For the most part, though, it was as if I weren’t even there. Never have I felt more superfluous. The coffee and muffins might as well have been left there by elves. I began to wonder what my visits could really have meant to her. I supposed I functioned successfully as some kind of ear, but there didn’t seem to be any real human connection. I had started visiting her out of the desire to do a good thing, something that would benefit another person—two persons, if you counted her son. But could it still be called good if I’d begun to hate every minute of it, to regret that I’d ever agreed to it in the first place, that I’d ever laid eyes on either of them, that the woman had ever been born? Wasn’t this really rather what you’d call a sick situation? Aside from the anxiety that built up for days before I could bring myself to ring her bell again, there were moments when I found myself actually afraid of her, when her voice was raised in anger and she glowered from her humpbacked position out of bloodshot rolled-back eyes and I feared she really was going to headbutt me across the coffee table.

On the other hand, I didn’t know how to get out of these visits now, what I would tell her son (the truth, or some excuse?), or the woman herself (but would she even care?), and I felt increasingly stuck in a position that seemed both perverse and ridiculous.

It’s so sad was one of the last things her son ever said to me. If she never watched TV, he said, I know she wouldn’t be this way. And it makes me so mad. She could be spending her last years in relative comfort and peace, grateful for what she has. Instead she’s in a constant state of bitterness and resentment toward all the enemies she’s been scared into thinking are out to get her. It’s so sad, what happens to old people. I keep telling myself it’s not her fault, same thing could happen to me. But I know I’d rather die before my time than have it ever happen to me.

At the very end of his very long life, a college professor of mine who’d devoted his youth to the cause for human rights was down to a vocabulary of just a few (shrieked) words, one of which was faggot and the other the N-word.