by Wayne Rideout

Created on: July 13, 2008

Daybreak

The call from the agency came just as we were sitting down to eat supper. Usually they were very good about giving me plenty of notice when I was called to care for a patient, but this time, the woman on the other end of the telephone had obvious concern in her voice. "I don't want to inconvenience you," she said "but we have a kind of emergency. There is a young man in Goleta who is dying, and his grandparents who are keeping him can't do it any more. If you could go there right away, it would really help." She also said that the hospice was involved in the case. I assured her that I would take the assignment, then went to change into my hospital whites.

When I arrived at the one-story ranch home about an hour later, the grandparents met me. Worry and fatigue were etched into their faces. They were completely worn out. They introduced me to their grandson, in the sickroom. He was a handsome young man with reddish hair and beard, and a swollen belly that bespoke liver failure. The sweetish odor of his failing body filled the room, accompanied by the hum of the oxygen machine that fed the tube in his nose.
We dispensed with the usual patient care drill; there was no bath to give or therapy to attend to. We didn't even take a walk, like I did with most of my patients. We just sat and talked. It turned out we had some things in common. Both of us had been in the army, and spent time in West Germany. He couldn't talk for more than a few sentences at a time, because it tired him greatly. So I mostly just sat with him, and occasionally attended to his immediate needs. The night grew very long as I sat in the shadows of the darkened room, watching my charge take quick, panting breaths as he napped.
Along about three in the morning, as I helped him back to bed from the commode chair, his body became strangely limp. I laid him back in bed, as straight as I could, and realized that he would not get up again. It is never a comfortable feeling to give the news of a death to relatives, but that became my duty. I woke up the grandfather, and said simply "He's gone." He accompanied me to the sickroom to view the body, and said cryptically, "He was a good boy. He never hurt anyone but himself."
I called the hospice, and found to my amazement that there really are people who will come to the house at three-thirty in the morning to help people in grief. The two hospice women were wonderful; we finally washed the body, and arranged him on clean sheets so that his grandparents could say goodbye. We gathered in the sick room with the departed, and the hospice women talked softly and gently with the grandparents who finally had some sense of resolution. About five-thirty in the morning, I could do no more, and took my leave. As I stepped onto the front porch, I saw in the eastern sky the rosy tinge that foretold sunrise, a thought that seemed unaccountably comforting at that moment.

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