Snake River at Massacre Rocks, Idaho ~ July 2009, by Katie
In a routine day's work I often watch a human heart stop beating.
A controlled slowing.
An anticipated flat line.
A silent pulse.
And after we finish our painstaking work...somehow, through the grace of God and science and brilliant, hardworking people, that quiet isoelectric line shudders a little.
A peak here.
A wave there.
Underneath the humming machines and the buzz of workaday conversation, the repetitive beep of a closely monitored pulse punctuates the background.
My job is equal parts science and magic.
When I have a moment to stop and watch that heart wake up again, the pulse in my own chest steals center stage for an instant. Sometimes it marches in tandem with that electric line on the monitor, sometimes in counterpoint. It is a miracle, just like the very first time I watched it happen. It will remain a miracle long after I hang up my scrubs.
Lately, I have been mentally replaying a comment from my mother about the relationship between a mother and her child. She observed how two hearts that beat in such close proximity for a time are bonded in a way that cannot be touched or even explained.
That thought tugs at my own heart a little as I watch the unfolding of a new chapter for me. For my mother. For my mother's mother. And for her mother. Our roles are about to shift. Change is coming.
My great-grandmother is slowly edging toward the quieting of her pulse. Soon, her heart will go to sleep and not wake up.
In this heart's particular story, after eighty-nine years of keeping time, that outcome is right, expected, and natural.
It will mean the end of one chapter and the beginning--or resuming, or continuation--of another. I believe that is what happens when this human experience draws to a conclusion.
I will write that part of my own story one day.
Though I hope never to see it, I know my lover will write his.
Death is part and parcel of this experience. I know that my Bedstemor {Danish for "grandmother"} has been waiting for a long time to climb out of this worn-out shell. She is ready for a welcome release from diapers and dentures and fungal creams, from a slow whittling away at autonomy and the omnipresent hum of pain. But somehow, even when I know it is coming, death catches my breath just a little.
There are times as a nurse when I have stood in a room where nothing more can be done. Images are seared into my mind; the nights when I have held a baby whose heart is newly, permanently still. Sponging with a sweet, baby-smelling soap and washing the small body. Rinsing away the blood, dressing the ugly sutures, and bundling the little person in a blanket before cradling them for that long walk back to their parents.
This process is humbling. Soul-quieting. An honor. After drugs and surgery and medicine fail, a touch of dignity is the last thing I can give my patients.
My mother talked for a long time tonight, spilling thoughts and stories. She told me about this morning. One of the last mornings with my Bedstemor. Four generations in a little room together, and how these women~these daughters~sponged away the body fluids. How they trimmed and filed the nails on the gnarled hands. How they rubbed sweet-smelling lotion into the papery skin. How they looked in her blue eyes and talked to her, heard her breathe, listened to her sounds and movements.
Mom talked about how the morning was humbling. Soul-quieting. An honor. How they gave her the dignity and respect they have always shown.
I wish I was there.
Hearts stop every day.
Some wake up.
Most do not.
But the experiences of being a nurse, or a daughter, or a woman, or a human in the face of death simultaneously make me look ahead, and they make me remember.
I look ahead to a time when I may meet Bedstemor as Edith, as a healthy, mobile, lucid, independent woman. I bet she is a force of nature.
These experiences make me remember to take a breath and savor it. To listen to my heart and hear it. To love and really mean it.
Jeg elsker dig, Bess.
