Are You Death? From Swiftwater Valley Stories Joseph Kantor   © Copyright 2026 by Joseph Kantor

Image by congerdesign from Pixabay

The sixteenth person, a delicate, bird like woman sat perfectly still in her wheelchair backed against a wall, only her mouth moving with the incessant sound of her voice. She wore an immaculate navy-blue dress dotted with tiny periwinkles, lace collar and cuffs completing her ensemble. I had not seen her before.

I visited my mother daily for more than a month while she was undergoing rehabilitation at Greenhills Nursing Home. The day before Halloween, Mom…86 years old and blind with macular degeneration…had fallen, splitting the ball of the right shoulder in half, and fracturing the bones in her upper arm. In short order, the ambulance whisked her to the Allegheny General Hospital Trauma Center in Pittsburgh to get the best care possible. A week later she was transferred to Greenhills.

On this Sunday two weeks before Christmas 2014, I arrived at the facility after services dressed in head-to-toe black: shirt, trousers, belt, shoes, socks, and jacket. In hindsight, it is not the smartest thing I have ever done.

As I passed the nurses’ station, the delicate, petite woman of this story shot out her arthritic, blue-veined hands, grabbed my arm and looked up into my light blue eyes from her deep blue ones…searching, probing into me. She smiled softly and blurted out:

“Are you Death? Please take me with you…” in a voice laced with a southern lilt. She clasped my wrist with arthritic lumpy hands, her eyes brimming with tears begging me for help, for release.

In shock and choked up, my own eyes starting with tears, I patted her hands gently and made what was probably an asinine, placatory remark, so stunned by the searching clarity in her dark eyes that I could not gather myself.

“No, I’m not. I’m sorry.” I did not know what else I could have said.

“Please, take me with you,” she said again with a tiny sob, but already drifting away.

I was convinced that, for all of her dementia…she spent hours a day chanting “ya-ya, ya-ya, ya-ya” or “gnuh,gnuh,gnuh,gnuh” while staring at one meaningless television program after another…in the moment of our contact, she was lucid, fully aware of what she was saying: lucidity in the midst of madness, the sun breaking through dense fog, a brief flicker of sparkling synapses connecting, then fading…then less…then gone.

Tears stung my eyes at her question delivered in a soft, sweet voice so genteel, so kind. And my heart broke for her and for myself because I was unable to assuage her agony, her grief. What could I have said so that she understood?

After I finished visiting my mother and walked back down the hallway to the nurses’ station, the little lady and the group were gone, the television, dark.

Much later, in the solace of my home, I sobbed like a lonely child who, like her, had been cast aside by life, demented and left behind. I knew there was nothing, really, that I could do for her in her loss of compass. Sorrow overwhelmed me and, oh, did I weep for us both.

When I saw her the few times before my mother was released from Greenhills to come home for Thanksgiving, she only stared at me—glared, really—as though I had betrayed her. But lucidity was gone, if it had been there at all, into the silence that surrounds the abandoned.

She did not remember that she had spoken. But I remember her to this day, a mental photograph seared onto my mind’s eye, a reminder of human suffering.

And I never wore black to a nursing home again.

~The End~