9 a.m.
One perk of having no kids at home for a week is that we can up and go whenever we want, wherever we want, without a thought to whether it’s a good time for the boys to go or arranging for someone to be close by in case they need help.

So we have been going out for supper more often than we normally do.

Last night we went to the hotel restaurant in town, and had steak sandwiches — which I order because the meat tastes so good with the garlic toast. Then we headed over to the special-care home to visit with Vincent.

He is put to bed at 3:30 in the afternoon now. He had a sore caused by pressure on his tailbone from sitting in his wheelchair, and it had been healing when one of the caregivers jammed him into his chair and tore it open again, effectively cancelling out a year-and-a-half of healing. So he has been spending most of his time in bed for the past two months, and must yet lay there for another month.

He was feeling pretty down last night, and angry about this woman’s carelessness and the fact that the administration does not accept his version of events. “Oh no,” they assure him when he tells them what happened, “it was a combination of things.” Well no, it wasn’t. It was her incompetence.

He is disheartened.

“I usually take it all in stride,” he told me when Loverboy had gone down the hall to talk with his aunt, who is also a resident there. “I’ve had lots of surgeries with long recovery periods, and they never got me down like this. This is so — so unnecessary.”

He still smiles, he still laughs, but we could see the suffering on his face. His bed is by the open window, where he can look out and even smell the spring day and the peaceful evening. But he can’t get out into it.

It’s not physical pain he is feeling. No. He can’t feel anything from the chest down, except for the use he has of one arm.

We sat in his room for an hour, then went to spend some time with L’s aunt. She’d been home on the farm for the weekend and looked content and chipper. She’s had health problems for many years — she had her first surgery to remove a brain tumour when she was younger than L and I are. Now she needs constant care and can’t live at home because L’s uncle can’t stay in the house and operate the farm at the same time. Funding for home-care help was cut, and left them no choice but to move her to the institution.

That’s how Maxine ended up out here initially. She was hired as a live-in caretaker and while there, fell in love with L’s cousin Ole, moved over to his house, and married him last summer.

As usual, when we walk out of that place we are subdued. There is not much to say; we have no answer to the question “What can we do for them?” We have seen a lot of people with very little life left in them, as well as those who simply aren’t having much of a life in this institutional setting.

Vincent said “I wish they’d get some younger nurses. You know -- fresher.”