If I wake up in the middle of the night, that’s what time it will be, give or take 15 minutes: 4 a.m. No matter what the season, it’s dark at that time of night, it’s lonely, even the cats are snoring. If a window is open, I can hear if an owl, a coyote or, rarely, a whippoorwill or chuck-will’s-widow is crying into the night. If it’s a warm autumn night, I can hear if passing whitetail bucks grunt or click while tracking does.
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“We should have let him die,” he said. “It would have saved us time and money.”
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Wind scatters leaves as I approach the house.
The geranium he hung lies on the floor.
The same porch board’s loose. The coir mat sheds.
I fumble for the key and push at the door
that opens to guitar amps, music books
and cardboard boxes left by the man
who asked me not to touch his clothes
or toss the newspapers till he came home
from the hospital, sorted through the stuff
once and for all to organize his life.
Gabriel Foster
“If my father dies, you’re going down with him.”
The words pierced the air, and suddenly there was silence.
I hadn’t noticed Frank’s son at first. He’d been pacing in the back of the family group gathered in our ICU waiting room. Now, up close, I could appreciate how large and intimidating he was. And I’d just had the thankless job of telling him, along with the rest of his family, a shocking, completely unexpected truth: Frank wasn’t dying, he was already dead.
Michael Leach
About the artist:
MIchael Leach currently works as a data and quality specialist in a hospital setting. He is also a published researcher, writer, poet and photographer with special interests in health and history. His creative work has been published in The Medical Journal of Australia, Medical Humanities, The Galway Review and Pulse–voices from the heart of medicine. Michael creates visual images in order to capture and share the poignancy and beauty that he perceives in everyday life. He resides in Central Victoria, Australia.
About the artwork:
“This photo, taken from the window of my office at a regional hospital, shows the darkness of the day my eighty-nine-year-old grandpa passed, the old hospital in which he spent his final days and the bright light he always radiated. It was a cold winter’s morning when a nurse called my office to convey urgent news: Grandpa was dying at my workplace’s hospice. I dropped everything and rushed
The Day Grandpa Passed Read More »
Marilyn Barton
“Nursing students needed to work in the University Hospital, good pay, orientation.”
As a rising nursing-school senior in the 1970s, I naïvely applied for the job above without getting the full details. No one mentioned that I’d be working in a psychiatric unit housing twenty-five aggressive, catatonic or schizophrenic patients, many of whom had been locked away for years.
The entrance sign, which should have read “Locked Psych/Med/Surg Unit,” said simply “5 East.”
On my first evening shift, I overheard two nurses discussing how to monitor a new patient, transferred from the federal psych facility across town.
“Can we get the student to do it?” said one.
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