Life and Death

Please don't read this if you are depressed or upset

Most of you know I work part-time in a nursing home as a house-keeper. I clean in 2 and 3 East on weekends. These are the locked Alzheimer's wards. I've been there almost 3 years and I have seen many residents come and go, for lack of a better way to say it.

When the family is gathered to be with a loved one in their last moments, the kitchen provides coffee, tea and pastry as well as soda on a wheeled cart as a courtesy. This morning I rolled my cleaning cart into 2 East and saw the trolley and this poor woman crying against the door frame. I am a person who gives hugs when I feel they are needed and I let her cry against me until she felt she could go back in.

The social worker and I imagine the woman's husband were there and I heard the social worker say she was sorry and I knew what had happened.

Tomorrow I will clean that bed and furniture, once the family has gathered whatever they want of their loved one's belongings. Wash everything down, make the bed and get it ready for the next one.

Sometimes I run into the funeral people who come to collect the body. There's two of them and a stretcher on wheels. I call them "the Dark Angels of Death".

Next Saturday when I go back to work that bed will be filled with another person who needs total care. They may be able to walk, or use a walker, or wheelchair or be bed-ridden. They may talk or not. You do what you can for the poor old dears because everybody there could be your mother or your father and perhaps someone else is doing the same for them, or maybe sometime down the road.

It saddens me when the ones who were there when I first began work, who I had conversations with, gradually go down hill until they live their life out, like the lady who passed this am.

I had to walk by that room on my way back up the elevator to the 3rd floor and I couldn't help but to see that woman lying in bed with her grandmother who had passed and at that moment I was thankful for every pill I had taken that day, especially the Xanax. So sad, so sad