NaWUPoBo, #23
Only five days left of National Whomp Up Poetry Book contest! How are your poetry series going? Do you find it easy to write a poem a day for a month?
Some posts I write need a little background information. Not everything I do as a nurse aide is clear. There are terms, phrases, ideas I use because I do them every day, but they might not clear to an outsider. Then there are things that happen that need no background information. One of my residents is dying of cancer. It is a terribly painful way to go. One day I suppose I will go to work and "Max's" bed will be empty; unless he dies on my shift. Either way it will be hard on all of us. We have no real tools in place at work to deal with mourning. We just keep pushing on. You work with a resident for a year, perhaps two or more, day after day, month after month. You become their world in some ways and they yours and then one day they are not there. Like getting washed overboard in a storm at sea. The body is gone; no physical evidence they were there at all, except in my memory. That is a poor tombstone, since I have so many large holes in my brain I am worried I will forget faces and names as I age myself. It also weighs on me uneasily; such responsibility and why I was given it I do not know?
But here I am. And here "Max" is and I have no doubt that when I return to work this afternoon there will be more vomit to clean up. More soft words to speak to calm his panic-attacks (who can blame him?) and more bending of my back and lifting of his body and hurting of my muscles to keep him comfortable. It is a price to be paid in this job. And what a price.
After each meal, his pills caused nausea,
vomiting everything back up, nothing
was held down. A nurse aide from Jakarta,
Indonesia, nodded her head, sighing
as we wiped away the froth, spew, vomit.
Looking into the bucket she asked: "Max,
what did you eat for lunch? Spinach? Diet
Coke?" Soon the cancer will spread, the attacks
worsen. Soon we will put him on morphine.
"That'll be the whole shebang," Max shrugged. Resigned.
"She? Bang?" My Jakarta friend asked. "You mean
what, Max?" "Everything." Yes, Max had declined
fast. It's what we don't talk about We hang
about, blind to all this, the whole shebang.