Most of my workdays involve a series of stops to patient homes for visits that typically take an hour each. I am armed with a phone, a tablet, a car/office, my wits, and whatever I thought to pack in my cooler. It is truly a dream job; a slice of chaos driven by a loosely based schedule, fueled by coffee and creativity, and firmly based in the service of others with a heavy emphasis on medical care.
I am a hospice nurse. I spend my days talking to people about end of life and a lot of time alone with my thoughts. I also do a fair amount of bathing, tending wounds, changing briefs, and making sure people are pooping properly.
The first thing people usually say is, “it takes a special person…” and my response is always “yes, it does- and it also takes a special person to take my McOrder, hand the van in front of me the right number of Happy Meals and Nuggets, give correct change, pour a drink at the same time, and have that bag dangling for me before I starve to death. I say, THAT tender soul is underpaid, treated like trash by customers and corporate, and NEVER gets told they are special”. As it turns out, now they are being McReplaced by AI. I’m mad about it, but I couldn’t do their job and I don’t know why in the civil service anyone would even want to do their job. But they are special people; at least the ones who are still people. The kids who work for the Cows selling Chikin do get told they are special, but probably not often enough. And they probably don’t get paid enough.
I also couldn’t do Kurt’s job. I can’t even tell you Kurt’s job title but I promise you it’s a whole lot less impressive sounding that what he did. Kurt worked at my last job and was the kind of guy who did it really well and made everyone else’s job go more smoothly by doing so. He made sure everyone had all the medications they needed and also all the other supplies they needed to give the medication. He didn’t get the pharmacists pay or the nurse’s pay, he probably didn’t even get the Tech’s pay but, good-gotdang he deserved it. The best thing about Kurt was that he never made me feel dumb about not knowing how to do all the things. Nurses don’t typically have to do spreadsheets, so on the day that suddenly we were expected to know how to do spreadsheets, he showed me how. “You’re not dumb, you’ve just never been taught” That’s the kindest thing a coworker ever said to me.
So my days involve taking care of people in various stages of illness, loving their families and helping make their jobs a little easier, living in my car and charting endlessly on my tablet and talking on my phone. I’ve been doing my job as if it’s just a job and am beginning to think maybe it’s more than that. It’s a lifestyle. We in medical care are a bit of a cult. Those of us in death work are a niche cult. We walk people through grief and sometimes we tell them what to do and how to do it and provide space for them to do it… but we- I, don’t do it.
So now here I am growing. Grieving. Grieving like it’s my job, because it is.
I am grieving that I don’t have the hard skills to do a spreadsheet. Or a blog. Or an instagram post. Or make a decent grilled cheese. I don’t have the patience to do a puzzle. I don’t have the bandwidth to write an obituary for my dog.
For the moment, I guess I’m just grieving by writing this post. I’ll get distracted and follow all the rabbit trails down this web. Maybe I’ll cry just a little. That is sometimes a part of grieving. And right now I’m doing it like it is my job- in my car, alone, with a cooler and a trunk full of adult diapers.
