Spring, 2019. I am bending over my mother, who is in our guest room, on hospice. I am doing some medical task for her.
“This is not the kind of nursing you like, darling,” she says ruefully, and oh, is she right.
I have no idea what simple, amateur nursing task I was doing in that moment—which is proof that one should never be scared, because anything we fear will be over and the miserable details will vanish. But whatever it was, I am sure my hand was trembling and a flock of butterflies was trapped inside my belly. Though I ached to be serene, loving, and helpful, I was as awkward and nervous as a new dad left alone with the baby on a fifties sitcom. Except that my situation was neither funny nor adorable, just one more daughterly failure.
She understood, though. That, I do remember. It is good to have someone know you that well and forgive you.
Talking with a friend the other evening, I thought of my mom’s words yet again. My friend and I both have a husband with a chronic illness, and she is as ill-equipped as I, temperamentally, for caregiving. We love books and talks and projects, not the far greater challenge of overseeing another mind and body, the daily struggle to ease pain or prevent complications. Luckily, both husbands are stable for now; mine’s myasthenia is nicely under control, requiring only the minimal wifely fussing. (Love, when frightened, cannot help but nag.) Still, I need to be ready for anything that might happen. Which means coming to grips with…myself.
How, when my childhood hero was Florence Nightingale, can I have this aversion? In fiction, I loved Cherry Ames, who had glossy black curls and kept switching nursing specialties. And my favorite book in the genre was Sue Barton, Student Nurse. It sits on my bookshelf to this day, the paper browned with age but that happy, fake-perfect cover illustration still bright.
The spine cracks the minute I open the book. Paging through—fast, as chunks split apart in my hands—I begin to understand. Nobody throws up or bleeds out in Sue Barton, Student Nurse. None of Sue’s patients dies, and she makes no grave errors in care. Instead, she finds two merry friends and falls in love with a young doctor. Nursing’s appeal here is aesthetic—Sue gasps at the beauty of the jewel-toned antiseptics in the supply closet, and her formidable instructor scolds the other girls for laughing, telling them it is beautiful, and she is glad Miss Barton has the imagination to see it. There is deeper appeal as well, with passionately idealistic passages from the young doctor and one of Sue’s friends about their love for the old hospital itself.
Love a hospital? The thought of even entering one to visit somebody makes me nervous. I have learned to march in from the parking lot with a momentum so brisk, it carries me past the impulse to flee. Focus on the balloons, I tell myself, and the women being wheeled out with new babies in their arms. Do not think about all the pain and misery, all the spewing body fluids and tense codes and races alongside a gurney, pumping temporary oxygen.
With, again, that merciful amnesia, I forget my own past surgeries and icky procedures. But other people’s misery gets engraved on my brain. My grandmother clutching the wall as she slipped to the ground, fainting with undiagnosed colon cancer when I was ten. The woman moaning all night in the next bed when I had melanoma dug out of my arm. My mother-in-law’s bright orange vomit after she insisted on a bag of Cheetos post-op. My stepfather’s rasping breath as his body gave out. My mom in the ICU for an entire summer with Legionnaire’s disease, consigned to a twilight-state induced coma and a tracheotomy just weeks after winning a tough tennis game.
The body is not stable like a book, a reliable source of pleasure that grows brittle ever so slowly, without a cry of complaint. The body is as strong and beautiful and fragile as glass. One learns to tolerate the inevitable cracks, the incursions of misery, pain, or incapacity. See how carefully I use the safe, coolly impersonal third-person voice to distance all that mess? I compartmentalize like a televangelist with a mistress. Anything can be endured if you can rationalize it, make up a story about it, pull yourself away from it.
But when you are nursing someone else through their misery, you cannot distance. You have to pay close attention to every sigh or wince, if you are to solve the puzzles that come in rapid succession. What would ease the pain now? A different position, a fluffier pillow? Is it time for a pill? What sort of lunch will sit lightly on the stomach and not fly back up? Does the fever mean infection? Did I wrap the bandage too tight? Is that redness just the healing process, or ominous? Do I dare call the doctor again? Am I hovering and only adding to the misery? What if I mix up the meds? Or blow up the house with the oxygen machine?
Stop that right now. Project serenity. A smooth countenance, no frowns or bit lips, no visible panic. My God it is hard. The K – 5 bio of Flossie Nightingale spoke only of her walking among the soldiers, bending over each one with her lantern held aloft, smoothing feverish brows with a cool hand. In the Civil War romances I read as a teenager, women just ripped their petticoats to make a bandage and staunch the blood, and somehow the soldier was well enough to make love to them the following day.
I should have set those books aside and taken a course in caregiving. Why are they not offered alongside shop and home ec and how to make a budget? Because healthcare is a commodity and we are expected to pay others for it, rather than learn the basics ourselves? Half my recoil is fear of my own ignorance: I am terrified of failing, forgetting, screwing up, and endangering someone I love. The other half is panic at the sight of their suffering—and by extension, horror at the precarity of everyone’s well-being.
Good nurses awe me. They learn and observe and come to terms with the vagaries of the body, its quirks and vulnerability and surprising resilience. The best of them finish each shift exhausted and gratified, having sped the healing and lightened the hearts of their patients.
These nurses will soon be replaced by machines. The machines will not worry at all. But I can imagine shoving one aside to give the care myself, awkwardly and nervously, with guaranteed screw-ups. That is the thing about love: it forces us into roles we would otherwise dread. And somehow, we manage.
My mom knew full well how ill-fitted I was to nurse her, but no way would she have preferred a robot.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
