Like the child's game,"I am thinking of a color"
I am remembering one. I won't make you guess.
The color is florescent, the 24-hour light that floods
a thousand hospital hallways as if to punish the
horizontal people made to gaze at it as they wait.
I am thinking of a place. It is a nursing station, a floor
of the first hospital I led in 1977. A current of nurses,
capped like ocean waves, swell when doctors enter,
ebb when they depart. I am thinking of a person,
a lanky nurse, my height, named Marian. Ten years
my senior, she is now unable to breathe without
a machine. I am thinking of the many hallways we
walked and the many meetings we attended together
when we lived more in hospitals than in our homes.
Those were the days when we were caregivers
surrounded by caregivers. Those were the days
when places so frightening to so many were home
for the two of us. We roamed operating rooms
near unconscious patients unable to breathe
without machines. We traveled hospital floors in
the manner of landowners surveying our fields.
We inhabited E.Rs. full of frightened patients
as fearless as veteran battlefield captains.
We took care of the people who take care of people.
Hospitals were our homes for so long that it's
difficult to think of them as foreign, hard to
know that we are no longer a part of the places
we that were "homes" for decades.
Deadre has
entered the same hospital to work on the same
ICU for more than thirty years. Soon, she will
walk out the door for the last time. She will
leave behind thousands of patients whose
skin has felt her healing hands but whose minds
have no recollection of her.
In her thirty years,
Martha has smiled at tens of thousands of people
from her "home" at the front desk of a large hospital.
In a couple more years, she will leave that home,
never to return in the same way. The jobs we live
each day, the places where we are welcomed
by familiar faces, will one day be occupied by people
who never knew we were there. Gladly, the air has its
own memory. The light recalls the time of our being.
I am thinking of a place. No blueprint can shape it.
No florescence can light it. No security cameras or
swipe card can record its existence.
The House of Memory keeps every snapshot of our lives.
Their walls hold the shadow & light of the caregiver's home.
-Erie Chapman
