what i do in the land of lost souls
image: ghostbones, flickr creative commons
arthritis had crumpled and twisted her 75-year-old body like a potato chip. barely able to bear her own weight. very tenuously able to walk only the shortest of distances. right-sided heart failure manifested itself in her bloated limbs. she told me i looked like my mother, whom she remembered from french boarding school in the 1930s and 40s. i wondered what life would have turned out like if i'd had a mother like her.
she told me, not in those words, she felt life no longer held worth these days. she sobbed -- gutteral, primordial weeping. she wore an innate compulsion to apologize for herself, her feelings, her outburst. her trembling voice stammered and waivered through her sobs and tumbled out in some sort of fren-glish patois. i crouched on the floor at her feet. silent. listening. and, rubbing her arthritis knee with my hand, i felt obtuse in my powerlessness. and ... i felt her.
loneliness. abandon. desolate. fearful. self pity. and the grief that rains upon us as age looms ever larger. these things i felt in her. a child in calgary. another in san francisco. and a fit-and-healthy husband that left her, (stuck in the nursing home), to return to working the farm in saskachewan. and, oh dear blog, i heard the grief in her voice. grief for the woman she was, when a younger body allowed her to live fully and unrestricted.
now she grieves for herself. lost body. lost mobility. lost independence. lost place in her social network. and a mind intact. cruel. cruel fate, when age erodes the body to a grinding pain-filled halt, while leaving mentation unaffected. unaffected - to contemplate one's own slow demise? lost. she's lost. i'm lost. i have no answers, no words of wisdom, for her. i have nothing for her but love. and, blog, sometimes i fear that love does not suffice.
lost. lost souls. that is what i do - soothe the lost souls. that is what a nurse does.
Labels: aging, grieving, nursing, reality, reflective
