Sharing Life with Another A Memoir of a Social Worker

It was easy to laugh to myself about being a crazed dervish man from another time, here now, waiting and helping and being with Hester. In less than three years I have already been with dozens of dying. My work: The Creator’s work given to me. My choice to do this for Creator since Life, I reckon, is Me, and Me is Life, and Hester, is also a part of That. I am going to help dispose of what is left of her body when she no longer breathes in the life force. What do I know that she doesn’t? All my praying and studying and meditating makes me someone much different from who she is. But we are all part of the One, brought here together, to this place, this nursing home, so the staff can do something for her: To help her along. I still wonder if anyone really needs to be helped along in their dying. Oh yes—according to the “Tibetan Book of Living and Dying” there is work to be done to help the dying, Maybe it’s enough: Just being with her and supporting her, praying for her, and letting her know she won’t be alone. “You won’t be alone,” are the words that came out of me today. How will I know when she is about to die? What if I’m at home? The staff can call me if they have a feel for her last hour, her last moments. Sometimes we know. I’ve known. Frequently, the staff gets sensitive to that moment. We tell one another. It gets passed around so those who care can go in the room and spend a few last sacred moments with someone they worked with, helped along, in and out of bed, administered medication, changed dressings, spoon fed, cleaned up all fluids that come out of a sick, dying person. The thoughts of a madman: I’m sitting on her bed imagining doing like I’ve seen junkies do, tying off my arm and melting down heroin. Taking a syringe and watch the white-grey liquid going up into it. Clenching my fist so a nice vein pops up real good. Then shooting up as she pumps the morphine into her vein and we nod off together. I think of the two bottles of vodka in my office desk that I took out of Hester’s dresser after a nurse told me about them. Hester told me to take them. She said they weren’t hers but belonged to a friend. What am I supposed to believe? “Are you going through any alcohol withdrawal, do you need these bottles close to you?” She looks at me surprised and denies alcohol was the problem, as she brings two fingers to her mouth mimicking taking a puff of a cigarette. She’s has done her share of drinking. Her good friend, Jo Ann, comes to see her regularly to give Hester a bath. Only two weeks ago, Hester was getting into Jo Ann’s pick-up and going back to her apartment to complete some things there. Jo Ann tells me Hester really enjoyed her vodka, even put some in coffee in the morning to get her day going. Jo Ann, who knows Hester for two years, tells me that Hester owes nothing to life: She has lived it fully. My thoughts are on Hester’s bottles off and on, wondering if her friend, if there really is a friend, doesn’t come for the bottles, should I indulge myself and drink up the innocent-looking throat-burning liquid in commemoration to Hester after she dies. Odd thinking this way. Heroin and vodka. It’s never been my way, but never have I felt this way about someone. Will she be the last dying person I care for in the nursing home? Maybe quit after this is over with Hester, and agree with myself that this has been enough: I’ve done the work given to me; enough is enough, let me get on with other work that is fun. Let me have another lighter way to go for the remainder of my workdays. It’s impossible to keep track how many times I’ve had this thought. Six decades of life, more than half of them as a social worker. What more is there for me to do? How many lives must I help along the way, in trying to ease their path? Have I been cheating, not suffering as much as the many I have helped? Is this, some kind of guilt or redemption trip my life has been on, atoning for known and unknown malevolence in this life of mine. My life, though, has been mostly benevolent living being brought to do the work of a helper. One day a few years ago, while riding to work to see an abused, emotionally disturbed adolescent girl I had worked with for a couple of years, a realization came to me: My life was like a modern day shaman, going from home to home, town to town, program to program, agency to agency, ministering in the guise of a social worker. Odd, thinking of all the time spent berating myself for not making more money, not being something else, not being successful, while all along, doing the Great Work. Who knew? No one told me when I began on this path there was even a path⎯that it would be my Life’s Path. It was the Great Work, not a business, with all the scheming and conniving. I used to think that business was the hardball league, one I didn’t fit into. It always made more sense, slow pitching, not having to try and compete or get over on someone as in a business arrangement. Traveling the shaman path, trying to figure out how to make someone else’s life trip less traumatic, easing pain, softening the burdens, but accepting there may never be solutions. I understood that from my own life. Life is relentless, constantly coming at us. We work through it as part of the trip⎯it is the life. As a middle-aged retarded man told me, “Life is life.” Through his small vision of life there was a bit of simple, but grand wisdom. There is no getting away from it.