“As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times.” Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, p. 85.
* * *
As she knelt by her, feeling with her palm the wet, burning forehead, she prayed a thousand times. At first she prayed for the old woman to get better, to wake groggy and confused, demanding green tea with lemon and the Sunday crossword puzzle.
Over time, her prayers became more discrete. An hour of sleep without the wracking pains that sent the woman’s knobby fingers, with their strangely beautiful shaped nails, clutching the railing of the hospital bed. An hour without the pitiful moans and whimpers, the subterranean growl of failing organs. An hour without the indignity of being rolled this way and that so that others, strangers with strong, capable hands, could inspect, wipe, apply cream, as if to an infant.
In the final days, Mother Morphine presiding, Kaylin’s prayers branched in other directions. That the hospice literature was correct, that death in this manner–essentially by dehydration–was painless. That the very ill felt no hunger, in the end. That it was a kindness to let them sink into sleep, not to force them to take liquids or soft foods, which their bodies, already preparing, shrunk from like poison.
And finally, because the waiting was unendurable, because it was surely impossible for a person to survive four full days without a drop of water, because the reality of it made her question all reassurances, because what happens to the sinking flesh, hung on the bone structure of the face like clothes on hangers, is a slow and silent terror, for all of these reasons Kaylin wished in the end only for death. And one morning it came for the woman, simply, without fanfare, as it had for the others.
“So where do they go?” Jack asked her later in the nurses’ lounge.
“Who?”
“The people you sit with. The old ladies. Heaven? Or do you think they’re … just gone?”
Kaylin looked up at him, but didn’t stop pushing the bits of lettuce around on her plate. She shrugged. “How would I know that?”
“No reason. Only, you’ve seen it more than most. The passing. The exit. Whatever you want to call it.”
She supposed that was true.
And … well, you’re different about it. Different from the others. You see Michelle get all bent out of shape each time. Carl jokes about it, but that’s a cover. But you, when you came in here just now your face was almost … serene. Like pictures of the saints in church.”
That made her giggle.
“Like you know something we don’t.”
Kaylin rolled her eyes and took a bite. “Well I don’t,” she said.
“Knowing. Believing. You must at least have an opinion?”
“No Jack, I really don’t.” But that wasn’t true. And she could tell he didn’t believe her.