Mom,
My first memory is of a woman. She has white hair and I don’t know her name. There was a large window in her kitchen, a round table placed in front of it, and I sat at this table with her, for hours it seems. She taught me how to push flowers through wire and wrap it all around a hair comb. She was a widow and one of your Hospice cases. Although, my childhood mind encoded no grief in this memory, just pure fascination with this wonderfully patient woman who took the time to teach me her hobby.
The next memory is of a retirement home, a cafeteria with tables and tables of elderly people eating and you introduced me to the woman who could remember every word to every song that she performed on stage, but nothing of her family or even her own name. I was fascinated with how a mind could do that to someone. Allow them to remember their profession, but not the people they love or even themselves. Next, was the oncology unit, where you learned humor was the best medicine for those who put themselves in harms way in the service of others. The nurses and the doctors played ongoing tricks on one another. You made fun of one particularly surly doctor by hanging a finger condom on the bulletin board with a note saying he needed it for his date tonight. The levels of appropriateness or darkness with the humor surely would not pass today’s standards.
You came to my classroom in sixth grade at a time I was embarrassed to even say “hi” to you in front of my friends. You made the students sit in a circle and put stockings on our heads, over our faces and gloves on our hands and then said, “This is what it feels like to be elderly. Try to read this label. Try to open this bottle. Try to put on your shoes”.
In the later years, your stories were peppered with details about what happens to the body as it dies. The bed sores, the impacted bowels, the smells of mouths, the sound of inconsistent, labored, gurgling breath as a person is in their final hours. You often shared with me the cases that haunted you, challenged you, touched you.
Your life’s work has seemed to me to be the unraveling of your own experience with your mother’s rapid battle with ovarian cancer and her eventual death when you were only 20. For the past 30 years, yours was the hand that was held at the bedside, the voice that consoled, the eyes that witnessed, the heart that was open in those final, sometimes scary, sometimes peaceful transitions. You gave to everyone you worked with, that which you did not receive when you were young.
When most of our society is unwilling, unable, uninterested, running from, and terrified of the only thing we know we will experience – death. You have been there. Solid, present, compassionate.
“By their fruits, you shall know them.”
When asked about my work and what has lead me to wanting to be a psychologist, I say, it began with the woman who gave me life, who introduced me to a woman with white hair who taught me to weave wires through plastic flowers as she grieved the death of her beloved husband.