So, let's be clear, this entry need not evoke a "What's with DjinnfromtheBronx?" It just happens in my travels I see certain things perhaps more than others. So, because I visit someone regularly in a nursing home, and informally volunteer with an art class at the site, I am around people at the end or near end of their lives. And sometimes the end of a life, to the observer, sort of has a way of integrating itself subtly into our living world in one moment so to be a rather amazing experience for its passing appearance. This happened the other day.
I had been helping my elderly friend create what turned out to be quite beautiful painted coasters. She is at that stage of her dementia where it is hard for her even to follow directions, but I think I can safely say that she participated more than usual in the work we did as a team. Two lovely coasters were produced, but I could see she had had enough so I took her out to the wing's lobby area. There was a comfortable leather like deep chair for me and for both of us a view to the outdoors in this lovely setting. It was a little too breezy to take her outside.
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| The other side of where we were sitting, but lovely. |
She pointed to the trees and the perfect plein air expanse and said, "This is a famous place." I don't know about famous, but it sure is bucolic. She asked me questions about my two cats, which somehow she remembers though she saw them only once, while she can not remember a moment before, nor people she knew for years. What she remembers also well is that Catholic Faith that has sustained her and her delight that I help at the parish, lectoring and serving as needed. She asks me with rhetoric repetition, "You are still on the altar?" Whenever a nurse or visitor she has many times met comes in, as happened once or twice that day, she will say, "You look so pretty!" It never fails that they take her hand, cheered by her kind words which substitute for a hello and hide her failing memory.
And so, there we were. I noticed some errant paint on her fingers and was thinking that before I left that day I would bring her back to the activity room and clean them off. She was in a good frame of mind. Smiling. I was in a good frame of mind. Smiling.
Then a series of people, clearly family members of someone, passed us by toward the exit. Each was sniffling, or dabbing an eye. Someone had died. I don't know who, because they are very strict about adhering to the HYPPA laws, which is a good thing (except when someone you have known there for a long time, disappears, and you realize that it probably was death that caused it). I suspect it was one of the folks I don't often see in the activity room. They seemed to be all accounted for, in my head. Several of the nuns who run the home went outside and hugged the family, a confirmation that thre had been a passing.
My elderly friend saw them all, and asked me if I knew who they were. I said they probably were visiting someone. And that Sister so and so was just chatting with them. I did not tell her that anyone had died. It would not have impacted her because she is unaware of where she is, and seems not to remember the other residents when she is not with them, but it was unnecessary, perhaps a little inappropriate, somehow, to note something that pointed out the elephant in the room--this scene of loss has been and will be repeated for years.
And yet, in the activity room the gleeful noise of the seniors still finishing their art work--one man must at one time have been an artist, as he drew little cartoons on the coaster. And my friend did not notice the tears. And the sun still shone. And the trees still swished in the heavy breeze. And the birds were flying by with pieces of weed and fuzz constructing their nests for the new life that they would incubate.
How to phrase this? I saw the whole circle in that few moments. I wanted to say something to the family, but I didn't want to intrude.
I took my friend back to the activity room and got the paint off her fingers. She was content.
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