Our Lord the Sick

Meditations in the Hospital

I’ve spent no small amount of time in hospitals of late, both near and far from my home. It’s not me who’s sick, but rather, an elderly relative whose time is approaching. I keep her company when others cannot, which usually means at night, often until very late and occasionally until dawn. In my time here I have had much occasion to think about a great many things in no particular order.

Hospitals vary quite a bit in quality, which one can gauge with roughly the same criteria as an area’s public schools, with the same metrics. The first hospital that admitted grandma (as I’ll call her) was very much a third-world institution, a harbinger of the future much like so many others of its type- haphazard, poorly run, understaffed with workers but stuffed with redundant administrators, and with no one offering a clear theory as to what was wrong with her. Treatments would change with the shifts. Her latest hospital, in the semi-rural area where we live, is much better. We are fortunate that the town has enough money to fund such a place and is far enough from the nearest urban dysfunction to remain largely independent of it.

I say ‘largely’ because she is housed across the hall from a ranting criminal brought in from the local prison. I don’t know the whole story, but at least once an hour he screams profanities out of his room, berating the nurses with racial slurs and threats. In a weird way I find it comforting; this awful man with all his threats, who was probably a reprobate his whole life, is now as helpless as a baby in a crib, at the mercy of the small women who attend him. Everyone gets rendered harmless at the end.

Grandma is not in good shape. Her physical health is failing and her mind is in and out. If you leave the room for even a moment she panics. If she’s not asleep when I leave she will be calling my phone by the time I get to the elevator. She prays but has forgotten much; I have to walk her through the Lord’s Prayer like I do with my young daughters. I read Psalms to her. She prefers 121, 23, and for some reason 21 (which concerns the bloody destruction of the bodily descendants of King David’s enemies at the hands of the Lord). Modesty demands I spare you the more prosaic indignities of a woman in her condition.

Grandma sleeps a good bit of the time and at those times I take the opportunity to read and attend to correspondence. When she is awake she makes constant demands, only some of which come from real needs. She will ask for things and forget she did so. I suspect that given her condition she simply feels a desperate, inchoate urge to exert control, to impose her will on something. I imagine Nietzsche, bedridden and mad, had a similar experience.

Unlike most people, I actually like hospitals. They’re quiet, orderly, and everything that happens within the walls takes place under the shadow of mortality. The majority of the people who enter will never leave. And yet, they are also places of joy, of loved ones getting good news, of successful surgeries and the revelation of false alarms. Two floors below us babies come into the world, as my own daughters did. Everything that happens anywhere has meaning, but here, one is constantly reminded of it.

At the same time though, there is something unnatural about a hospital that can never quite be elided. I think about this place a lot when I hike in the mountains. I touch the ancient, gnarled trees and the rocks worn smooth by the winds of millennia, I see the mossy ledges and slimy river-rocks where the crayfish hide, I hear the squirrels chittering and stumble upon the occasional black bear, chuffing at me for my impudence in disturbing his haunt. I try as hard as I can to burn the very texture of those experiences into my mind, should I love so long to end up here at the hospital, where everything is glass and metal and plastic, where the noises are beeps, hushed hallway conversations, and the indifferent televisions.

Some time ago I was hospitalized myself, the condition being life threatening at one point. I remember awakening one day to a commercial advertising a new season of the FX show Archer, which I liked. The nurses were laughing about something outside. It occurred to me that if I had died all of those things, and everything else besides, would still have happened. The world goes on without you. It’s humbling, but then the rest of your life happens, and such things are forgotten.

I write this even now in the hospital. This sentence comes while I stand in the hallway while the staff attends to grandma’s private needs. The rest comes in idle moments; I’ve been here since just after 4:00 and I don’t expect I’ll leave until at least midnight. I write better in straight shots, but I do what I can with the opportunities my life presents me.

If that sounded like casual resignation, it’s not. I genuinely wish I had more time to write, and given the chance to reflect here, I only wish I had it more. This isn’t the story of a nice “grandson” who prays and reads the Bible and selflessly sacrifices his time. It’s a tale of resentment. It’s the tale of a man faced with mortality and his thoughts still turning to anger at years of impositions. There’s a history, you see. Things haven’t always been nice between us. Others are home and I’m here; others sit at the bar down the road and socialize, while I attend a dying old woman. People are having fun on the internet while I sit here. I question my choices. I ask what might have happened if I’d made different decisions, some very fundamental. I want to be elsewhere, having a real conversation, not listening to repeated, muttered requests to elevate a bed one inch. But that’s not really true either. I want to be alone, just left alone to read and write. I type this while she’s still awake because I have to say it. She interrupts me to tell me to open the room’s bathroom door for no reason. I have to stop and do it. I just want to type; it’s like a horrible unscratchable itch not to be able to get words out, to be constantly interrupted, as children do, as students do… no one leaves you alone!

And then I catch myself. I feel guilty, as I should. She’s dying, as are our differences. Before too long, in the big picture, I’ll follow her to the grave, and all the works of my life, including my precious writings, will join me in the dust. For here we have no abiding city, but seek after one to come.

The Knights of St. John of Jerusalem were known more famously as the Hospitallers. They were men of war from proud houses, but doffed their armor to empty bedpans and tend the wounds even of their enemies in their hospitals. In their churches hung their unique crucifixes, with Jesus the Suffering Servant covered in lesions, his body wracked with illness. His diseases were not His own of course, but the burden of suffering mankind he took upon Himself. They called him Our Lord The Sick, and they called the sick their Lord, and tended to Him.

My own sickness is my pride. May the Lord who heals take this upon Himself, lift it from me. May the example of grandma, humbled at my side, breathlessly mouthing her half-remembered prayers in the final dreams of her life, serve as a guide, and may my work here, despite my ingratitude, serve in some small measure as penance. Blessed Virgin Mary and Ever-Glorious Lady Theorokos intercede for us both, and may Our Lord the Sick grant His mercy.