Page 70 - Vol. VI #1

The Dying Kind (continued from preceding page)
suffering from dementia and frightening halluci- nations that made Sheila believe he saw ghosts. Even the easiest patients were never as peaceful as Sheila had expected when she first signed up. Lots of moaning (“Lord, take me” was Mrs. Harp- er’s favorite) and complaining, with sporadic visions of loved ones and glimpses of white lights or perfect Garden of Edens to make the diaper changing and sponge baths worth it.
“Are you hungry, Mrs. Harper?”
Sheila didn’t mind the physical manifestations of death, because she felt an almost magnetic at- traction to the dying. It stemmed from a desire
to witness life stripped of what was illusory and false and to see the veil lifted between this world and the next. She believed in heaven, not as a place with pearly gates like her father the preach- er had described, but instead as something es- sential, like a fine vapor of atoms and molecules combining and dividing, all one with God.
The old woman didn’t answer, which wasn’t un- usual. The stroke had made it hard for her to speak clearly, and she frequently couldn’t think
of words she wanted to say. This aphasia made
it easy for Randall and most of the caregivers to lose patience with her and blurt out words they thought she might be trying to say. The result was often more confusion, as her stroke-addled brain struggled to keep up with the torrent of words. Sheila used her considerable patience to let the woman try to get the words out.
With every one of her patients, she asked them about the visions they had, asking them to tell her what heaven was like. Days from death, she loved watching them sink slowly into their interior life, as though even to be touched or open their eyes and see this temporal world pained them. She’d been in the room three times when someone had passed, and each time she had sat watching their faces for signs of God or Jesus sightings. With Ruth, the dementia patient, she had sat vigil with an
Dora had left the dirty lunch dishes in the sink, and Sheila filled the sink with water and soap. She was too amped up on the speed to be able
to sit down, so she’d clean up after Dora. From the crumbs on the plates, she could see Dora had only prepared a sandwich for Mrs. Harper instead of making a hot meal. She was a lazy woman. Through the window, she looked into the side yard, where a young elm tree, bare-branched, swayed in the wind.
old German shepherd dog, both watching Ruth’s chest as it rose and fell a few times before stop- ping. Then, above her chest, some gold mist had glittered briefly in the air, dissolving faster than
a blink. Sheila would have thought she imagined it, but for the dog’s strange reaction. Eyes trained on the same spot as hers, the dog had sat upright, ears forward, and barked twice.
“Mother, hello,” he said in his deep croak. The hos- pital bed whirred and she heard Mrs. Harper cough and say something back in a low voice.
Sheila went into the kitchen to look at the medi- cine log. Mrs. Harper had last had morphine four hours ago, which meant she was due for another dose in two hours. She decided to move it up an hour so that Mrs. Harper would be out like a light when her son Randall got here. She’d just write the expected time in the medicine log. No one had noticed when she’d done it before.
She threw the dishcloth on the counter, but missed and watched it slide to the floor. She stepped over it to the kitchen table, where Mrs. Harper’s medi- cations sat. Nearly twenty bottles, all white plastic of varying sizes, were clustered together like a tiny skyline of prescription drugs. The tallest bottle contained suppositories. Constant constipation was a hard truth of old age. The other bottles were an assortment of pills meant to lower blood pres- sure, reduce the urge to pee, lower cholesterol, thin the blood and fight depression.
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And then there was the good stuff. A glass bottle and eye dropper for the morphine, and Mrs. Harp-
She heard the key in the lock while she was dry- ing the dishes. Then she heard the door opening, a male voice calling out hello, and a frown took over her pale face. Randall was early, which threw her medication timing off.