Gone people

For six weeks, April 19 to June 6, 2012, I visited my stepmother every day; first in the hospital following her colon cancer surgery, then, in hospice. Three years prior, my great aunt had lost a leg to poor care in the hospital following hip surgery. Having lived independently until age 96, she was forced into a rehabilitation home from which she left only to die in a hospital mere days after her 97th birthday.

I visited my Aunt Dutsie (nee Elvira), once a week. She snapped at less fortunate fellow patients who endeavored to engage me in conversation. “She’s visiting me,” she would say. Sometimes I would bring an art project or puzzle for us to do together. Often, I would wheel her to the dining room for a meal or around the floor to see something different from her room. Most often, I would just listen to the stories of her long-ago youth and the bitterness she still held toward some no longer with us, as well as the myriad quiet joys and sorrows that were her life.

I visited once a week; it was not enough.

I visited my stepmother every day, not only so that she would feel loved, but so that the hospital would know she was loved and would not ignore her and her well-being as too few staff attempted to care for too many patients. Even present, I witnessed disdain and careless banter repeatedly, sometimes with reference to my stepmother, more often, with regard to some less frequently visited neighboring patient.

I visited my stepmother every day, computer in tow so that I could work when she slept. I listened to what stories she would tell when she was awake. I begged her to eat and drink. I conversed with doctors and nurses, hospital social workers, aides. I didn’t cry when she yelled at me for being overly kind to nurses and aides she had berated and insulted. “I’m in pain. I’m allowed to be mean.” I knew she was in pain.

She knew she was dying.

Over the weeks, her stories were fewer as she spoke less and less. But many people came to visit from her church, her apartment building and neighborhood, her family and friends, and they would tell stories. Often, she slept, but occasionally she would bestow on them a smile of thanks for the memory.

My stepmother was the last thread connecting me to my father’s family. She buried my dad, my grandmother, my great-grandmother, my two great-aunts and my cousin. I visited her every day because while she “was,” they all still “were,” too. On June 6, 2012, she passed away. One moment she was breathing, shallow and slow. The next her body was deflated as she expelled her last breath and with it all the spirits of the “gone people.”

I was happy she was no longer suffering, but I cried because I felt myself newly bereft of all those I’d lost before her.

Recently, a friend made a comment that made me realize, however, that she and they aren’t really gone. As long as I am, they, too, are: in my heart…and in my stories.