Example Essay

Most of the time, a resident gives warning signs, little clues, of their soon approaching death. There are the verbal, often loud, statements to Jesus, asking why he hasn't taken them. There is the pill-refusing, a backwards kind of suicide, as I think of it. Perhaps it's the heart that doesn't sound quite right through the stethoscope, or the fluctuating blood pressures. Maybe even the urine has a different odor. Most of the time, though, there is simply an aura around that person, a sort of pheromone alerting those around them that they will soon be leaving. Sometimes, sometimes, there is the unexpected, the deaths walked into blindfolded. The times, as staff, we leave a resident who is just fine and return to find them struggling for their lives.

A few weeks ago, I found a resident of mine dying in his own bodily fluids, snoring loudly because his soft palate had collapsed, blood oozing from his mouth, unresponsive and naked. I prepared to send him to the hospital after ordering my CNAs to clean him up and get him ready, called the ambulance STAT, gathered a packet of information for the ER nurses and a half an hour later I was back to the normal routine of the job. As though nothing had happened, arranging and organizing the room as though the gurney was never there, making the bed as though he had never laid in it. Pretending and smiling so that the remaining eighteen believed they were the only ones in my thoughts. He died two days later, never having regained consciousness. An intracerebral hemorrhage. He hadn't really had a chance, but he waited long enough for his wife to come to him.

Before that, on a day where I was alone for the last few hours of my shift, I knocked on the shower door looking for the resident who had gone in about an hour before. I had his 4:00 meds for him and I remember thinking it unusual that he wasn't yet back in his room. His clothes were laid out, waiting for him, but he hadn't returned. So, I was at the door, knocking without response. My gut dropped and I could feel the hairs raise on my neck. Knowing something wasn't right. I opened the door, calling out his name, hearing the rushing water spattering on the tiles. And there he was. Sitting sideways on the shower chair, slumped backwards, shoulders resting on the shower wall. During whatever event he'd endured, a massive heart attack probably, he'd vomited, as they so often do, and it laid precariously on his chest. He was breathing, although extremely gray in color, and it was that rattling sound. The sound a human makes when they are technically dead but their body is just alive enough to work off base instinct. I didn't send him to the hospital. He had a no resuscitation code. He was cleaned, clothed and put in bed to wait for enough doses of Morphine to help him pass.

Then, before even that, there was the old-time nurse. I'd left her sitting at a dining room table, a cup of hot coffee warming her hands, her snarky smile watching me as I left. I'd gone to grab her a sweater from her closet, a habitually cold resident who preferred to wander the halls with many layers. I walked back in and found her sitting on the couch, her cup broken on the floor and the coffee spilled. She was bent over, her head between her knees, bright red blood between her feet. She attempted to apologize when she vomited again, more blood. Then she looked up at me, a woman in her late eighties who didn't want anyone touching her to help her, a woman who refused her medications because she was just fine, looked at me and asked for the ambulance. I'm dying, she said, and she was right. She died that same day, only hours after she arrived at the hospital.

Death, and dying, is a part of my job. People ask me, how do you do it? How are you not depressed? How can you keep walking into a building where you've seen so much? There is really only one, entirely morbid, answer for those questions. You get used to it. Oh, sometimes, when I walk into the shower room I have an image of that man lying in the chair. Or, while I'm eating lunch in the dining room, my eyes will manage their way to that spot where the blood once was. Sometimes my husband will snore in a way that makes that man's face swim in front of my eyes. But, you get used to it. You get used to the little hauntings, the little ghosts that have to be carried. After the funeral, after the belongings have been parted with, after the family has mourned, who else is going to carry them?