Today's Hospice Adventure

“Bedpan,” she croaks out, barely intelligibly, and her right hand, the only one that still works, flutters on the covering sheet before grasping and pushing it down.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, “But I can’t, they told me not to.” Besides that, I think but don’t say, I’m spectacularly unqualified to lift you, and if I move you I’m likely to hurt you, I’m an accountant, and we don’t know how to do these things. Got any numbers you’d like me to add up?

But she’s insistent. “Go potty,” she says, again, and so I make a half-hearted stab at it, which is what I do when people want things, getting the bedpan, rolling her slightly, but I see she is heavily diapered and double diapered, so there’s no chance.

I tell her I know it’s hard, but if she really must go, to go ahead and go. They told me they’d clean her up when they got home so it “may be stinky,” they’d said. I’m not so much worried about being offended by smells as I am by Agnes’s reluctance. She looks at me uncomprehendingly, as if I’ve suggested she climb a try and shit on innocent passers-by.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, because I really don’t. “Someone will be here soon to help with this.”

The phone rings repeatedly this morning, between the hours of 8:30 and noon. Hospice, the physical therapist is coming between 1 and 2.

Hospice, again, the aide is coming for a bath and such between 11 and 12.

The pharmacy, they have something in that someone wanted for Agnes.

A salesman. I don’t care.

Hospice, again, for the third time, the RN, and she’ll be by between 3:30 and 5:00.

I hope that’s everyone. Dying takes a village.

But hey, someone’s going to be here between 11:00 and 11:30, giving me and Agnes hope for a future potty break.

Agnes does not want to wait, and again, for the third time, she pulls down the sheet and tries to turn, saying, “potty,” and gesturing at me to do something about it. I do something about it all right. I lean in close to her and say, “Someone will be here soon from hospice,” and I pull the sheet back up so she won’t get cold.

Helpful I am.

Water. Ice. Water. Ice. Agnes is insatiable today. I give her teaspoons of water and ice, one after the other, and she keeps asking for more. “Thirsty, today, aren’t you?” I ask her, and she smiles at me. I wouldn’t really know if she’s thirstier today than usual. This is my first day with Agnes.

She gets me to come over again and move her forward, and she indicates she wants her back scratched, so I do, over the thin nightie, and I feel all her bones, as if she’s barely anything else at all, nothing more than bones anymore.

There are a profusion of kitties living here, but I don’t remember all the details. Two kittens locked in one bedroom, but if they come out another cat can’t be in. A cat in another room, and she can’t go outside. And another cat, a Siamese, who can’t come in except under certain circumstances that escape me (maybe when the kittens are in hiding?). It’s okay though, for none of them make any pretense of being present and if I didn’t know better they wouldn’t even exist.

Water. Ice. Bed up. Agnes likes to sit up, and then I prop her up with pillows. But then she removes the one on the side holding her head up, so her head falls forward when she starts dozing. She looks uncomfortable, but last time I attempted to make her more comfortable her eyes popped open and she said something that could have been, “water.” Or it could have been “who are you and what have you done with my daughters?” It could have been, “get me out of this hell hole,” but I doubt it. But when I offered her water from a teaspoon her eyes lit up, faded blue, the only spots of color left in her, and she opened her mouth wide.

The aide comes and takes care of the potty issue, and she gives Agnes a partial, which I suppose means a partial bath, and she makes Agnes comfortable again. The aide is efficient and kind and beautiful, she speaks loudly enough that Agnes can understand what’s being done, and before she leaves she bends down close to Agnes and says, “Thank you for letting me take care of you today.” Agnes smiles at her, beatifically, from her horizontal position, drifting off to sleep. On Friday the aide will return for a full bath.

I think Agnes might sleep now, she must be exhausted, and the physical therapist is coming in an hour, but no, it was an act for the aide, and as soon as she’s gone Agnes wants to sit up, she wants water, she wants the bed this way and that.

I’m not allowed to give meds, so I hope Agnes’s pain holds off for a bit longer. I’m not allowed to do much of anything but spoon feed water, adjust the bed and pillows, answer the phone, talk to Agnes, and help myself to anything in the kitchen.

I don’t, I never, except once when I was starving at Fred’s and decided one piece of toast would be okay, eat at a patient’s house.

I hold Agnes’s hand, and I look at our hands together. At 93, Agnes has a few years on me, so suddenly my middle-aged hand looks younger. Want to shave years off your appearance? Hang around old people. I tell Agnes her ring is pretty and she smiles, and it’s a pretty good smile for someone who has cancer and had a stroke two weeks ago.

I know so little about Agnes, except her name, and that she has two twin daughters who are taking care of her. I know what’s killing her, and it’s the same thing that killed my friend Stew, and my mom, and I wonder if she said everything she had to say before the stroke happened. I hope she didn’t wait too long to say anything that needed to be said.

Agnes’s grandson comes home, and tells me he’s not usually back from work so soon, but his mom, one of the daughters, called him and said she needs a couple more tests and so they’ll be later than they’d planned. I’d told them that was okay, I could hang around until . . . whenever they got back, and I tell him the same thing. He’d watch her, if I needed to leave, but Agnes doesn’t like him to watch her because he’s a man with important things to do. Her daughter tells me later that when Agnes was still getting around she didn’t like her grandson to take her to the store, because it’s not right to expect a man to wait around while one goes shopping. I tell him not to worry about it, I’ll just keep hanging out with Agnes, and he goes to his room. At least if Agnes needs something for the pain he’s there now, so I can say, “Look, let’s give her something for the pain,” and I won’t be overstepping my bounds.

Agnes does start to drift off then, sitting up, her head slumped forward a bit, sleeping, finally, and when her daughters get home she’s still asleep, and I leave her like that. I tell them I’ll come back next week, and at first the daughter I’m talking to doesn’t understand that they don’t need to have doctor’s appointments, they don’t need to have an urgent task to attend to, if all they want is a couple of free hours to take a break from the 24 hour responsibility I can fill in, providing water and ice and the occasional back rub, and all they have to do is tell me what time they want me there.

Volunteers just do the simple things, like give people a little bit of time.

Speaking of Mr M

from August 14

Which we weren’t, but here’s an update nonetheless.

Mr. M’s volunteer returned from her vacation, and I stopped visiting. Nothing against Mr M, I thought he was adorable, but I needed some time to take care of some business things, and I was running myself ragged. That, and his volunteer came back from vacation. Otherwise I would have kept going, of course.

A couple of weeks passed by, as weeks will, time which included the Great Northwest Heat Wave of 2009, a time which burnt out a few of my brain cells and left me, afterwards, stumbling about in a parody of myself as I tried to remember what I’d been doing before my only mission in life became survival.

And I thought of Mr M, and wondered how he was doing.

The other night charming husband and I drove up to a Starbucks with the intention of grabbing some sort of drink (for him) on our way home. And there out in front of Starbucks was, not Mr M, but the hospice chaplain.

“Charlean!” I squealed, in a paroxysm of joy. I like Charlean.

And Charlean had news for me. Mr M’s sisters had flown out from Boston to see him. In person! After years of being estranged from his family, isolated, homeless and alone out here, his sisters flew to see him. And now they’re looking into finding a facility in Boston to move Mr M too, and our hospice is willing to send someone along to help him get there, he being in the condition he’s in. One of Mr M’s sisters is a nurse, which is also fabulously helpful of course.

Isn’t that great? I am so happy that his sisters have so willingly accepted him back. I don’t know what happened between them before, and now, it doesn’t seem to have mattered. Maybe he just drifted away, as people will sometimes do. His son seems to be a bigger issue, but hopefully that’ll work out too. I hope so. Life’s too short, isn’t it?

I Lost My Patient. Then I Found Him.

from July 17th

I went to see Mr M yesterday, a day so hot that I’d rather have been indoors and not in my car, especially since my car is currently lacking air conditioning. Hot is a relevant term, since some people are quite happy in the sort of weather that makes me wilt, but all the same, it was hot.

When I got there I noticed the smoking woman from the last visit was outside again, smoking. I went inside and headed for Mr. M’s room. His roommate was there, the smoking man with only one leg, sitting comfortably on his bed, but when I walked over to the other side of the room, behind the curtain, there was no Mr. M.

The roommate indicated he had no idea where he’d wandered off to, shaking his head as if to say, “How the hell would I know?” Not overly friendly, but the man’s missing his leg, so I give him a break.

I went out to the nurse’s station, which is right next to the room, and I ask the overly extended person if she knows Mr. M’s whereabouts.

“He’s in his room,” she says, certain that she knows his location.

“No, he’s not there.”

She comes out from behind her desk and goes into the room, as if I’m mistaken, I just didn’t look for him, obviously he’s there. It’s not as if he wanders around by himself all that often after all.

He’s not there.

“Maybe he’s in the restroom,” she says, and she goes to look. He’s not there.

“Maybe he’s in the shower,” she says, and she goes to look. He’s not there.

“I don’t know where he is,” she says, “but maybe he went out the back,” and someone else walking by confirms that he was last seen headed for the back door. “He goes out there sometimes to get a snack.”

Okay then. At least I have a destination now. I head down the hall, turn left, and go out the door marked, “Back Door.” I see a big sign saying, “No smoking except in the designated area.” It occurs to me that he went for a smoke, but since I have the cigarettes with me still that’s not exactly likely. There’s a fenced-patio, a couple of vending machines, another building with laundry facilities. There’s no Mr. M. I look around the corner, to a grassy area. No Mr. M. I walk along the path and find a smoking area, under some trees, a couple of inside chairs and a can for butts, and a picnic table. But no Mr. M.

I look in corners and in darkened areas, but no Mr. M.

I wonder if he’s run off. How far can a man in a wheelchair get?

I go back inside.

I look out front, thinking that perhaps he found his way out there, but he’s not there, just the smoking woman. I go back to his room, and someone asks if they can help me. “I’m just looking for Mr Marshall,” I say, and she tells me, “He’s in his room.”

“I don’t think so,” I tell her, and she goes to look. He’s not there.

“I think he’s out back,” she says, “You should go look there.”

Despite the fact I was just there and no one at all was out there, I go back. I mean, I’m here, what else am I going to do? So I go out back. He’s not there. This was not exactly a surprise to me.

Coming back in I see him, coming up the other end of the corridor, the one that runs along the front of the building.

“Where the hell have you been,” I greet him with.

No, I don’t. That would be rude. Instead, I ask him how he is, and he starts to tell me about his long journey, out the back, around the side, up to the front, down the corridor. It’s as if he’s in training for a triathlon.

I hand him the pack of cigarettes I got him the night before (my husband choosing to stay in the car as I shopped for cigarettes, something I’ve never bought for before, not wanting to enable him in helping a smoker smoke), and the lighter I thought would come in handy. It’s yellow. I got it because it was pretty.

“Where would you like to go now,” I ask, and he wants to go out front to enjoy his new cigarettes.

We go out front, and I park him in the shade, and I sit on the outdoor couch. I’m exhausted. I’ve been running around in the heat looking for a 61 year old man in a wheelchair, and he’s in better shape than I am. And Mr M talks.

I mean, he talks. And he talks. Two of his sisters have called. His sisters! They’ve called the facility! He tells me about his sisters, one’s an RN, another sister has a bit of a delicate of constitution and they haven’t told her about him yet, and his brother is a janitor in Boston at the federal building. His son, he tells me about his son, and how there were problems with that relationship because of a girl, but his sisters will talk to him. He tells me about his dad, who got sick and told no one and no one knew until he died. He tells me about being homeless in Portland, and how he’d sleep under Burnside, by the Portland Saturday Market, and how the cops would come wake everyone up in the middle of the night and tell them to move on. Vancouver is, he tells me, a much better place to be homeless. It was in Vancouver that he got picked up by the police, and it was then that he found out he had cancer that couldn’t be fixed.

He speaks quietly, so much so that when there are other people talking close by, smoking woman and smoking legless man, who has come out, I can barely hear him, and I miss some of the things he says, but it doesn’t really matter. He talks about how they want him to come back so they can look after him, and how he’s not sure if that would work, but his sister is an RN, so it might work. It’s all still theoretical, of course, and he knows that.

He smokes two cigarettes, taking a long break in between. It’s hot, even here in the shade, and eventually his voice winds down. I think he must be exhausted. I ask him if he’s ready to go in, and he says he is, he’s getting hot, but he’s not tired.

I wheel him inside. I’ve already opened the door twice, once for legless man and then for smoking woman. I’m getting quite good at this door opening thing. I wheel him back to his room, but he doesn’t want to get out of his wheelchair. He says it’s more comfortable than the blue chair they usually place him in. I park him next to his glass of water, and I ask if there’s anything he’d like when I come back on Friday.

He thinks for a moment. There’s so many things he hasn’t had in so long, after all.

“A couple of stamps,” he said, “I need to write some more letters.”

From July 13th

Last week I went to see Mr. M a total of three times. Wednesday I asked if he wanted to go outside, it being a cooler day. I’d given him his M&M’s, not just one bag, but four, in case one wasn’t enough. I’d started with five, but ate one before I got there. So shoot me. I’m a bad volunteer. As soon as I asked if he wanted to go outside he rose to his feet, and asked for his baseball cap on the other side of his bed. He got into his wheelchair, his hat on his head, and we went for a stroll.

 

We were looking for places to have a cigarette, but there’s not much to the grounds of this particular nursing home. An area right in front for residents to sit, in the shade, and a parking lot. We sped out into the parking lot, as much as two can speed when one’s in a wheelchair, and looked around the buildings, but the pavement was bumpy and we came to the conclusion that there was no place to hide.

 

This because no one had told us that it’s okay for residents to smoke right outside the front door, to the left, with a table and a comfy sort of couch for those of us not in chairs. We didn’t find that out on Wednesday. We roamed with abandon, and then we sat outside, enjoying the cooler weather and the flowers, and the green of the grass and the trees. We didn’t talk much. Mr M. seemed to like feeling the air.

 

Friday he wasn’t feeling very well (hence his inclusion in the hospice program) so I stayed just long enough to ask if he wanted me to come back on Monday, after handing him a couple of chocolate chip cookies I’d picked up from Subway. He nodded his head before sinking back down into his chair, nodding, then sinking, curled slightly to alleviate the pain.

 

Today I returned, and he was up in his chair. The weather today is muggy (which I always thought sounded like the weather was attempting to mug someone, but it seems to be a popular usage and, I think, a correct one), cloudy, with cool winds. I asked him if he wanted to go sit outside, and he stood, got right up, and then tried to reach across his bed for his hat.

 

“Whoa,” I said, “why don’t you sit down in the chair, and I’ll get your hat.”

 

I was afraid he was going to fall over onto his bed, and then where would we be?

 

We maneuvered out of the room, a trickier proposition now that Mr M has a roommate. We headed outside, and to the right of the front door, and I sat in a chair, and he sat in his wheelchair. I looked over to the left of the door, and there were two residents in wheelchairs. And they were smoking. They’d been there when I’d entered, but I hadn’t noticed that they both had cigarettes in their hands.

 

I told Mr. M, “Look, they have cigarettes!”

 

He looked over their way, more than a tinge of envy on his face. He has big brown eyes, and I can tell when he wants something.

 

“I’m going to go see if I can get a cigarette.” I walked over to the two and said, “Excuse me, but Mr M hasn’t had a cigarette in 8 months, and he’d really like one. Do you think I could get one for him? I’d be happy to buy you more.”

 

I’m not above groveling.

 

One, the woman, said, “I only have one left, but I can go in and get more,” and the other one, a man, said, “That’s okay, he can have one of mine.” He waved off my offer of compensating him.

 

The woman said, “He better come over here though, this is the smoking area.”

 

So I gave Mr M the cigarette and lit it for him with the lighter I’d also borrowed, then wheeled him over to the smoking area. I sat on the couch, since I was the only one who hadn’t brought my own chair.

 

And Mr M, who hardly talks to anyone because he has no one, talked to the other two residents. They talked about smoking. The woman said she would never quit, and she came to this nursing home because she could smoke outside. The man, who was missing half of one leg, said if he could quit for 8 months he’d never go back. Mr. M puffed, and said 8 months was the longest he’d been without a cigarette.

 

The woman said she thought there were cigarettes available for sale at the nursing home, a claim the man scoffed at, but said it might be possible. I thought one cigarette was fine for Mr M’s first day of smoking, but didn’t say so. Instead I let the moment slide away, after saying I’d look into it and find out.

 

The man left us, rolling out into the sun for a bit, then rolling back up. I got up and opened the door for him, this particular nursing home being bereft of things like automatic doors. There is, however, a doorbell that one can push if one wants assistance. I then held the door for two paramedics who were bringing in a woman on a stretcher. She looked rather lively, for someone in her condition, and said hello to me as she passed by.

 

I went back to my spot on the couch and said I’d developed a real talent for opening doors for people. The woman laughed and said it was a good skill to have, and Mr. M smiled.

 

The woman asked Mr M where he was from, and they talked about the weather, and train travel, and why Mr M came out here. He said it was his asthma. Mr M came out here from the east on a train. Halfway here, or in Nebraska, he got off the train and realized his asthma was already much better.

 

He was homeless for a year, he said, before he ended up in the nursing home. “It’s better to be homeless here,” he said, referring to Vancouver, “than it is in Portland.”

 

My own expert on where it’s best to be homeless, in case I should need to know.

 

The woman gave Mr M the last half of her last cigarette. “D’you want to finish this?” she asked him, and handed it to him, then to me said, “He was looking at it, I thought he needed it more than I did.” I liked her. He finished her cigarette, and, if I’m not mistaken, he rather enjoyed it.

 

The woman went in then, and I held the door for her, and then rang the doorbell so an attendant could wheel her back to her room.

 

I took Mr M in, and we wended our way back to his room, after stopping at the front desk to ask if there was any truth to the rumor that they had cigarettes available for sale. I did not receive a positive response to this question, but I told them it was no problem, I’d just get him some cigarettes myself, and they seemed relieved, as if this is not an uncommon request and they’re forever denying people the one thing they want most in the world.

 

The man who’d been outside, the man with one leg, was in the other bed now. This was Mr M’s roommate, but they don’t seem to communicate much. Mr M sat back in his chair, and I put his hat back on his bedside table. I sat down on his bed, the only place for me to sit. I don’t stand well. I tend to fall over. I asked if there was anything else he needed, other than cigarettes, which I’d bring him Wednesday, when I come back. He said no, and he lowered his head and whispered, “I wrote my sister two weeks ago.”

 

“Haven’t heard back from her yet, have you?” I asked.

 

He shook his head.

 

I wish I knew her name, her town, so I could call her, but that’s not my concern, is it? I’d like to tell her that her brother is dying, and that he’d like to hear from his family. I don’t know what their relationship is like, what he’d done, or what they’d done, or what happened, but because I am who I am, I want to fix it. I can’t fix it. I can’t even fix my own failed family relationships much less anyone else’s. Maybe I want to fix it because I can’t fix my own, as if fixing someone else’s will allay some of the feelings that still drift around me.

 

Instead, I take his hand, and I tell him I’ll be back the day after tomorrow, and we’ll go outside and have a cigarette. It’s not much, but it’s something.

Mr M. and M&M's

Last week I went to meet Mr M. I’m a substitute volunteer while his usual volunteer is on vacation. He was sitting in a blue chair next to his bed in the nursing home, a shy older black man who has no family locally, no friends. When I say older, I mean older than me of course, since otherwise it’s meaningless. The hospice chaplain introduced me as his sub volunteer, and I shook his hand and told him it was a pleasure to meet him.

She left us alone for a few minutes. He looked around, avoiding me. I asked if there was anything I could bring him, if there was anything he needed or wanted. He thought about it, shook his head slightly, and finally said, “Stamps. I could use some stamps.”

Probably a bit too enthusiastically I said, “Stamps! Okay, I’ll bring you a few stamps.” This is good, the asking for stamps. He’s decided to try writing to members of his family, his youngest sister, and seeing what happens. It was too hot to take him outside, and I told him that perhaps when I returned we could go for a walk. It’d be in a wheelchair, of course, so technically only one of us would be walking.

Today I went back. He was sitting in the same chair, watching a National Geographic show on television. I took his hand, and told him it was nice to see him again. I sat on the bed which was right next to him, perhaps it’s his bed, I’m not sure – there’s two in the room, and just him. I searched around in my purse and found the few stamps I’d brought from him.

“These were all I had today, but I can bring you more.” He said that was fine, since he only had three letters to send. At least I think that’s what he said.

Mr M is 61, and has terminal cancer. He lives at the nursing home, alone, and I call him Mr M_______ to accord him the respect I think he deserves but hasn’t received. He’s estranged from his family, and he tells me that he doesn’t think he can write to his son and tell him his condition, so he’s written to his younger sister, knowing that she’ll know how to tell his son. They’re all back east, there’s no one close by, even if they were close emotionally. I wonder how his sister will respond to his letter. I don’t know his family history, I don’t know how down and out he was before he ended up here, but I know it was pretty close to the bottom.

I don’t ask that. I ask him if it’s okay if we talk. I ask him how long he’s lived here, and I tell him how long I’ve lived here. I ask him if he likes dogs, and he tells me he had a puppy once, and the puppy, being rambunctious, ran out into the street. Since then, he hasn’t wanted another. I feel as if I’ve put my foot in my mouth, but I persevere. Me, who doesn’t talk to people.

He doesn’t want to go outside today, he doesn’t feel the best and would rather not. I tell him that’s fine, we can do whatever he wants.

The TV’s still on, and it’s a show about exploration, and Florida. I ask him if he’s ever been to Florida. He says no. He was north, in New York, where he was born, and he came west and found it helped his asthma. I tell him where I’ve lived.

I ask him about the food at the nursing home. “How’s the food here,” I ask, and he says, slowly and with much thought, “It’s okay, most of it. Some of it,” and he pauses to regroup, “is really good, some isn’t.”

His speech is slow, as if he’s not used to communicating by this rather obscure method, as if English is a second language, but he’s alert and clear, and able to have a conversation. I’m not sure if he wants to or not. He’s accommodating, that’s for sure. I won’t let him off too easily though.

I want to tell him that everything will be okay, that everything works out, but I can’t. For one thing, it’s not true. We watch TV for a bit, and he shifts in his chair.

“Is there anything you can’t get here that you’d like?” I ask. I’m determined to get something for him, since it’s all I can do.

“Well, I haven’t had a cigarette since November,” he says, looking at me, then away, then back, not sure where to look as he makes this confession. “I’ve stopped before, but never for this long.
Usually when I get sick I stop, then when I get better I start again. Two months is about the most I haven’t smoked.”

It’s his asthma that’s made him stop smoking every so often. Now it’s the nursing home, which has a bit more clout, apparently. I’ve already been warned that he’ll ask for cigarettes and really, we don’t care, and by “we,” I mean hospice, but the nursing home, that’s another matter. There’s no smoking in the nursing home, and if I were able to smuggle cigarettes in I’d have to smuggle Mr M outside to smoke them, because what if the other patients saw and wanted one too? Instead I tell him that I know it’s hard to not be able to smoke, especially since helping people not smoke is what my husband does for a living.

“I’m not sure I can get cigarettes past the desk,” I tell him, “so is there anything else?”

He thinks for a moment. He tries out a few things in his mind, almost to the tip of his tongue, I can see that he’s thinking of what he’d like, and I’m fairly certain that people offering to bring him things is not something he’s been accustomed to. It seems a fairly new concept to him.

“Chocolate? Any kind of food?”

Finally he settles on something. “M and M’s,” and he looks at me and then away, as if embarrassed.

“Plain or peanut?”

“Plain.”

“I’ll do that,” I tell him. And then I ask him if I’m making him nervous. It’s been 45 minutes, and all this time spent interacting with me must be exhausting him.

He doesn’t answer but looks away, and starts to say something, then stops.

“It’s okay,” I tell him, touching his arm and laughing with him, “it’s okay. Do you want me to come back in a couple of days?” He smiles, perhaps because I’d come out and said what he’d wanted to say, that I was exhausting him with my presence, no matter how nice I might be. And he has a ready answer for my question, and he says, “Yes,” right away.

I shake his hand, and I thank him for talking to me, with the unspoken emphasis being that I’m the one who needed to talk, and I let him know that I appreciated his company. I tell him I’ll be back on Wednesday, the day after tomorrow, with M&M’s and more stamps.

I drive home, thinking about how I can sneak in cigarettes, and sneak him out to have one.

R.I.P. Fred

I've been visiting Fred every week since last August.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Fred’s for the usual Sunday morning visit. He was in fine form, for a dying man. He was up, by which I mean he was in his hospital bed, sitting up, leaning against his pillows, awake and playing video poker, smoking a cigarette and telling jokes, though having a bit of a problem remembering things, such as words.

No big. I often have problems with words. They’re slippery things and tend to wander off on their own, slithering away like camouflaged snakes, so you don’t know they’re gone until you can’t find them.

I gave him a nebulizer treatment, and a handful of his noon pills. It’s a big handful, the noon pills.

I fixed him an egg with cheese. Just one this time, not the usual two. And he’d taken to asking for it in a bowl, so he could eat like he used to, when he was in country and used chopsticks. Alas, there were no chopsticks, so he made do with a fork. He ate it all.

I did the dishes, cleaned up, and then helped him with his commode situation, which means, mostly, getting him back into bed from the commode, which is a step away from his bed.

When his wife returned from church I hugged him goodbye, and said I’d see him the next week.

I didn’t. I had to have someone else fill in for me when I realized that the next Sunday was the day Stew died one year ago, and I just couldn’t sit with another dying person on that day. May 31st was already taken as a day of mourning. So instead my charming husband and I took the dogs to the coast and celebrated Stew’s life in our own way. We played on the beach, and we drove down meandering roads just to see where they went, and we even found a pioneer cemetery to explore. I like reading the headstones, even those that can be barely read at all, the ones that have been so marked by time there’s no telling who’s lying there.

Two days later I received a call from the hospice chaplain. Fred passed away on June 1st, his wife and a caregiver by his side.

My first thought was that now Fred can breathe again. No more fighting for air, no more wasting away, unable to do anything for himself. He’s free.

I told my husband, and he said, “You didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”

“I said goodbye to him every time I left,” I said, “because you never know when it’s going to happen.”


R.I.P. Fred

This Sunday With Fred

This Sunday started like most other Sundays. I showed up at Fred’s at my normal time. If I’m one minute early or late, Fred’s wife is sure to let me know. When I drive up, she’s at the back door, watching for me. When I go in I find he’s still sleeping, and she tells me what the weather will be like this week, and then her mother arrives and they go off to church.

Same as every other Sunday.

Twenty minutes later I hear a cry for help from Fred, and when I go to check on him he’s awake and having trouble breathing, and he makes it known he wants help. In fact, he says so. “Help,” he manages to get out, and he points to tell me he wants his nebulizer. He can’t really speak, so desperate is he for breath, but I get the message pretty quickly. I also give him his morphine.
With the nebulizer treatment over he still struggles terribly to breathe, and he looks at me and says, “I’m going to die,” which is a fact I can’t disagree with, though I’m hoping it’s not imminent, so instead I take his hand and tell him that I’m going to get help for him.

I find the phone in the kitchen and I call the answering service for hospice and leave a message for an on-call nurse to call me.

I tell Fred they’ll get back to us, and I hold his hand and ask if there’s anything I can do for him. He holds up five fingers to indicate he wants his oxygen turned up to five, and I go out to the living room and do that, and when I return he’s thrown off his covers and is crying for help.
I take his hand and tell him I’m calling for help again, and this time I call the church where Fred’s wife and mother-in-law are, and I tell the person answering that Fred’s having a problem, and could I please speak to the mother-in-law. She comes on the phone and as I start to tell her about Fred his name completely escapes my mind. I settle for saying “he” instead of his name, because it’s not as if there’s going to be any question who I’m talking about.

She says they’ll be right there. The church is right down the street.

I go back in to Fred and tell him his wife and mother-in-law will be home soon. I raise the head of his bed a bit to make it easier for him to breathe, and I hold his hand and try to be reassuring, though I’m not sure how much use it is. He’s lost all color, the man is white as a ghost, he’s trying to suck in enough air so he won’t feel like he’s suffocating, but it’s so hard for him.
When they come in I’m still holding Fred’s hand. And then the hospice nurse calls back. She tells me to give him more morphine and an anti-anxiety pill. I give him the morphine, I let the wife give him the pill. I’m not supposed to administer drugs, I always hand them to him and let him take them himself. But this time he can’t, she has to put it in his mouth. She tries to get him to drink something, but he can’t, he just wants to breathe.

The mother-in-law is on the other side of the bed holding Fred’s hand, and I’m holding his other hand, and she tells him, “It’s not often you get pretty girls holding both your hands,” and he laughs, my god, he laughs! Or I think it was a laugh, which may not have been a good idea, for then he scritches up his face and starts gasping for air even more.

The color starts to come back to his face, and he opens his eyes and looks at us, and the mother-in-law says, “He’s here!” just about the same time I say, “There he is!” For one second there the look was not one of a desperate man gasping for air, but the look a cheerful Fred would give us when he had a big joke that we weren’t in on yet.

I’ve never had to call them back from church before. Only once before have I had to call the on-call nurse. I’ve never heard Fred say he was going to die, and I’ve never seen him so scared and desperate. I’ve been with Fred on Sundays since August. He wants to make it to his wife’s birthday, which is this next Saturday.

When I left I held his hand and told him I’d see him next Sunday, and that we’d celebrate Mother’s Day then. “We didn’t have much fun today,” I said, “But next week, watch out!” I said this knowing there was no guarantee I’d see him next Sunday, but we can only work with what we have.