And the Same is True of All of Us

As I drove back to work from a lunch hour that involved me not so much eating as watching my dog relieve herself, I put on my sunglasses for the first time on this lush and grey Thursday, the Sun finally coming out just in time to set. Just like every other trip in my car for the last two weeks, I was listening to Juno’s “This is the Way it Goes and Goes and Goes”. I started to sing along with his low, soft scream, and I thought of you. I don’t remember if it was something funny you said, or your laughter, or the shape of your face, but I thought of you, and that memory made me happy, and I wanted you to know that.

No.

You.

I’m talking about you.

You may or may not dance at nighttime through the dreams of others like smoke or candy or a great and monstrous train, but I can guarantee that during every moment of every waking daytime somewhere someone is thinking of you. Maybe it’s your mother or your boss, or maybe it’s the last heart you broke or that quiet special someone who can’t ever seem to get you off their mind, or maybe it’s your third grade teacher or some guy at American Express carefully monitoring your credit card expenditures, or maybe it’s me, but somewhere someone is thinking of you.

Don’t look so surprised. Have you seen you? Go ahead. Look in the mirror, close your eyes, and take a good, hard look at you.

You.

You are beautiful.

You are talented.

You are kind.

You are you and you are loved.

You.

You feel that?

You’re smiling.

Because you know I’m right.

Upon arriving early in the morning, I was paired with a very experienced hospice nurse. The first patient’s room we entered was occupied by a man in his 70’s and his wife, who was watching her husband die of metastatic lung cancer. He had been a client of the hospice unit for about two or three weeks and she hadn’t left his side. In his room was his bed draped lovingly with a handmade blanket, a collection of family photos, and his wife’s cot in the corner, impeccably dressed with sharp plaid sheets. Her suitcase was packed with care, neatly pushed under the cot. The nurse told me she had done this every morning, by 7 o’clock, since her husband’s admission. I remember thinking how strange packing that bag would have been. What type of clothes are appropriate for this setting and, worse, how many days worth should be brought?

The man in the bed had recently made a significant change in condition. Two days prior to my meeting him, this dying man had stopped speaking, stopped responding, and slowly slipped into what appeared to be unconsciousness. He was receiving ample pain medication as well as a medication to help keep his airway as clear as possible. This man with whom I never had the pleasure of speaking took slow, irregular breaths, often with many seconds between them. I noticed that his breaths produced a unique, calming rhythm as we all sat with him in near silence.

When we walked back into the corridor, the red-haired woman with the tightly packed suitcase ran to us with an unmistakable urgency. “I think something has happened” she whispered, “He hasn’t taken a breath in a long time.” The nurse and I hurried into the man’s room. Indeed, his slow, off-tempo respirations were eerily absent this time. He lay there, in his bed, without even his chest moving up and down. The three of us stood surrounding him, saying nothing, watching. Then after what seemed like an eternity of silence, the nurse went to the nurse’s station to retrieve a stethoscope. With it, she listened to the exited man’s silent chest, waiting in vain for any sound to be made. The nurse removed the stethoscope from her ears and took a step back.

“He’s gone” she stated. The man’s wife started to slowly shake and cry quietly. The nurse, who had developed a very special relationship with her, went to her to offer a very soft touch on the arm. Seemingly, with the sensation of this touch, the woman’s quiet tears became one long, loud wail, the sound nearly animalistic. She began to violently shudder, her shoulders wrapping in on her chest.

“Don’t go, Dad” she sobbed. “I won’t know what to do without you.”

I stood alone at the foot of the bed while the nurse and the newly widowed woman cried and touched the peaceful man. I attempted to hold in the tears which threatened to burn my cheeks, but listening to the woman’s guttural pleas to her dead husband forced them from my eyes. While I cried, I began to realize the overwhelming power of lifelong love and the devastation of losing it. I began to envision myself as an old woman, standing by the side of my future husband. I could see our life together, rolling up a screen like such slow film credits; a life of love, of struggle, of joy, gone in one moment. Now, this woman was left to continue a paired life alone. I began to wonder whether the life with this man was worth the devastation of losing him in the end. Would it be better to live and die alone than suffer the pain of such severe loss and longing? Amidst my naive mid-twenties thoughts came a pain in my chest--MY heartache I felt for the broken heart personified standing beside me. At that moment, I knew the depth with which I felt for this stranger’s lost love, all emotion is worth it in the end. However, the END was no longer the finale of some metaphor or extended romance novel. The end of this shared life stood before me in such explicit, blinding detail. Real heartbreak is something my 25 years had no way of preparing me for. So…I cried.

I could feel that the day was coming. I knew the day was coming since I had started that two year long series of humiliations called nursing school. All I could do was wait and dread and hope that it would be a wrinkled, papery, old man in suspenders who would be the one.

My first suppository.

Though I was mentally and, perhaps, visually a little thrown when the day shift nurse told me what I would have to do, I mustered up all of the professionalism that had been forced down my throat over the previous one year of nursing school. “Okay, I am ready to meet this rectum, I mean guy…” I thought; and then I entered that fateful room. On the bed I see a man. He was not exactly the frail, sick older man with a heart problem I had envisioned. He was definitely not the kind of man a student nurse, a woman of 25 wants to give her first ever suppository to.

The man sitting on the bed in room number 204 was a 29 year old, handsome black man with a large number of tattoos and a large number of even larger muscles. As my eyes widened, I remembered what I was there to do. I introduced myself to him and he to me. His drawl was recognizable, his voice low and rolling. I asked the patient- or the fantasy of every woman from Martha Stewart to Lil’ Kim- whatever, to lie on the bed on his side and (oh my god oh my god) pull his knees up to his chest. This extremely understanding guy obliged and assumed this extremely vulnerable position. I tiptoed up behind his behind, gulped and placed one of my gloved hands on his hip. With the touch of my hand the patient leapt from the bed with the speed of lightning and ran into the bathroom, screaming “Oh HELL no.” My face began to burn, my armpits began to drip, and I wanted to run from the room, not to mention out of the hospital and the school of nursing.

After the longest one minute I haven ever sweated through, the hot black man came back into the hospital room. “Sorry,” he said and re-assumed the position. I took a deep breath and another step toward the bed. When I placed my hand on his hip this time, I flinched. And for good reason, because my patient once again jumped from the bed, tripped on the remote control cord and ran into the bathroom yelling “oh my GOD!” This time, he came out right away shaking his head and walked back to the bed without looking at me. I knew the longer I waited, the more nervous each of us would become, so this time, I went right for the…target. I was able to place my hand on his hip, and although I could feel him tense his muscles through his hospital gown, he stayed where he was. I moved my hand south and began to expose the aim of my lubricated finger. When the separating began my very impatient patient yelled “Oh my GOD” and exploded from the bed and stumbled into the bathroom. Again. This time, embarrassment did not come to mind. Swear words did. “That is IT,” I thought, “I have GOT to
stick this thing in his ass.”

My red face had turned from embarrassment to anger and back to embarrassment by the time my very fit patient came out of the bathroom. “I am so sorry,” he said. I reminded him that he could do it to himself or that I could have a male nurse come into the room to perform the task. He then reminded me that those options made him way more uncomfortable and that he promised he would stay in bed this time. So we began again as we had so many times already: his knees to his chest, the gown removed, my hand on his hip. I could feel him tense and shaking beneath my fingers as I made my move. However, my determination was strong and my reflexes were quick. This time, the insertion was imminent. With one fast motion, a blur really, cheeks were separated, fingers were thrust, and a suppository was placed in a beautiful man’s rectum. Sigh.
When it was all over, I carefully peeled my gloves from my hands while my patient sat up in his bed. As I walked around the bed, his eyes shifted and his shoulders slumped while his dark face darkened with a blush. I moved quickly, trying not to slip on the sweat dripping from my brow. The tension in the room was palpable; it felt as though it was the morning after an embarrassing, drunken sexual display the previous night. Unable to meet eyes, I told him I would be back later to check on him. I instructed him on how to use the surgical scrub when he showered, which somehow felt a little dirty. Once on the outside of the room, I felt safe and was finally able to breathe. I leaned against the wall and picked up his chart knowing that somehow I would have to write down what I had just done to this man.

Magical forests

For years I would sit in the back of my grandfather's 1975 muted gray Cadillac that we only took to funerals or for a drive to our cottage, and I would stare anxiously out the window. I was always looking for one thing as I gazed patiently at the Wisconsin prairie and farm scenery whizzing by. My grandmother sits in the front seat and tells me that they are coming up soon. I squirm in my seat, belted in, anxious in my small six year old stature and its limits on my Cadillac window viewing. The seconds pass so slowly and thoughts excitedly raced through me head. Will I see one today? Will one of them sneak out into the daylight? Watch out brown cow-they might come out today and spoil your chocolate milk!

My grandmother nudges my grandfather to turn down the radio, Willie Nelson calling for his lover, and I look and look out the window. Little hazel eyes glancing and darting, peeking through the slightly tinted glass for the tried and true signs of their existence. There were their remains, the enormous round balls randomly sitting in the cleared farm fields! Always so perfectly round, these brown and golden spheres of hay were part of the necessary deeds we all had to do. It made sense to me, they ate hay, so they would have to expel hay, regardless of how perfectly round it appeared and the size of their waste only proved to me the real size of the creatures themselves.

I continued to scour the empty spaces between the giant globes, hoping to see one of their horrifically amazing faces. Hoping, wishing, with only the enthusiasm of a whimsical girl to think of how I could tell my friends at school of what I saw, how I could tell them this secret existence that only my grandmother knew. She has shared her secret with me.

My eyes meet the mindless rows of yellow corn, so I sit back into my seat. Another missed opportunity at a sight of them, a sight I wanted so badly. My dismay was fleeting, the ride was long and there would plenty more opportunities to catch a glimpse. My grandmother asks if I saw anything and I tell her no and smile. I know that someday one of them will come out during the day, even though my grandmother said they only come out at night, and the first one I see, I will name them Penny, same as my cat, I can only image them being best friends. As the forests fly by in the tips of the window next to me, I know they will come out of their magical forest home for me to see, a real Wisconsin dinosaur, my grandmother would never lie...