GRUD

You know how as kids we mixed crayons together to make new colors, and would make up new names, like rellow(red and yellow)? So it is with nature.
Colorodans know the color of of aspen trees and snow, the frosty color, seen from a distance while skiing. Beautiful. The frosty gray is a different color here. The ash and chestnut tees are dark, and the frost looks very different, more amber, lovely.
There are other colors, ones I've never seen before, even while mixing crayons. Abkhaz colors. The one most disturbing I call GRUD. It is gray and mud. I could call it MEY ( mud and gray), but that sounds much too pleasant. Grud makes me sad and mad. It is made of despair and blood. Grud is an unnecessary color. No one needs grud in their town, or in their lives.

Grud smells. The stench is frightening. It is beyond squalor, beyond revolting, repugnant.
I am a geriatrician, no stranger to bad smells, they come with the territory. No baby fresh fragrances on my exam table or in the nursing homes.
Today my experience of color went beyond grud. Gray, mud, anger, despair, blood were only the top layer. No utterances are sufficient to translate the experience, the reality of this 'living being' in the same universe as you and me.
There was not a reason to ask how? Why? How long? Just advance to the bed of this barely living being, then greet, pray, work. Depart. Find my sanctuary, my little room, and sob.
I will be returning next week, and the week after, until this being no longer breathes grud any more.
God help us all, pity us all.