Otherwise Engaged

"And have I shown you my ring?"   I find the sunlight streaming through the windows and I aim my diamond straight at it, let brilliant little reflections sparkle for just us.    Shy rainbows appear randomly on the walls all around the square room.   The bed opposite her is empty.  It is Valentine's Day 1999.  I became engaged the night before.  I am a nursing student and I have to spend my day, my first day of promised matrimony otherwise engaged.    I am fulfilling some of my zillion hours of required clinical training at a hospital near the beach, on a perfect Sunday.   My patient, old and riddled with cancer was subdued when I came in at seven o'clock this morning, but my mood has lifted her spirits.  I'm all about the ring on my finger.  I gush endlessly.  

The bath I gave her has breathed life into her and she talks to me about places she lived,  houses, parrots, vacations she took long ago and about swimming in the ocean.  I feel close to her.  I pat her hand, let my fingers circle her frail wrist.   I gaze at my ring and I marvel at how it looks against her pale, sagging, speckled skin.   I like holding her hand.   I don't feel like letting go.  When her son comes in, she livens up further still.  

He seemed amazed to recognize his mother in the bag of bones lying on the bed.  The woman I'd shown my newly acquired engagement ring to over and over, seemed to be nearly born again.  

I leave them be.  I go spend some quality time with my ring.  "Have you seen this?".  I flaunt it to the nurses at the Nurse's Station.  A few roll their eyes, but not before I say again, "Take a look at this!!", as I shove it in front of their computer screens.  It looks strange on my familiar hand.   I'm fooling around; boasting, bragging.  I'm happy.   I want to make a nuisance of myself and conveniently enough for me, I'm an expert at it.  

It is a strange thing when someone dies.  

The room was quiet when I entered it again.  Sunlight no longer struck my diamond.  Rainbows were not dancing on the walls.  She'd stopped breathing.  I'd stop asking her if she wanted to see my ring and my finger stayed in line with the other ringless, less boastful fingers on my hand, which hung at my side.

I called her son.  He seemed angry with me.  It was sort of unexpected, I guess.   She had been terminally ill, though on this particular day, she'd seemed so extremely alive and now she was gone.   He wanted to blame me and so I let him.  But, when he came back to her room, where I waited for him with my ringed finger tucked into the pocket of my nurse's jacket, he hugged me and he cried.  For this I was ill prepared.

To be honest, I felt unworthy of hugging him back.  Who was I?  Just a person who'd given his mother her medications and her last bath and forced a ring into her face too many times for anyone healthy or not, in one day.  

She was my first patient to die while I was her nurse.

Things I thought while attending to the newly dead;

What if she isn't really dead?

Can she hear me?

If she can't hear me, can she read my mind?

Was she scared?

Is there a God?

Did she go to heaven or  H E double toothpicks?

What did I do wrong?

Why did this have to happen today?

Does her son blame me?

Did she think my ring was pretty?

How come I can still feel her?

And every time anyone died while I was their nurse from that day forward, I felt mostly the same things.

Are they really dead?

Is there a God?

How come I can still feel you?