This is her monologue. Technically, it is not mine, as I personally believe in a Christian afterlife, I base death widely on my personal quote: "I view death as both a relief and an answer, but I do not seek it, nor will I accept it, until I have accomplished what I was put on this good earth to do. Thusly, this is primarily her words.
With all such said, I wish you a merry day and a Blessed life!
Living in His Name,
Thomas Agrusti
When was the last time you could
feel your own mortality? Literally reach out and touch it?
I
do almost everyday. I’ve always been around death; since the day I was a girl.
Sometimes I feel like it follows me, like I can never get away from it, no
matter how hard I may try.
I
was six when my sister died from leukemia. I was a lot younger then, and didn’t
understand why sis wouldn’t wake up.
But
I came to greater terms with all of it when mum passed away, damn near in my
arms, when I was 13, just entering academy. It was strange. There’s no special
sign or change when a person happens. They don’t breathe an overdramatic gasp
like they do in the movies, no glowing, ethereal spirit rises out of their body
to ascend to heaven, they don’t even close their eyes. It’s more like they’ve
simply stopped paying attention to life. Like everything around them, all the
people and experiences, have just surpassed their needs, and they look past it,
falling into a new world to explore apart from this one. Physically, you can
feel as the muscle in the hand holding your own no longer has the tone it had a
second ago. You can see the neck sink back, once looking and beaming directly
towards your face, but then slumping into a peculiar angle, finding new
distinct, yet apathetic interest in the ceiling. You notice their eyes glaze
over, the milieu of life finally taking them fully, and you become consciously
aware that they are no longer consciously aware. Then I cry.
I
never understood why people cry when they see someone die. Maybe it’s just the
incredibly discontent that the path you saw before you did not go as you had
originally plan, and the extreme symbol of grief is simply our arguing with the
universe that we want to be in control of it, as opposed to it being in control
of us. Maybe it’s the desire that they could have taught us so much, handing
off their own experience unto us so that we wouldn’t have to fare this journey
through life as grievously and as arduously as they did, and their “passing”,
as death is simply the flag marking their departure from this world into the
next, birth being the opposite, our lives being a mere detour in existence, and
our tears are simply our begging for more knowledge and wisdom that had never
been shared.
Maybe
it’s just our ignorance. Our naïve minds refusing to believe they can evolve
anymore, not wanting to know the discontent the corpse in front of you once
felt, being so overtaking by the urge for more that they leave, yet you, not
knowing anything of the sort attempt to force them to stay, to shackle their
understanding to your own, and damn them for trying to think differently.
Certainly
shines the grief of death into a far darker light.
As
I said, I see dying everyday. I see the tears like most drivers see traffic
lights. I’ve heard as many life stories as children hear fairy tales. See, I’m
a hospice nurse, meaning as opposed to giving the people still enjoying their
tea every morning a few more days to read the paper and such, I tend to the
people who know that they will soon be no more. I receive the critically ill,
who have been told their day count, stamped with a “god forsaken expiration
date,” as Frederick, my first “patient,” had called it. I always felt strange
calling them patients. Your patient is supposed to be someone you help until
they can walk out of the sliding doors to meet their family the next day.
However, I’ll be damned if I let any person, even myself, tell me that I don’t
help these people everyday. I have busted my arse day in and day out, ensuring
that, in ward or home, that they experience their last days “comfortably,” and
“efficiently.”
I’ve
treated some of the darker cases, on all sides of the spectrum. I’ve seen a man
who had come back from a subway crash, so brutalized you couldn’t tell his neck
from his face. The people you know had only hours, if not minutes before they
would be carted out in a black bag, zipped by yours truly; the people who may
or may not even be able to tell if they were already dead or not. Men scared
out of their wits, and women tearing with whatever eyes they had left.
Then
come the others, the “normals” as Louisse calls them. Damn her for sticking
that name for them in my head. “Normals” are people who, if you saw them, you’d
probably invite them to the pub, or a game a cricket. One’s who looked
absolutely fine, and appeared as though they could walk out of the hospital and
be about their day, completely out of their environment in a hospital. Yet a
simple chart breaks that fantasy: cancer, AIDS, Hepatitis, leukemia, names that
have become all too devastatingly familiar to me throughout the years. I’ve
seen words like these turn men into lost little boys, any hope that they had of
returning to their school on Monday: gone. I’ve seen a girl, just about to get
married in a month, having her plans torn apart by something in side of her
that she could neither see, nor taste, or hear, but damn it if she couldn’t
feel it. There have been people admitted in who could have their picture on the
cover of a magazine, and I’ve seen them struggle to even stand.
These
are the people your heart breaks for. My hearts broken so many times now, I
can’t even say it bothers me in the slightest. You lose a bit of yourself when
you take this job, and there’s a name for the part you lose when you take this
job: your humanity. Any other person would walk up to the person, offering
enlightening words of things to come, and glorious appraisal for the blessed
life they’ve had, then drawing themselves over to the family to offer their
hallmark “condolences”. I can’t do that. Not just because I’ve been
desensitized, but also because it grows old and hurts your reputation in this
field. Getting teary eyed on the job may soften the heart of the teenage girl
who walked in 5 years ago with polio, but the 70 year old man whose heart has
failed him three times already, the father trying the soothe his grief stricken
kids, and the four year old kid who has had trouble breathing since birth; none
of them can see you “get weak.” You have to be robotic and have bedside manner
at the same time. You have to be able to assure them for the thousandth time
that “it won’t hurt,” and that their dinner will be on a tray in front of them
in five minutes if they would just stop yelling for it every three minutes.
Showing emotion in it’s purest, natural form on the job bears the idea of
weakness, and that, my friend, leads to the idea, if not the illusion, of
incompetence. You have to be completely air tight, nothing in or out, or you
could end up hurting yourself, and the patient, more than if you had just not
come to work that day.
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