The first feeling I had when I entered our friend Gloria’s room was a combination of surprise and sadness that she looked so changed in her hospital bed. Her face was thin and her skin looked bluish and see-through. Her white hair looked flattened down and lifeless compared to the healthy thick way it used to look. Her arms looked thin and bluish too and a little bruised. I held her hand for a second because her daughter Maria asked me to. It felt a little cold. When Gloria tried to speak, her mouth could not open very far. She said she hated to have me see her looking the way she did. I said I was just happy to see her. I showed her a pot of some narcissus bulbs my mother gave me to bring to her, and she said they were her favorite flowers. Then her eyes closed suddenly. I thought something terrible was happening, but her daughter said that she gets tired really easily. I said that I should go, but then Gloria opened her eyes again and said I could sit next to her and read something. I had brought this David Sedaris book someone gave my mom for Christmas because it has short, short stories in it, and some of them are pretty funny. After trying to find one without bad language, I read “The Migrating Warblers,” and I still had to edit out words as I read. I came to a part where one warbler was complaining to the other about how backwards and superstitious birds are in Guatemala, and the other one asked “Why not winter in Florida like everybody else? The other one said that even though there were “language barriers and severed heads,” Central America was “Cheap, cheap, cheap.” Gloria smiled the biggest smile I think she could.
Then I was alone in the room except for Gloria. Gloria’s daughter Maria was in the kitchen getting me a drink. I looked around. There were a lot of photos on two tables on either side of the bed. I guess the idea was for Gloria to see pictures of her family and friends and remember happy times. I had not seen them before. Gloria’s house is at the end of our block. She used to sit outside and say hello to me whenever I walked by. Sometimes I would go to the store to get her something or go to the Farmer’s Market a few blocks away to get fruit and vegetables for her. She always wanted to pay me, but I would not let her. Actually, once she gave me $2, and my mother told me never to let her pay me again. She was always smiley and happy. I saw a picture of her when she was married. She looked really young and beautiful. Maria came back with some juice for me, and I was glad it had ice in it because the room was so hot I felt really sweaty. Gloria seemed to have fallen asleep, and Maria told me that she would sleep more and more until the end. I asked if she would go to the hospital soon. Gloria said that she wanted her mother to die at home and that it would not be very long now. She said her
brother was coming tomorrow and that there would be other family members to be with her at the end. She thanked me a lot for coming.
I thought that Maria was handling her mother’s death in the same way that Beth handled her husband’s death. Both of them wanted to give their family member the most dignified dying experience possible. Both also had a lot of pictures in the room to give visitors of sense of the person and also to make the dying person have good memories. When Maria asked me to hold Gloria’s hand, it made me think about how Paul Farmer always made physical contact with his patients because touching made a closer connection with them. I think that is what Maria wanted for her mother too.
The part about this post that I enjoyed the most was the way you were able to connect the insights you made from visiting Gloria to the insights you had previously came up with while reading Mountains Beyond Mountains and while listening to Beth. For instance, when you said, "Both of them wanted to give their family member the most dignified dying experience possible. Both also had a lot of pictures in the room to give visitors of sense of the person and also to make the dying person have good memories," you did a great job of connecting to specific things that Beth said when thinking of your own experience in the hospital. I also really liked the way your writing had a very personal touch to it.
ReplyDeleteDevin,
ReplyDeleteI'll be interested to learn how this experience either lives with you or gets buried by your life.
I'll ask you in 3 years.
In the meantime, it sounds like the dance went pretty smoothly - you were helped in the choreography by your mom, by Maria, and by Gloria herself including props (bulbs), key moments (the hand-holding), and task (reading). Lucky! A lot of life feels easier and sweeter when you know the standard steps.
Would you change the general choreography at all when you visit the next ill person?
I enjoyed your post particularly because you did not completely focus on Gloria's current state, but instead reminisced on how she used to be. For example that she was married and how you used to go the store for her. It's apparent that even though she is slowly reaching the end of her life, you are still able to remember that she is a person and lived a fulfilled life. I think a lot of times our society hides the ill and dying and forgets that they too used to carry out a normal, routine life. Overall I really like how you wrote this post, it demonstrated your emotions and internal thoughts throughout the entire experience.
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