Thank you for helping her meet
this day, this night.
Though she needs you now
just to take a sip of water,
she was once a volunteer firefighter.
If you were grieving, she would
bake you sweet bread.
If you were struggling,
she would leave a gift at your door
with a kind letter but no name.
Thank you for being the one
who arrives to help this woman
who always rises to help another.
This is the way we guide each other,
like the geese who change leaders
at the apex of the V when one gets tired
or sick. Thank you for flying ahead today.
The distance we must go is long.
Posts Tagged ‘hospital’
The Words I Want to Embroider into Her Hospital Gown
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged compassion, geese, hospital, illness, mom, nurse, vulnerability on October 20, 2023| 15 Comments »
Anastomosis
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged connection, daughter, healing, hospital, mom on October 17, 2023| 15 Comments »
It means “connection between two passageways.”
It means “place where two rivers meet.”
It means, “here is where necrotized intestine
can be cut away and a woman can be healed.”
It means, “seam where sepsis might begin
through the tiniest of micro perforations.”
It means, “my mother endured such pain.”
It’s so fine, the line between healing and crisis.
So elusive, the word that means
“I know my own life because it’s connected with hers.”
And I, who never before
had even heard of anastomosis,
I, who even yesterday could not spell
nor pronounce it,
I now know too well the five-syllable word
that means “fallible healer,” “essential danger,”
this word that describes the very place
where a life might be saved,
then nearly lost, then saved again.
Another Night in the ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged caregiving, gentleness, hospital, icu, mom, nurse on October 16, 2023| 22 Comments »
for Ally
So tenderly, the night nurse lifts
the blankets from my mother’s limbs
and notes the drainage—
its serosanguinous color, its volume.
She checks mom’s vitals and does
whatever she does with all those plastic tubes
that now tether my mother to her life.
How quietly she moves, like a wraith,
she whispers, as if she’s a wisp,
something insubstantial, a midnight trace.
Yet the gift of her work is great
in this moment when all depends on care.
I marvel at her gentleness, her humanness,
her kindness as she works
and my mother’s chest rises and falls,
rises and falls in hard-won sleep.
Like a killdeer, able to make a nest
in bare soil, gravel, even a paved parking lot,
the night nurse makes of this sterile room
a soft-enough place, a place where my mother
can be safe. Like a mother killdeer,
the night nurse stays close to the room,
her eyes and ears trained for danger.
She’s tracking everything,
determined that all will be well tonight.
*
Dear friends,
wow, thank you for the generous outpouring of love, prayers and well wishes for my mother and for me. I read every single one and thanked everyone out loud by name, and I am sad I won’t be able to respond individually to you, but please know how your kind words and good thoughts are carrying me and Mom. I have a deep abiding peace, despite the new curveballs the day brought. She had another (third) surgery today, and I hope and pray this will be the last and she can now rest and recover. She’s been in the hospital since Oct. 6. She’s had an intestinal surgery, a cardiac event, sepsis, a vascular surgery for lack of blood flow in her arm, an ulcer in her duodenum, dangerously low blood pressure, and today a third surgery to repair perforations that occurred at the point of the original surgery. Amidst all this she is a marvel of positivity, resilience, and kindness.
And as I said last night, thank you to all who care for those who need healing. I am so so so so grateful.
So Far Away and Not Allowed In
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged dad, daughter, healing, hospital, separation, touch on May 13, 2020| 12 Comments »
Because I cannot be there to hold my father’s hand,
I walk into my children’s room and hold my daughter and son—
as if love in one room emits a wave strong enough
to be felt many states away. Because I am afraid,
I don’t try to pretend I am not. Tears run hot
down my face and I don’t dam them.
When they dry, I let them dry.
Because I am helpless to fix my father’s kidneys,
I tell him I love him, as if words could help
filter his blood before returning it to his heart,
his tender heart.
Because the helicopter is flying him to Miami,
the blades of my worry begin to spin.
Because I can’t stop them, I turn them
into a giant wing that carries prayers
into the rooms where I’m not allowed to go.
And though I’m not there, I hold his hand,
imagine it heavy in my own. Because maybe
he can feel it. Because I don’t want him to be alone.
In the Northwestern Hospital ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged daughter, father, hospital, icu, love, mother, parents, poem, poetry on July 21, 2019| 4 Comments »
And as my mother steeped toward slumber,
her thin body wired to monitors,
there, surrounded by incessant beeping
and the red and green mountains and valleys
of pulse and pressure and the slow drip
of IV tubes finding her veins, yes,
there as her speech became mumbly and her
eye lids heavied, my father leaned over
the rails of the hospital bed to smooth
her gray hair and kiss her lips and whisper
I love you. And she rallied a smile and
whispered it back. And there, in the sterile room,
with all its instruments of cardiac measurement,
there was nothing, nothing that could chart
how open my heart, how—unable to hold
all the love I felt for them both—it broke
in the most beautiful way. How I prayed
it would stay that open, that broken, that whole.
**
Dear friends, thank you for all your good wishes. After having a heart surgery go wrong a few days ago, my mother was released today from the ICU and is now resting at home, and though she is not out of the woods yet, she is not in imminent danger. It’s been very scary and I thank you for all your thoughtful messages and prayers and thoughts. Rosemerry
*
Letter to the Doctors and Nurses in the ICU
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged doctor, gratitude, hospital, mother, nurse, poetry, prose poem on July 13, 2017| 6 Comments »
I know it’s your job, to monitor the heart rate as it rises, the blood pressure as it falls. I know the gray-haired woman in the bed is another set of numbers with a name you’ll forget. She’s my mother. She grows tomatoes on her porch and has a song to sing for every occasion. She loves side stroke and chocolate and Japanese art. She makes the best poached eggs, and she knows exactly how to scratch my head to lull me to sleep. I know it’s your job to find the clot. To bathe the wound. To ease the pain. Thank you. Thank you for your hands as they slip the needle into her arms, the arms that gather me when frightened or cold. Thank you for your feet as they run down the halls to examine her heart, her heart that holds so many. Thank you for your art as you puzzle the why of her body, her body that knows itself as a vessel for love and prayer. She is praying for you, even now, as I do, and though you are just doing your job, thank you.