Thursday
I saw my mother yesterday. She was awake (a pleasant surprise) and sitting in a wheelchair staring at the wall in her room. She sleeps a lot these days, perhaps a regression back to infancy oddly enough. She seemed to study my face while I was there, searching, maybe, for a feature that was at one time familiar. Now and then she would smile and begin to whisper unintelligible words like a person in a state of deep prayer. I held her shaky hands and talked my way in and out of the one way conversation I’ve grown so accustomed to these days. I didn’t stay long—maybe 30 minutes, before I made my way to the elevators.
I ran into Marion, one of the RN’s on the floor who I hadn’t seen in a few months. I enjoy talking with Marion because she doesn’t come off like some of the dogmatic nurses I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with in the past. She’s a real sweet lady. She looks like a shorter version of Bea Arthur (Maude) with considerably less silver streaks in her short-cropped hair. Marion just has a way about her that makes you aware that she cares. It’s in her voice, her eyes and her unfailing willingness to listen. Sometimes that’s all we really want—someone to listen to us and hear what we actually are trying so hard to say. I feel this foreboding sense of guilt as I talk to her because I don’t visit my mother as much as I should these days. She barely recognizes me and speaks a language all her own and it seems so pointless. Marion says my mother knows somehow that I’m there and that’s what’s important. Maybe that’s not too far off, I just don’t know.
I tell her a few stories about my mom that I’ve accumulated over the years in the hopes it will give her a different perspective, another side of the proverbial hospice coin. I mentioned that one thing I really miss is talking with my mother. She had a unique way of interpreting the intricacies of my life before feeding them back to me with her bare bones translation. She had a knack for filtering out all the extraneous BS in an effort to make me understand what I was really concerned about. That was her beauty. If you were full of excrement and endlessly wallowing in some vat of self-induced pity she was never afraid to tell you so. There’s no one in my life that could verbally cuff me behind the ears the way she could. My wife comes close but the result is drastically different.
As I talked to Marion, I could see her eyes getting teary. This was a part of her job description that no college course had ever attempted to teach. How do you teach compassion? Kindness? Love? As far as Empathy 101 goes, Marion unknowingly graduates magna cum laude.
I left the nursing home cognizant of the fact that as the days go by, more of my mother's spirit washes away from the eroding coastline of her life here on earth. The thick fog of Alzheimer’s is making it harder and harder to see her but I’m not worried. The light that shines inside caregivers like Marion will always be there to guide me.
~m
Beautiful and touching story Michael. My grandmother had a nurse like Marion…her name was Eileen.
I work with Hospice nurses and you are right…they do not teach them compassion in college but some just seem to have been born to understand and always know the right thing to say.
There are many of these posts that didn’t attract comments because people didn’t know what to say.
I know I’ve read it before, but that was in the days when I was new here.
Seems like a lifetime ago actually.
Maybe time to trawl the archives again and bring some of these wonderful posts to the top?
Deb is doing a fabulous job at that, and I think it’s a good thing.
There is much you wrote a long time ago that needs to be read Michael.
These are the posts that drew me to S&M a long time ago.
Posts that show the beautiful soul you are….