Page 69 - Vol. VI #1

2017 Honorable Mention for the Literary
“How are you doing today, Mrs. Harper?”
“No good,” Mrs. Harper said.
Mrs. Harper’s first name was Nancy, but she insisted that the caregivers address her more formally. Sheila had been working as in hospice long enough to know how important these little scraps of dignity were to the old or the very sick in their last days. Nearly all of Mrs. Harper’s independence was gone, robbed from her by a stroke eight months prior. She communicated mainly by pointing and shouting out the few words her brain could remember. Her right arm was more of a prop than a working part of her body. She could only walk a few steps, and that was with assistance, and she’d lost control of her bladder. She needed someone to change her
The old woman could have meant her useless arm, or she could have meant Sheila. Sheila de- cided she meant the latter.
“What did you say, Mrs. Harper?”
The old woman turned her face away from Sheila again and pretended to sleep.
Just like her brother, Andrew, Sheila thought. King of the big silence. Well, go ahead and freeze me out, old lady. See if I care for ten dollars an hour. She walked down the hall past the gallery of family photos—at least twenty-five of them—framed and hanging on the wall. All those smiling faces, and only one or two came to visit.
diapers and feed her meals. Fortunately for her, the family had enough money to pay a firm to provide those services.
Watching someone die in hospice care wasn’t for everyone, and that meant family too. It was hard to see people wasting away in their last months or weeks of life, particularly if they were in pain. Sheila understood it. The dying usually lost their appetite for water and food, losing so much weight that their skin sunk around their bones slack as a shroud. Near the end, their skin started developing these mottled purple spots, which meant that the blood was no longer circulating. Some people didn’t like seeing those physical changes, and preferred to remember their loved ones as they were when they were healthy.
“Who?” Mrs. Harper used her good hand to peel a corner back of the eye mask, and raised her neck.
Sheila had started working for Rosebud Palliative Care four months ago. The brochure avoided
use of the word hospice and its sound of a death sentence, but doctors only put patients in hospice or palliative care when they thought patients had six months left on this earth. So what it basically meant was that the terminally ill came home
“It’s me, Sheila.” She walked over to the bed and fussed with the beige fleece blanket laying over her thin legs. Mrs. Harper’s feet, covered in fuzzy pink striped socks, pointed up like an anvil.
to die, with someone keeping them clean and hydrated, periodically checking vital signs and making sure they didn’t run out of medications to ease the final bits of suffering.
The old woman made a sound like hmmph and pulled the eye mask back down over her eye.
Her right arm slipped off the bed and dangled uselessly for a moment until Dawn gripped her forearm and rested it on the mattress. Her arm felt less like flesh and more like a bone with loose skin hanging off of it.
Dying, Sheila had found, could be fast and unex- pected, like her father’s. Or it could be long and bewildering, as it had been for her last patient, 60
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