The hospice nurses tell me that people leave this world by degrees. She closes her eyes again and falls into a fitful sleep. She tries to smile, but it only leads to more hacking. “Making sure I don’t start causing trouble?” “Oh, it’s you,” she mumbles with a hoarse voice. Occasionally she opens her eyes to see me sitting at the foot of her bed. This woman who once welcomed an awkward, lanky redheaded fool into her family many years ago. When the house finally empties, I decide to creep into the bedroom to sit beside my mother-in-law while she sleeps. Nobody ever told me death could be so affectionate. You know the nurse who sits in the hospital maternity ward nursery with all the babies? Think of the warm face she wears when she holds a newborn.
EVERLASTING SUMMER NURSE HOW TO
I’m trying to think of how to describe what I’m talking about. Nobody wears the forlorn expressions of pity, they wear looks I can’t quite explain. They enter with smiling and tearful faces. The caregivers sit nearby, clad in scrubs, killing time on phones. After he died, my mother-in-law blared non-stop HGTV. When my father-in-law was alive, these walls vibrated with 24-hour cable news. Long ago, this house used to be the loudest place on the block. I’m not used to this house being so unearthly silent. When the aunt left the house, everything went quiet again. “She’s been talking in her sleep all day. “Who’s she talking to?” said the aunt, dabbing her eyes. Ours are the faces of people tangled up in nostalgia. “Oh, bless her.”īut the strange thing is, nobody wore the kinds of faces you’d associate with grief-those faces will come later. An oxygen machine that sounded like a small lawnmower, with long tubes going to Mary’s nasal cannula. The aunt peeked into the bedroom and was confronted with the modern machinery of medical care. “Can I sneak in and look at her?” asked the aunt as tears dripped from her cheekbones. She is talking gibberish in her sleep, too, which the nurse says is common among those who are dying.Įarlier this morning one of the aunts stopped by. The hospice nurse is here to check on Mary, my mother-in-law.