The address looked like an ordinary apartment building.
Twenty minutes later I was sitting in my car thinking that one day my own photo might be hanging outside a room like that.
At first, I had no idea where I was.
I asked a woman who was coming out if I had the right entrance. She answered in French. I understood roughly every word — which is to say none of them.
The front door was locked. Someone buzzed me in.
Inside there were staff in medical uniforms, equipment, and those small electronic beeps you recognize immediately even when you have no idea what machine is making them.
That was when I started to understand.
It was a CHSLD — one of Quebec's long-term care homes.
I went upstairs and started down the hallway.
A lot of the doors were open, and without really meaning to, I kept looking in.
Someone was lying in bed.
Someone else was eating.
One resident was on the phone.
An older woman had a stuffed dog beside her.
Outside some of the rooms were photographs of the people who lived there.
On the wall was a birthday calendar.
For some reason, that stopped me.
Birthdays still came here too.
And that was the moment the place fully registered.
This wasn't a hospital where most people were waiting for a doctor to tell them they could go home.
Home was here now.
For many of the residents, probably the last one.
What got to me most was how ordinary it all was.
No movie soundtrack. No dramatic scene.
A hallway.
Lunch.
Photographs.
Birthdays.
A stuffed dog.
Life was still going on. It had just become much smaller geographically.
My delivery was almost at the end of the hall.
I knocked and went in.
The man inside greeted me with a smile.
Not a polite delivery smile. He was genuinely upbeat. You could hear it in his voice and see it in the way he carried himself.
I put the bag down.
Only then did I notice, out of the corner of my eye, that both of his legs were gone.
And it happened in exactly that order.
First I noticed him.
Then everything else.
I wished him a good day and, on autopilot, said:
“I just need the PIN.”
He smiled.
“The what?”
I told him there should be a code somewhere on his phone for the delivery.
He started looking for it.
And I thought: no. Forget it.
The app had an option to complete the delivery without the code. I used it.
I wasn't going to make him dig through his phone because an app had decided four digits were the final proof that lunch had arrived.
We said goodbye and I left.
Walking back, I passed the same photographs.
The same birthday calendar.
The same open doors.
This time I didn't feel like looking inside.
I got back to the car and sat there for a while.
At first I was just sad.
Then came a thought I liked even less.
On the way in, I had been looking at the residents as if they belonged to some other world.
They were in there.
I was out here.
I had a car, a phone, errands, plans, problems, somewhere else to be.
Then it occurred to me that there really isn't an “in there” and an “out here.”
There's mostly time.
Maybe a lot of it.
Maybe not.
One day it could be my birthday on a calendar like that.
My photograph outside a door.
Some delivery driver could be walking down the hall looking for my room and glance inside on the way past.
I did not enjoy that thought.
And then I thought about the man at the end of the hallway again.
I don't know anything about him.
I don't know how he got there.
I don't know how long he has lived there or how long he will.
I only know that he had lost both legs.
And when I walked into his room, he smiled at me like he was the one having a good day.
I arrived carrying my own problems.
I left with the same ones.
They just looked a little different afterward.
I don't know whether he taught me anything. Maybe encounters like that don't need to come with a lesson.
Sometimes you just meet someone for a few minutes and remember him for a very long time.
I never got the PIN.
For once, the app was asking the least important question in the room.