By: Chris Mancari
I can only begin to tell you what it is like to help someone who is dying, to help them live comfortably as they expire. The sadness in their eyes, packing their things up as they still blink slowly in their bed. Just waiting. I saw it in his eyes today. I saw the end. He blinked it at me twice while I stared at him unafraid. As a professional caregiver to the evergrowing senior population, I am ready, always ready for that knowing slip of truth, that this is it, that there is very little time ahead, so few markers to meet.
Yes, he wants to see his three grandchildren marry. He wants to be at their weddings. I know this because he told me with a head bowed and a catch in his voice. I hear him understanding that he doesn’t have long. It was only seldom that he let this fear emanate off of him, but these days It happens more. Ever since he stopped being able to walk.
It just happened last week, when his strength seemed to slip off him like a hula hoop drops to your knees and then clatters to the floor, and it really sunk in for him that he cannot lift his head, that he cannot put one foot in front of the other. And I saw him feel it, his body collapsing.
Literally, he is collapsing into me as I transfer him from the toilet to the wheelchair, his rounded spine sinks into my chest as I hold him upright. I slowly lower him into his chair as he curses, and though it’s not a sob. It is.
It is this guttural moment that I absorb, that I hold space for, that I offer safety in. No judgment, no thought of self, just the desire to keep him from hitting the floor, to put him in his chair where it is safe, and I did not, at that moment, want to be anywhere else in the world. Because it’s not just old people who have those moments, those moments when the floor is coming up to meet you and you just can’t stop falling. It’s a thing that happens inside, where nothing but ideas can catch you. Ideologies to soften the descent, and even those can become a noose if clung to.
But here in this moment with my client sliding down the bathroom wall. I am allowed to, I am supposed to ease the impact. It is quite literally my job. And I am eternally grateful for the honor. I am glad that I am the way that I am at that moment because I am not afraid to absorb his weight and yet not be consumed by it. I am able to peel myself out of his way and lower him into his wheelchair. I separate myself from him only to kneel at his feet and point to my nose and remind him to breathe. His whole body is shaking and in that silence I am at complete peace, wrapping his fear in my acceptance. Not offering a solution.
I would at one point have tried to exercise my empathy, to cry with him, to sob with him. But this is different, new, something I have practiced, and now through muscle memory has snapped into place, a reflex of acceptance, not disassociating, but truly allowing my friend to be in that moment be as he is. To just sit with him and hold his hand. It is these moments when we are so painfully human that I am so grateful to be this porous person to let this weight move through me.
The awareness is not always there but it will strike me in certain settings. As in two days ago in the bathroom of the urologist with my gloved hand between my client’s legs. I reposition him so nothing touches the inside of the sample cup I am holding, as is specified in bold letters posted on the wall. I zoom out on this scene and see a young androgynous poorly dressed woman sitting in a wheelchair in front of a half-conscious man trying to pee into a cup she holds.
That’s it, I see it and again realize it is exactly where I am supposed to be. Looking at the blue and red veins like confetti on my client’s pale white thighs makes me gasp in wonder, in the privilege that I get to help this person without judgment or attachment. It will all probably hit the fan tomorrow, but this is how I feel today.
We think we have moved past the barbarous time of war, hand-to-hand combat, sword-to-sword, lines of men running into fields of flying metal. But I have seen what time does to the body and we will never escape the brutality of nature.
It comes over me like a wave, no matter how I run from it. No matter how many times I disappoint myself with my inability to be a protege, to be the vision of grandeur I paint behind my eyes. I just cannot stay away from the page. Life for me was always to be digested between pen and paper. Always, from childhood, I have cornered myself and written what feelings, what images look like in words. What stories play out in the red and blue veins on my client’s legs. But now they are just exactly that, veins, glowing under the skin and over fat, and in being just that they are also everything. My glimpse into the universe, my piece of it. How could I not tell you when I saw it, right there beneath my fingertips?
In the winding of a grandfather clock, and the holding of a wheelchair.
It does not have to be so grand as this, so self-righteous as caring for a dying being. Because for me it is all this grand. The picking of staples out of a thin grey carpet in a hospital office building, the mopping of a greasy diner floor. It is all so unbearably beautiful.
There could be a hell, but I believe it is punishment enough to miss it now, life. When we get stuck in our heads and miss the night sounds through an open window, to miss the way you realize there are things dying all around you and it is ok. That there is a bug on your window sill and it’s dead and that’s alright, because things die and change, and that’s beautiful.
Even the most tender touch can become a brush burn, an irritant if it caresses the same spot for too long. It is the ability to come and go from the truth that brings ecstasy, in what would otherwise be a long blank of knowing. It’s leaving it that brings us back to the light, to the wonder of it. The rotating of the earth into night so that we may enjoy the sunrise all over again in the morning.
When you are waiting for the light to stay forever, you are missing it.
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