Filth and Faith

I cleaned a house for my sister this week. It was a small place that I used to live in and rented from her two years ago. It's a studio really, with one room 15 x 20, a kitchen at one end and an old queen bed at the other. This week, opening the front door hard against piles of dirty towels I hardly recognized it. Three hundred square feet of living space. Small by any Western standards and yet this cleaning job before me had been turned down by all the professional cleaners in town. Standing there, I suddenly realized why. When I had moved into this place it was right after my bike trip to SE Asia and it seemed just right for a couple who lives with two teenage boys every other week. I mean really, who needs space and bedrooms and privacy and alone time and a spontaneous sex life anyways. Most Thai or Laos or Cambodian folks would be fine living here so why not us? Sheryl and I put up curtains around the bed and the boys slept on inflatable mattresses on the floor. It was what you might call "cozy". Turns out we're not quite as Asian-Developing-World as I had hoped we were. Cozy is sweet for about a week...two weeks tops. Then cozy becomes cute which really only lasts a few days or so quickly turning into small. Small becomes cramped after a month . As Fall sets into early Winter, with the sweating single pane windows, uninsulated walls and 24/7 space heaters droning on and humming their insufficient warmth, cramped just became claustrophobic and we just snapped...and moved into a palatial 800 square foot apartment. The magic of the simplicity and familial bonding of Asian living worn away by the schedules/desires/expectations of life in the West. But standing on that doorstep threshold last week pushing against the front door I realized that we already had lived in a palace back then and just didn't realize it.
I had been fairly warned by my sister that the place had been left in shambles by the previous occupant. Yet, even though fairly warned, I think "shambles" was being generous to whoever lived here. Cleaning up the shipwrecked flotsam of a life battered by the waves of sickness and mental illness is devastating. I didn't do it for fun or because I was bored, I did it because my step-son Julian needed a job and couldn't do this one alone. It was a selfless act of love. I also did it for the $60/hour...a self serving act of greed. Lastly I did it for my sister who was becoming desperate for the help. So there it was, the door only half open before the smell of the place hit us like a dirty fist. The stench was palpable, stale, fetid and cloying. It wasn't the kind of acrid nastiness of a steamy overused summer outhouse. Nor was it the poopy/farty tang of freshly sliced durian fruit. It was the smell of death mixed with rotting food...thrown into a fog of dirty old diapers. It was the smell of a diabetic nightmare and madness. It was the smell of a man in the last throes of a long battle with his body and his mind...a battle he had lost. The load of crap behind the door was barring entry as if to say, "Hey, we won this battle, this is our territory now". Samantha told us that the guy who lived here had been sick for a while before calling 9-1-1. He was hauled off by the poor EMT volunteers and flown to some mainland hospital and she heard that he actually survived. By the looks of this place, just barely.
Madness! So this is what an untethered mind, fully let go, looks like. It's not Russel Crowe's garage in the movie "A Beautiful Mind"...where he has 10,000 post-it notes stuck to the walls and all intricately connected by string, like some art director's spiderweb, and all fluttering in the breeze. That was eerie and kind of cool. This was more scary than eerie and there was nothing cool about this place. But we came prepared...physically prepared anyway, with masks smeared with so much Vic's Vapo-Rub that our throats burned and our eyes watered. Not nearly enough to deal with the dank air inside but it did help. Gloves and garbage bags and a positive attitude were the only other tools we needed for the next few hours. Emotionally however we weren't quite prepared and I'm not sure what those tools would be anyway. Hundreds and hundreds of wet, brown adult diapers were piled up on the floor between moist and smeared towels, half eaten boxes of cereal, smelly crumpled clothes mixed together with weeks and weeks of of strewn trash. On every surface half drunk bottles of juice breeding fruit flies or milk containers curdling yellow chunks of slime. The bare mattress wet and stained brown, surrounded by paper backs and paper wrapper of hundreds of Mounds candy bars and thousands of "Lifesaver" candies. Then I saw them. "Julian, STOP" I said as he was reaching down for another pile of filth. No, I wasn't worried about the ant collecting near his feet. All around the bed and bedside table were insulin needles. Little orange capped hornets waiting to sting. Fortunately, most still had their caps on. Unfortunately it meant that scooping up armloads of junk and bagging it up quickly was no longer an option. A needle stick in this environment, hell in this world, is a very scary thing. We were reduced to picking up each item and carefully placing them into the black bags. The good news is that neither of us got stuck. The bad news is that we had to observe each piece of grimy trash individually. We could both tell you now in full detail, if you cared to listen, how the molding spore patterns of a poopy diaper differ from the greenish hairy tendrils of mold in a half full can of refried beans.
It was horrible. There were incongruities that were jarring. Like dirty underwear on a counter top next to an open jar of olives. Or a box of Cinnamon Crunch cereal on the bathroom floor. It was disconcerting. Like going to the dump and seeing society's mixture of wast tumbling together under the bulldozer's scoop. But as visually weird as it all was, what really got to us was the smell. It stuck to my skin and hair. And even through the Vic's Vapo-Rub, the smell painted the back of my throat and no amount of clearing or coughing would remove it. But I only wretched once. Now, as a nurse I have trained myself for over 20 years to NOT wretch. Whether it be while a patient is vomiting or faced with some other horrible thing that we deal with in the ER, I don't wretch. Clearing out a sink full of roting meat and dairy products and opened cans of macaroni and cheese broke through those 20 years of training...it was just too much. Reaching my gloved hand into that brownish-gray miasma of goo brought up a smell that I can only say will be the smell that greets me at the gates of hell when I die. One wretch...no vomit. I held it down thinking I don't want to barf into this mask and drown in my own vomit...not here. "God don't let me die here in someone else's hell". The clog broke and the sink drained away, answering my prayers. I even looked for a pattern of Jesus in the muck wondering if one miracle could follow another so quickly, but none appeared. I don't think Jesus has been in this room for quite a while.
But that sink was the worst of it and when it drained and the smell abated somewhat, things got better. Well, except for the refrigerator full of melted and decaying foods that were slowly growing into one large dark green solid carpet of mold. After that though, the rest of the place was relatively easy. OK, not really, but less hellish anyway. Both Julian and I knew that taking this job was going to be hard as my sister gave us a clear heads-up. We both knew it was going to be gross and nasty and it most assuredly was. But there in the midst of another man's ruined life (through all of our boisterous "OH MY GOD"s and "HOLY CRAP"s, replete with barfing sounds and a camaraderie that accompanies shared hardships) crept into us both a profound sadness. We became quieter and quieter as we each imagined how it must have been for this poor fellow traveller as this shoe box of a space swallowed him whole in his own waste. "It's so sad" Julian kept saying and I never loved him more. Standing there in his painters mask and long orange rubber gloves, burned out from a long day of work, was this 14 year old guy who wasn't angry or resentful or callous or hard but full of love and compassion for someone he had never met. Someone whose horror he was having to deal with first hand and very unpleasantly. Someone who by letting go of the reins of his life was impacting our lives in a nasty way and Julian showed only compassion. He got it. Here in all this shit and ugliness shown the bright and brilliant light of open hearted understanding. Any one of us could go down this crooked road of slow death but for the grace of God. So we continued to scrub and clean with occasional random bursts of "yuck" or "oh, no...oh, God!" but only in the spirit of our suffering in the moment and never in resentment of the man who created the mess.
We ended up scrubbing the floors and pulling out the bed and pulling up the carpet and bagging up 50 or so black garbage bags of trash. The place actually looked pretty normal when we left but I'm not sure the smell will ever go away. I'll never step foot in there again as any warm memory of family closeness has been superimposed with new ugly memories. As we drove home in silence we both longed for a hot shower. We were happy to be returning to a home of sanity and order and were also happy that we had come through this ordeal more intact as human beings than if we had never had that experience. We survived a shipwreck together by picking up the pieces of a smashed up boat that we were never even on. And something happened to Julian that day and to our relationship. The 14 year old boy took a leap into young adulthood and we bonded more as emotional equals than ever before. It was a good thing we did and I hope we never ever have to do it again.