Just a job

Paria ©2008 Robert Sommers Photograph

I was at my local saloon last week, nursing my cranberry juice and a fistful of peanuts - well let's be honest, it's not really a saloon but a private service organization with antlers attached, and its civic mission is often obscured in a dull alcoholic fog. Anyways I was sitting there and struck up a conversation with a gal there who is gainfully employed as a hospice nurse. Being an extremely nosy person with an overactive need to know what makes things tick, I quizzed her about the insies and outsies of her profession.

She said that it had been a weird week- money was tight and her boss asked her to make sure that one of her patients hung in and stayed in her mortal coil through the next pay period, when maybe the mortgage on the place was due. Anyhow, the patient started choking early that day and my friend grabbed her and tossed her on the bed, whereupon her head kind of bounced in an unnatural fashion. There is a do not revive order in these care centers, so the nurse watched the clients due date well, expire. The client left this earthly firmament post haste. I didn't ask the nurse if she was in hot water with the boss over the lack of fundage and the clients unfortunate early termination. But I did ask her about the moral propriety of doing nothing and how she balanced her work rules that with the necessity to be uh, human. She didn't have a problem with it - that was her job. She was trained in CPR but could not administer it. She would lose her employment if she did.

Years ago I painted signs. I was taught by a 94 year old master sign painter from Alhambra, Les Gampp. Les would letter with me for an hour each morning, the ancient art of one stroke. We would also hit the heavy bag and speed bag, for he was a one time boxer and trainer. A vegetarian, he was quite a guy, walked across Japan to protest the Vietnam War in his day. Les called my ex and I up one day and asked if he could stay over at our house. We mistakenly left a window open and he got pneumonia. I visited him in the hospital shortly thereafter and he was literally tied to a machine with his mouth duct taped. He was grunting as loudly as he could when he saw me and I signaled to the nurse that he wanted to tell me something. She agreed to free one of his hands and handed me a sallow yellow stickie pad. In a scrawl, Les wrote - Cut Me Off - on the pad. 94 years old, a life well spent, and now my friend would be in a symbiotic dance with a brutal cold machine for the rest of his earthly term. I pleaded with the nurse to leave the room for a moment so that I could pull the plug and she threatened to have me removed and arrested for murder. I thought about untieing his hands so that he could do the job himself but couldn't follow through. Les spent the next two weeks in agony and then died.

I was left with a deep feeling of guilt, both for leaving the window open and for ultimately failing my friend. What kind of culture do we live in, when we are kept alive until the money runs out? Where is the dignity in living courtesy of the machine? I do not condemn the nurse, she is with these people every day, people that might not have families or that maybe have been conveniently disposed of. It is a really dirty, nasty job. I wouldn't want to be on either side of it...