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    Twilight: A Nursing Home Mystery
    Twilight: A Nursing Home Mystery
    Twilight: A Nursing Home Mystery
    Ebook80 pages58 minutes

    Twilight: A Nursing Home Mystery

    By Greg Cornwell

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    About this ebook

    A story that unashamedly promotes death with dignity, currently practiced overseas but not widely in Australia.  A nursing home in a rural town. Residents are inexplicably dying earlier than expected, much to the concern of Twilight’s Board.  Who is behind these mysterious deaths? And why? How will they be held to account? And when will the Australian public be given a voice in this crucial issue of end-of-life choice and empowerment.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVivid Publishing
    Release dateOct 1, 2019
    ISBN9781925952254
    Twilight: A Nursing Home Mystery
    Author

    Greg Cornwell

    Greg Cornwell AM is a former Member of the ACT Legislative Assembly (1992-2004 and Speaker 1995-2001). He is a proponent of death with dignity, has appeared before the ACT Assembly’s recent End of Life Choices and wants a national referendum or plebiscite on the subject ASAP. He is more well-known for his crime novellas published as e-books and in print, featuring John Order, a local ACT politician and sleuth. He regards Twilight as ‘reality fiction’, a story addressing an issue of concern to everyone, as all should have a choice of death and the legal right to decide.

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      Book preview

      Twilight - Greg Cornwell

      Epilogue

      PROLOGUE

      Istood over her, shrunken in her bed, her face drawn and very thin, lines down it like a waterfall in the dry season, lips not so different from when they were pursed years earlier against one of my young misdemeanours.

      I was about to stroke her hair, the alternative to kissing the narrow tight mouth which rarely opened for anything now, not even food.

      Then I saw there was nothing much to stroke: a few wisps of grey which if scratched with a comb would probably scrape the balding head rather than adjust the hair – hair I remembered so rich of blonde colour, now reduced to these few scraps clinging to a decaying body.

      My mother.

      Lying there at the end of her life. A life of interest, of challenge, of success, and now this.

      A hopelessly human wreck in a nursing home bed looked after, expensively, by nurses from predominantly African and Asian backgrounds who tried their best, but hampered by insufficient and inarticulate English were unable to adequately communicate with their patients.

      In turn the patients often were unable to understand their gentle carers. Even for those hard of hearing written English was impossible, education had not advanced that far among the immigrants.

      I heard a cry. Not close but locally, because most of the private room doors were open in case some mentally or physically crippled patient needed something, probably from their active past: a teddy bear, a lover’s embrace, roses from the garden.

      My mother was not like that. She was never one to make a scene, loudly demanding something, attention, affection …

      Yet she knew what she wanted. Like this afternoon when in her rasping hardly audible voice and behind closed eyes, this aged ruin whispered she wanted to die, she’d had enough of life.

      If love counted for anything …

      I lifted the back of her skull with my gloved hand, removed the pillow it rested upon and placed it firmly over the old exhausted face.

      - 1 -

      Twilight Village hospital and nursing home covered a large entire block, appropriately on a quiet street opposite small comfortable country-style houses usually of wood with wide verandas in testimony to the summertime sun. One side where the actual nursing home was located looked across the street to a neglected park now principally wild bushland.

      Twilight offered residents self-contained single storey units spread around a central dining room, the nursing home proper and a secure small dementia ward. Initially the nursing home was part of the main village hospital but increased demand as communities aged saw a major upward expansion of this section of the facility to three stories. The extra floors didn’t matter because most of these bedridden patients weren’t going anywhere else.

      Logistics and more services required a separate operation, which began as a sub-group but increasingly became independent of the main village management, as was deemed necessary for this major aged complex of the prosperous farming district around the large rural centre of Drummond.

      Cattle, crops and sheep, predominantly sheep, filled the open rolling hills and valleys of the surrounding countryside, whose elderly, it seemed from demand, welcomed the even expensive opportunity to live out their lives in such a familiar area.

      This quiet pleasure and the bright spring morning outside the windows, with new buds festooning the shrubs and bushes, did not reflect the atmosphere inside the meeting room.

      The third in two months, confirmed Robert Carroll, Twilight Village management committee’s represen­tative to the nursing home’s operations.

      An ex-military officer, balding and running to fat, he typified such appointments, being there to chair meetings and to handle non-health issues, especially finance.

      A local, he was dressed in the conventional country-style tweed jacket, check shirt and wool tie. His link to the land was through his elder brother who had inherited Fairview when their father died, but some complicated arrangement gave him shares.

      He was respected in the district, however he was out-of-his-depth in this matter.

      They were all elderly, argued Reverend Andrew Lord, as if this justified the happenings.

      Twilight Village had a vague association with local church groups and it had been thought prudent to recognise the fact, at least for those closest to the hereafter. He too was retired, a tall man perpetually stooped as often is the case with those seeking to be physically closer to those they wish to help. He wore a small identifying cross in his lapel.

      It’s not the deaths, Andrew, Carroll said patiently. It’s the manner. Just stopped breathing. Look’s suspicious.

      You’re not suggesting my staff are somehow responsible, Robert? Matron Jarvis asked defensively and to head off objections from Shaun Wilson, the sandy haired young but committed union representative with whom she had an often fragile relationship.

      A stout woman, dark hair back in a bun, she demonstrated capability and a

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