‘Hard to Comprehend’ How Life Can Become Unlivable
Charlie Marsh never expected to be the subject of a sad story. Even now, as he sits on his sofa and talks about his shrinking world, this 68-year-old retired Army man can’t believe it’s himself he’s talking about.
“It’s so hard for me to comprehend,” he says. “I knew it was happening, but I couldn’t do anything about it.”
It started in subtle ways. He’d be in the grocery store pushing a cart and noticed he had to hold onto the cart to maintain balance. Then, he’d be driving and his feet were so numb he couldn’t tell if he was stepping on the brakes.
After a life never interrupted by bad health, Marsh was found to have diabetes two years ago. It has gradually cost him almost all his leg strength and is now working on his psyche.
“Do you ever get so depressed that your stomach feels like it’s tied up in knots and there’s nothing you can do about it?” he says as we talk in his two-bedroom Garden Grove apartment. “When I’m lying in bed and thinking about stuff I can’t do, the stuff I would like to do and always was able to do but can’t do now, that’s when I get so depressed my stomach cramps up.”
Do you fight off those feelings? I ask.
“I’ve tried, but I can’t do it. I just get to a point where I give up, you know?”
An unemployed man named Chris stays with Marsh much of the time, running errands for him in Marsh’s 1983 Cadillac, but Marsh knows it’s not a permanent situation.
“Without Chris, I don’t know what I’d do,” he says. “We get along good together, as far as that goes. I give him money now and then for cigarettes. I’d like to have somebody I could rely on. If something should happen, I know he would just walk off and leave me. That would leave me completely alone.”
It irritates him occasionally when Chris takes off in Marsh’s Caddie and doesn’t tell him where he’s going or when he’ll be back. I ask if he’s spoken to Chris about it.
“If I told him he couldn’t use the car, I’d be sitting here by myself and have a car in the garage with nobody driving it. I don’t begrudge him driving my car, not one bit, but he’s the type who takes off and doesn’t bother to call or tell me where he’s at or what he’s doing, so I sit here and wait for him to come back, and sometimes it’s four, five, six hours. I can’t say anything to him, because what if he walks off and leaves me? Then, where am I at?”
The divorced father of three grown children, Marsh says he hears from his family at Christmas but doesn’t see or hear from them otherwise.
He says he needs a semi-permanent professional caretaker but doesn’t have the money to pay for one.
What are your days like, I ask.
“I sit right here,” he says. “I’m a couch potato.”
You don’t say that with pride, I reply.
“No way,” he says. “Disgust, if anything.”
He’s fully aware that he’s fighting a two-front war, faced with physical and psychological decline.
“I never thought about suicide before in my life,” he says, “but it’s getting to the point now where if I get to where I can’t get out of bed . . . I won’t live in bed.”
What’s the worst part? I ask.
“It’s the small things,” he says. “I can’t take a vacuum cleaner and vacuum my house. I can stand at the sink and wash dishes, provided I have a sink to hold onto. I know I think too much of my condition. I don’t know what you’d call it--whether you think I’m self-pitying or not. But I don’t feel I am, because if I could do it, I would. The only things I feel sorry for is the things I can’t do. I can’t go to the grocery store, I can’t go to the bank, I can’t go to the post office, I can’t even go down to my mailbox (about 50 feet away). If I take the walker, it takes me 15 to 20 minutes to make the round trip.”
He can make it from the sofa to the bathroom without the walker, but not much farther. “I don’t have any strength in my legs at all. If I used my walker, I can walk, but if I just stand up and try to walk, I fall down. And if I fall down, I can’t get up, because I don’t have enough strength in my legs to lift me up.”
I ask him how he fights the mental aspect of it all.
“Well,” he says, “I’m just taking it day by day.”
I make my leave and mumble something about hoping things turn out OK for him. He gives me kind of a lame smile as if to say he knows there isn’t a whole lot I can say to him.
We all know there are hundreds, if not thousands, of Charlie Marshes out there, elderly or sick people whose otherwise anonymous lives got turned into desperate daily searches for silver linings. Their view of the world comes largely from looking at a TV screen.
You wish there was something you could do, but instead you find yourself accepting the fact it could happen to you or anyone you know, and that you’d probably be left with nothing more to say than what Charlie Marsh says:
“ It’s so hard for me to comprehend .”
Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.