The Room

We cleaned his room the other day.  Gretchen went through the piles of clothes on his bedroom floor, sorted and folded them.  She hung his scarves, organized his hats and rearranged the drawers of the nightstand next to his bed.

I cleaned his bathroom.  Hot water and bleach in a bucket I got on my hands and knees and scrubbed every square inch of the tile.  I will spare you the gory details, but use your imagination on what could occur in a bathroom occupied by a 22 year old male with no control of his bowel and bladder and an incredibly limited amount of mobility.  It was a regular shit show, because he regularly didn’t clean it.

Similarly, he hated folding laundry. He had accidents daily which meant daily loads of laundry.  So, the clean clothes languished on the bedroom floor, pushed up against a wall.  We had a daily call and response: “Griffin, please fold your laundry and put it away.”  “Okay Dad.”  He rarely did.  Some days I’d walk in and he would be asleep on the heap of clothes.  Others I’d find him struggling to fold a t-shirt.  On rare days I would walk in and find the floor 100% clear of clothing and heave a sigh of relief.  And then I’d check the closet and there would be two weeks of unfolded laundry stuffed beneath his polos.

The room was a regular source of tension between us.  The messiness was just the trigger for the more pressing issue.  Griffin spent nearly 15 hours a day in his room.  Playing on his phone, struggling with homework or, more commonly, just sleeping.  The paradox of loneliness is that the more lonely you feel the more you want to be alone. We knew Griffin was angry and depressed.  He had regular sessions with a psychologist, was good about taking his anti-depressants, but still he was generally down on himself and his life.

We’d beg and plead to get him out of his room.  “Call some friends and go see a movie,” we’d say.  And then realize that the wheelchair was a barrier to the simplest of group activities and as a result Griff had very few friends to call.  We’d invite him to watch a movie with us and he’d make it about 20 minutes before heading back to his room.

His loneliness is what drove him to binge drink.  “I don’t really know why I do,” he once told me.  “It’s not to make me feel happier.  I think it’s just to not feel anything.”

The tragic part of this story is that over the past four weeks Griffin was making strides.  It was his choice to head to rehab.  He was taking seriously our heed to not only sober up but grow up.  We had a number of phone conversations about it in the last week and he had a resolve in his voice I hadn’t heard before.  When he left rehab his plan was to move out and live in a sober living house.And then he collapsed one rainy Monday afternoon and left us.

So, we spent a day cleaning and organizing his room the way he was cleaning and organizing his life when it ended oh so too soon.  As I breathed in chlorine fumes in his now pristine bathroom, I wondered if it was all a futile gesture.

And then last night as I walked down the hall to bed, I found Gretchen asleep on his bed, breathing him in, his pillow still faintly scented of Griffin.