“I’m going to make myself an aged sharp cheddar and vine-ripened tomato grilled cheese sandwich. I’ll slather it with real Dijon mustard from Dijon, France, and pair it with a Black Butte Porter.”
And so ends another day with this kind of intimate self talk, inaudible to me and to the swarm of spirits that surround me. I hope to hit the pillow by 3 am, so I can rest enough to meet the demands of the following day with grace and presence.
As a hospice nurse, I hand off people to the arms of the Invisible, but some days, I work other places in the hospital. Yesterday evening was such a time. She was nearly 90, but still beautiful. Her blindness had come on suddenly, unexpectedly, and no cause could be found. The ashes of her former world gave rise to other worlds, most of which terrified her. I hear in report she had tried to find a way out: a telephone cord wrapped around her neck, pillows in smothering places, to name a few. I had to remember she was the one out of 20-odd patients in my care who could not see me. I remembered to speak gently, to touch softly, as I approached her. I hoped that my voice would find her somewhere, and that we would meet in a place that mattered.
Our first encounter went well enough; she opened her mouth as I spilled in the pills and raised a cup of water to her lips. I poured in an indeterminate amount of water to wash them down. Too much, and she would choke on the water; too little and she would choke on the pills. She swallowed. She now knew my name and the sound of my voice. She knew the feel of my hand upon her shoulder. I hoped that this would be the beginning of something positive. The psychiatric team had come earlier in the day to “make a deal” and get her to agree to not harm herself while in our care. I always felt that odd. I would say, “Sure, yes, I promise” then, proceed as planned. Are promises to strangers binding? Maybe better to say,
“Look, if you try to kill yourself and succeed, it is going to create a big problem for me with no end of paperwork and maybe, depending on how you kill yourself, I and countless others will be traumatized, maybe even for life. And all you will have done is created more of you, more people walking around with unresolved trauma. If you were alive, you’d have company, but you’d be dead, watching from a cloud and believe you me, you’d feel bad then. You’d feel real bad, and sad, and you couldn’t do anything about it because you’d be dead. So, don’t kill yourself, it’s just not okay. Hey, can you HEAR me?”
Later, one of the other nurses came out to find me. Mrs. L was not responding. Her hands were clenched in tight little fists, her eyes squeezed shut. I managed to get my hand in hers, as she relaxed her fingers ever so slightly to welcome this stranger she barely knew. I cast an invisible golden line into the ocean of her being to hook her soul and bind it to mine, to reel her back in, but it fell into empty waters. She had gone away. With eyes tightly shut, hands clenched, breathing even and regular, vital signs stable, she had gone away. I told her it was okay, that she could come out again, that it was me, the night nurse, and all was safe. But what did I know? The plain fact of the matter is I do know. I have gone away. I have successfully deadened all that is inside and outside of me. I have been stone cold dead and by the grace of the Invisible, have thawed from my winter of terror and re-blossomed in the spring of possibility. It is alchemy of the highest order. Some go to never return. Others visit willingly. Most are swept inside by a current they cannot control. We would all go away if our world became frightening enough.
We took her to the emergency department. Their attempts to bring her back into our world were the same as ours, only harsher. She only gave them a faint grimace and went back the way she came.
