem in her mind:

Mr. Grim all dressed in gray,

Won’t you please, come my way?

Oh, how I greatly long,

To be wrapped in arms so strong,

With my head upon your chest,

Gently carried to my rest.

I may have spurned you yesterday,

And pushed you far away,

But now I am ready,

Please come without delay.

She repeated her poem every day.  Eventually she began to sing it in her mind.  She had never written a song before and was quite pleased with herself.  After several days, she began to hear a full orchestra playing soaring music to her words.

She awoke one night and heard her song playing.  Mr. Grim was sitting at the foot of her bed.

“Hello,” he said most tenderly.

Ginger managed a “Hi.”

“Ginger, I’ve been wondering,” he continued, “if you have some time in your schedule for me.”

“Yes, oh, yes.  I have no pressing engagements,” she said very clearly.

“I thought not.”

He took her by the hand and lifted her to her feet.  Her right side did not fail her.  She stood strong, feeling young again.

Mr. Grim placed his arms around her.  “Would you care to dance?”

Ginger put her head on Mr. Grim’s shoulder.  As her long red hair cascaded across his chest, she realized his scrubs were now glittering with specks of silver. 

She glanced back toward the bed where a wizened, gray-haired shell of a person lay motionless.

Then Ginger and Mr. Grim waltzed away together.