all the things she wanted to say...

All the things she wanted to say...

Walking toward the hospital that Sunday last December, it struck me that this was a time when southern belles had gone extinct; when Hope had sunken underneath the last bough of a wide Magnolia tree that lived in a memory, appearing never to lift its bright eyes heavenward again.

But she didn’t know that. She had spent the entire of her life waiting. Waiting to be noticed; waiting not to bother anyone; waiting to get well; waiting for a chance to voice the words that lay still and unbidden on the beaches of her still sharp mind. Somehow she’d missed out. Somehow life had managed to slide invisibly through her tiny, aging fingers. She always hoped, but it lived quietly in her now. She lay in a hospital bed, awake, fully conscious, but unable to say a word, frustrated by the same machine that kept her alive. She had been in the hospital many times before, but somehow this time it felt different. And there was an ineffable vibe that traveled between my sisters and I that this stay, this hospital stay, might be the one that didn’t allow her to come home.

The nurses moved silently in and out of her room throughout the long hours. Her throat hurt terribly. She wanted a drink of water. She wanted her lipstick. She could stand her hair tumbled untidily across the pillow, if she could just put on her lipstick. The nurses sometimes patted her arm a bit and called her “hon” or “sweetie,” but that was all. She was nearly 80 years old now, but didn’t look it. Her hair was still dark and softly curled with only an occasional few gray strands. She was inherently modest, but as the years passed when people noticed its unchanged color, she seemed inwardly pleased to say that she had never colored it.

Scattered lines had formed themselves here and there around her green eyes. You could have taken them straight out of the photograph of my Grandmother that sat on top of the china hutch in my grandfather’s old house and put them in her daughter Katherine’s face. They were the color of melon with flecks of light in them. Years of being unable to articulate at will just for the simple reason of having no one to listen, had caused the effect of a fullness of her heart. With no words able to pass her lips, her thoughts seemed to come spilling over the threshold of her eyes, having more expression in one glance; more to say in a look, than any of the people who filtered in and out of the hospital room. Sometimes people noticed, but mostly they didn’t since they were so hurried, interested in their own pursuits that the beautiful, southern-belle green eyes began to languish, despite the hope they tucked safely behind them.

There are still postage-stamp sized patches of palmetto-forested land on the Florida map, but back when she was born the thick, green sticky foliage was just everywhere. In 1931 Katherine Louise or “Kitty-Lou” began her life in the sunshine. She played on the shores of Sunset Beach in Tarpon Springs, Florida with her baby brother and sister and ate tangerines fresh from the tree in their backyard. In the summer, she slept on a cot on the jalousie-window porch when nights were too warm for her bedroom. She was a Florida-born girl who said “yes, ma’am,” always had an embroidered handkerchief in her pocketbook and would never, ever, go out without her lipstick.

I remembered all of that as we walked into her room in the Intensive Care Unit of the James A. Haley Veteran’s Hospital in Tampa, Florida. Her years in the Air Force were far behind her now, but over the years the Veteran’s Administration Hospital had become something of a safe haven. As we walked inside, the place felt sad and sick to us. This was a place for the world-weary,worn-out folk who had given much, but received thanks that amounted only to a government stipend and a barely noticeable nod to their sacrifice.

My sister and I tried on our brightest faces trying not to think of the unbridled bacteria or shame that we felt at having not having seen her more often. We made huge smiles as we approached her room, hoping she wouldn’t notice our concerned discomfort.

“Aunt Katherine? We’re back.” Her eyes quickly found us, closed appreciatively and opened again, her way to say hello, acknowledging our arrival to see her. Her face couldn’t smile with all the medical equipment, but her eyes did it for her.

“I know you aren’t very comfortable. Would you like some lotion on your arms and hands?” I said. A small nod from her told me she would. My sister Lu reached for a gift bag left by a veteran’s appreciation group on the hospital chair.

“Oh look!” she said. Her feigned excitement was nothing short of what could have been a small child’s visit with Santa it was so believable. She began to pull out lotion, perfume, a military commemorative watch, a comb, a small Bible and finally, a tube of lipstick. Lu held it up for her to see it.

“Brand spanking new Aunt Katherine. Ooh, such nice colors too.”

It was a Clinique, double-sided tube: light pink on one side, dark pink on the other. Katherine’s eyes went from being tired to being interested.

“Do you want to see it on? “ Lu asked her. Another small motion of her eyes that told us that she would.

“Okay, here goes.” My beautiful sister Lu, who wore next to no make up on her own face, applied the dark pink lipstick that she wouldn’t wear in a million years on her lips for display.

“There,” she said pressing her top and bottom lips together with a big smile. “Do you like the color?” But Lu’s smile quickly fell. Something wasn’t right. Aunt Katherine was still looking for something. I scrambled for a pen and found a piece of paper.

“If I hold this for you, can you write it?” Her eyes were emphatic, so I held the paper on top of a book someone had left her about angels. When I placed the pen in her right hand and she began to write,I read what she had written, saying out loud as she wrote it: “My lips.”

“Yours?” Lu said, kindly, but slightly puzzled.“Oh, I don’t know Aunt Katherine.” Clearly Katherine's top lip was completely obscured with the medical tape that held a the ventilator tube in place. “I’ll ask the nurse,” I said then, and headed toward the nursing station working desk. The nurse assigned to my Aunt on this day was young and nice and early in her nursing career.

“Sure,” she said, cheerfully. “Whatever makes her feel better.”

It wasn’t my lipstick, nor my lips, but I was somehow elated. I nearly trotted back to her room. “It’s just fine,” I said. “I’ll put it on you right now.” She moved her hand. She wanted the pen. She wrote and I read out-loud, “dark on top. Light on the bottom.” Lu and I were both smiling then. “Okay, Aunt Katherine. I’ve got that.” And leaning over her bed, I applied as best I could the pink lipstick that she waited for. I could not imagine how, in this misery of being in an ICU bed for more than a month with a tube down her throat and a tube up her nose, how she wanted this, but she did. She tried to purse her lips to help me and her eyes closed with some kind of sad relief that at least, with her still-dark, tumbled, unkempt hair and a painful tube from her mouth and nose, she was proper again in her lipstick. Some small portion of her lady-like dignity had been restored. We had applied her lipstick. Some small place in the enormous world had become right again.

“Tomorrow,” I told my sister, “we will put her lipstick on again and comb her hair. And I am bringing a picture of her all gussied up with her lipstick on, so they can see what she really looks like.”

My sister Lu nodded in agreement and we kissed our Aunt's forehead to tell her goodbye as if to turn then after that and leave, but her tiny hands began fluttering again. She wanted the pen. She wanted us to stay. So as I held the angel book again waiting for her to say on this piece of paper what she needed to say, I imagined a request like, “please move my pillow to the left” or “could you push the call button for the nurse,” but Katherine began to spill across the pages a litany of names of doctors who had taken care of her over the years, what course her treatment had taken and where. The details that anyone should have long forgotten by now were all remembered easily on paper.“…breast cancer, treatment options, my decision…doctors said I made best decision… it was right.”

“Yes, Aunt Katherine. You did make the right choices. Why look! You are here. There is no cancer now. You did the right thing.”

I said the words as though they were the very gospel and no one in their right mind would ever believe anything but just those words.

Once Katherine found she could communicate by writing, she asked for book, paper and pen every visit. It started small. Things like, “What’s wrong with me? How can I fix it?” I could not find it in my cache of positivisms for a hospital patient, much less the lady who lay in this bed, my very first pen pal when I was seven years old, to tell her that it was unlikely that she would leave here any time soon.

“How about television Aunt Katherine? Would you like for me to turn it on?”

“Not too loud.” And then, a new train of thought, “When I was in Air Force Mama and Daddy sent me coat. They always asked me what needed...sent money for it too. They always tried...things just didn’t work out.”

The matter-of-fact acknowledgement, so simply stated, asked the question in her mind that she’d never said, but always wondered. And we’d wondered too why things had not been different for this woman of a now gone-by era.

Only five days after I arrived, I had to go back up North. Christmas was coming and this was my year to be at the house of my in-laws. I left her haltingly and afraid I’d not see her again. But she left me with thoughts of the all the different ways that bravery can show itself; that even in the perceived weakness of disease or of mental frailty that there is present in some this core toughness; stoic, not happy at the circumstance, but a dogged determination to endure it and move forward.

I watched all that in her, being with her in this confined place in my small way. And sitting in her room, was so reminded that while all the world had moved along…growing up, taking jobs, getting married, having babies, she had stayed the same. It tripped the switch in my brain for memory. Aunt Katherine when I was a child, then at weddings and visiting new babies in the hospital. She had been constant as we all changed. I looked at her and remembered life with my family the way it used to be in its perfection, forgiving its imperfection. Here, in this room, we had come together again to support her; to somehow rescue her from the indignities of being a long-time patient. It was a sweet reunification, reminding us of all that we learned so surely and eloquently, yet in ways unspoken, as children. We were solidly together. We were bound. And for a moment I could live in the feeling of what once was; the steadfast commonality that held us as a family, always. It was Christmas again and sitting by Katherine's bedside with my sister nearby, sometimes in those moments it almost felt like things were okay again, in the way of being near one another, though we now live so taken far from one another. The togetherness felt satisfying, full-circle, and right.

That feeling settled in comfortably in those days that I was there, finding a place somewhere in the space in my head between the moss-covered oaks of my real home and the snow of my current one. Florida offered the solace of memory and the sun; the place where I had spent most of my life.

I knew it was time for us to go. My sister Lu reminded me quietly that we were picking up her husband from the airport soon. On the ride there we were silent and I thought how life is so casual as it casts the dark of what is beyond the next corner. Some of us hide, covering our heads with figurative arms of protection and retreat. Some fight back by looking for any other brightness to shame the darkness away. But some, the quiet, patient ones who still carry their hope safely tucked behind their eyes, they just wait. They just keep moving forward. And they continue to do the things they need to do to press on. They press on without drama and with diligence.

The ventilator made its quiet sounds, rhythmic, constant. The heart monitor occasionally made alarm sounds and Katherine’s forehead wrinkled. I read easily the question in her eyes, “am I okay?” causing me to remember again how good it was to have someone who loved you nearby to tell you small, sweet lies about your condition, and how ready you are to believe them.

“It’s okay Aunt Katherine. They are watching everything. You are okay. Just rest now.”

I passed my hand gently over her forehead. Her eyes closed again resigned for the moment, but vigilant, ready for whatever came next in moments or weeks. In that quiet show of continuance by an elderly woman in a hospital bed, I was struck with the idea of heroes and bravery. I had no words to explain the complexity of how it made me feel to stand there, helpless, and watch her go through this. For her, this was simply one more experience to bear on her own. Despite our steady, watchful presence, it was the way she had borne things her whole life. I barely understood how she had done it, but she had, always with a smile, always with an expectation that things were bound to get better soon. We said our goodbyes and left that world-weary place, but not before Hope stepped out again for me, one more time to look heavenward…and it was carried in the eyes of a somewhat broken, but entirely lovely southern belle.

Valerie Kennedy, January 10, 2008