Final Observation: HOSPICE

Hospice For Revision-Peer Review

The small room smelled sanitary and lonely, like peroxide rain in an isolated forest. The overall scent and sense of despair hung in the air. Flowers hung wistfully in photographs on the gray walls. The white floor, chestnut curtains and bedding, and pale blue comforter absorbed the soft pink, orange and jade hues of the framed wall prints, and depleted the scarlet in roses on the bedside table. Light from the window at the edge of the room seeped inside, dim and wary, as if considering returning another time.

She reached out a frail hand from a skeletal frame reaching for something on some unseen horizon. I took her clammy hand in mine. Her sapphire fleece sweater smelled like tobacco and Robitussin, when I leaned in. She gasped as if my presence surprised her, licked her thin cracked lips into a sincere smile and leaned her head forward to speak. Although her mouth formed the words, only a muffle came out. Trying again she hazily spoke, “You wanna go outside? I think this is the last one for awhile.”

Sometimes, in less than a span of a breath, time pauses, collapses, planets collide, and fear combusts into spiraling shards of broken truth tearing into your breaking soul. In less than the time to blink one eye, every fiber of the world leaps up into your throat at once, leaving a dry acidic taste and no room for a scream. The otherwise listless walls close in, growing sinister. The clock’s deafening second hand echoes the thunder of your heartbeat. You are seized back to that terrible dizzying breath. In the same split moment the instant escapes, leaving a wake of despair. I took one deep breath, trying to cleanse the shock and dejection from my face and soul.

I croaked, “C’mon. You’ll be ok.” With my forced cheerful voice, I wasn’t sure who I trying to deceive, myself or her. Maybe it was one last grasp at hope. I lowered myself, hung her legs limply to the side of the bed, and placed one of her arms around my shoulder while I gingerly lifted her weak frame into the chair. She called it dancing. Not long ago, I’d needed help to lift her. Now she was lighter than my nine year old. Her pale skin pressed against her bones, her right eye sagged, but she was as cheerful and witty as she’d ever been, when she was awake. She pressed her parched tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Do you want to try another sip of water?” “Maybe when we get back,” she assuaged.

I wheeled her slowly, down the fluorescent hallway. Bumps hurt now, more than they used to. She never said so, she was much too tough, but she tensed and gasped at approaching cracks and entryways. Warm sunlight bathed us, breathing color into her cheeks momentarily. Two drags into her cigarette, she started nodding forward slightly, lids drooped. I lead her back into the clean gray room. Not her room. Her room was lively, stacked with rows of mystery novels, collections of ocean scented body sprays, photographs of every child and grandchild and glued together remnants of decades-old kindergarten ceramics. This room remained the sanitized charlatan of her genuine room. I wheeled her soft and begrudgingly toward the miscreant room nonetheless.

I would’ve lifted her back into bed, but she startled awake. “Let me sit awhile. I talked to Carol, and she’s having the guys move me this weekend.” Death lurked in the background behind the chestnut curtains. The second hand thundered again. She shifted a challenging glance toward the curtains, and continued. “I think I’ll be home by Monday, then. I’ll be glad to be out of here, especially at night.” The graveyard staff seldom answered calls between commercials. At night, she’d wake alone, disoriented and in pain, without help for hours. Relatives decided to take turns sleeping in the small chair beside her bed, in case she needed anything) “Monday, then,” I hoped.

I surveyed the room, looking for any sharp thing. I would have ripped the scythe from his icy hands, slicing his arid throat, with a haughty victorious shriek but that I could deprive him of it. The less than breath, less than blink, years-in-a-moment moment shackles you, paralyzing, silencing any defiant scream you would otherwise utter. In that single space of eternal second, you cannot fraction a bargaining breath, or raise a fortifying arm.

The sunlight suddenly flitted in, challenged the fiendish creature, chasing the lurking minute aside. It rekindled her countenance, fluttering of her inlaid cheekbones, dancing momentarily against the vase on the nightstand, spreading a small rainbow of protection at my mother’s feet. The air freshened, and the grey walls seemed to blush. My mother laughed, as if sharing a secret to which I wasn’t privy, again from the belly as if to divulge that secret, smiled and sighed. She braced her arms on each side of the chair. Petitioning her body, she strained out of the chair onto unsteady legs, stepping cautiously forward and into bed one last time.