My Relation to the Patient

“What’s your relation to the patient?” the nurse asks.

I think I’m going to get kicked out.  I blurt out the truth.  “I’m their mother,” I say, pointing to my children, Marge’s grandchildren.  The nurse is sweet but it’s clear I didn’t answer right.  “Her ex-daughter in law?” I say, my voice rising at the end like a teenager making a statement.

She smiles and begins telling me about the medications Marge needs and how they will be administered.  She is very kind and I smile. 

Marge is a sweet person.  I’ve never known her to be anything but nice and she’s always been so good to my children.  On the grandmother level, she definitely has sainthood status.

She’s been in a nursing home for several years, ever since she was hospitalized for stomach problems and kept falling out of the hospital bed, injuring herself.  She never went home again and it was, as they say, downhill from there.  But it’s been a long, low sloping hill with little hills of hope in between.  Sometimes she knew everyone’s names, sometimes she slipped on one or two but got the rest right.  But over time, the hills leveled and the downward slide continued.

Recently, the speed picked up and she’s tumbling headlong to hospice care.  

Rachel told me last night that “Nana” recognized her, but then admitted later that perhaps she didn’t know her name but seemed to recognize her face.  She said Marge couldn’t talk or hear and that she was heavily sedated. She then said that Marge is going into hospice care on Sunday and that she’s got renal failure and is teetering on pneumonia.  If her grandmother seemed somewhat “with it,” I wanted to see her.  

It’s been a while, I admit.  I take the kids to the nursing home but it’s so hard to see Marge like that, and she frequently doesn’t recognize us, is argumentative, or doesn’t want to bother with the protocols of visiting, its dialogue, its breaking of a pattern she knows and we don’t.

So when we went to the hospital and I saw that little slip of a body framed underneath the covers but a fairly alert woman in possession of it, I was a little surprised.  She smiled when she saw us and seemed to be struggling to say something.  She seemed to warm up under my touch and I smiled at her and said, “It’s okay, don’t try to talk.”  But she looked as deeply into my eyes as a person can look into another’s and she said, very clearly, “Thank you.”  She was so glad to see the kids, and I guess me too, and it made me feel good to bring her a little happiness.  I felt like the tumbling had returned to a gentle downhill ride.

We stayed for almost an hour and then promised to come back tomorrow.  The script writer in me, always running dramatic scripts alongside reality, suggested she may not be there, but I know it will be a few days, or weeks, before she slips away.  

I hope she gets some peace soon.  It’s been a long life, a fairly uneventful one, and one that she deserves to wrap up soon and move on.  Her body is a prison and her soul is somewhere in there as we had the joy of sharing today.  Who knows who will be in that body in that bed tomorrow.  

So now as she slides gently down the last slopes of the long long glide, I hope the grass is soft, the breeze is gentle and the sun is warm on her sweet smiling face.

Enjoy those you love while you have the time together, even if together is a term used loosely.  Today we felt together, and it felt good.