Us

by Michael Kimball

  How We Talked with Our Eyes and Our Hands

  I woke up and she had woken up too. She had opened her eyes up, but she couldn’t turn her head to look at me in the other hospital bed. I got up and went around to the end of her hospital bed so that she could see me too.

  My wife looked so much brighter with her eyes open. She looked so much more alive when she was looking back at me. I held onto her feet with my hands and she pushed her toes against them. She must have been smiling under that oxygen mask, but I didn’t know what to say to her, and she couldn’t talk again yet.

  But we talked with our eyes and our hands. She lifted some of her fingers up enough so that it felt as if she were reaching for me. I walked over to the side of her hospital bed and closer to her arms. I lifted her arms up for her and put myself in them. I put my hands and my arms around her too.

  I only lifted myself back up away from her so that we could look at each other again. She looked at me and then looked down her face at the oxygen mask. I thought that she wanted to say something to me so I lifted the oxygen mask up and pulled it up over her head, but she just wanted to breathe with her nose and her mouth and her lungs. But I was afraid that she might stop breathing deep enough into herself without the machine, so I pushed the button that called the doctors and the nurses into her hospital room.

  They asked my wife who she was and where she was and what day and month and year it was. My wife knew her name, that she was in a hospital, and the year that she was living in. But she didn’t know the day and she thought that it was the month before the one that we were living in.

  They looked into her eyes and her ears with a tiny flashlight. They asked her to breathe in, but she couldn’t get much air into her lungs. It was enough to keep her alive.

  They asked her to move her fingers and her toes and she did. But she couldn’t lift her arms and her legs up off her hospital bed. She couldn’t lift her head up off the pillow.

  They wanted to see if she could drink or swallow, but she couldn’t hold onto the cup of water or the pill that was supposed to keep her from having any more seizures. A nurse set the pill on my wife’s tongue and tipped some water from the cup into her mouth so that she could swallow it. Another nurse brought in a tray of soft food to see what else my wife could eat.

  They fed her spoonfuls of chicken broth, oatmeal, and jello. They shook little clumps of ice chips into her mouth from a plastic cup and they put a straw into a little bottle of apple juice and the straw into her mouth to see if she could draw the apple juice out of the bottle. My wife could eat and drink enough that they could unhook the IVs and pull her tubes out, but somebody else was going to have to feed her and she needed to move more than she could then before we could go back home again.

  The Small Ways that She Got Better

  I still had to move her arms and her legs for her so that they would still work when she could move them again for herself. I had to hold onto the cup of water or the bottle of apple juice, but she could put the straw into her mouth so that she could drink. She could hold onto a spoon, but she couldn’t move it to her mouth without spilling the food.

  The spoon trembled in my hand too. We were both afraid of her dying.

  There were so many small ways that my wife started to get better than she had been. She moved from eating soft food to solid food and to going to the bathroom inside the bathroom instead of into a bed pan or through tubes. She started to smile with both sides of her mouth and then with her whole face. She started to move all her fingers and both her thumbs. She could lift her arms up and reach her hands out and touch me with them.

  She could sit up in bed again and then she could get out of her hospital bed. She couldn’t stand up with just her legs, but she could hold herself up with her arms. She could stand up with her walker before she could walk again, and then she could walk back and forth between her hospital bed and the bathroom, and then between the nurse’s station and her hospital room, and then all the way around the floor of the hospital. She could walk and eat and breathe so much that they told us that she was better enough to go back home and try to do those things there.

  How We Got Out of the Hospital

  There weren’t any other tests or procedures for them to put her through. There wasn’t anything else for us to do but for us to go back home and try to keep on living there. The nurse handed me the clipboard so that I would sign the forms to check my wife out of the hospital. My wife could hold onto the pen and move her hand, but she couldn’t write her name out right anymore.

  I handed the clipboard with the signed forms on it back to the nurse so that we could go back home. I had already packed our two suitcases back up with our clothes and the other things that I had brought to the hospital from our home. I had everything else from the hospital that we needed to go back home too—my wife, her walker, her prescriptions, and the directions for her home care.

  One of the hospital workers rolled a wheelchair into her hospital room and helped my wife to sit down in it. He pushed my wife and her wheelchair out of her hospital room, down the hallway, onto and off of the elevator, across the hospital lobby, and out of the hospital.

  We got outside of the hospital and I put the walker down in front of my wife so that she could walk with it. She pushed herself up out of the wheelchair and pulled herself forward with the handles of the walker. The hospital worker backed the wheelchair away from my wife and went back inside the hospital. There wasn’t going to be anybody else to help us anymore.

  My wife walked with the walker and with little steps and I walked beside her with them too. Our lives moved slower then than they ever had before, but we kept going.

  We got out to our car and I set our two suitcases down and opened the car door up for her. I stood in front of her and held her up under her arms while she turned around so that she could sit down in the car’s front seat. I moved the walker away from her, bent down over her, lifted her legs up under her knees, and slid her legs and her feet into our car with the rest of her body. I pulled the seatbelt out over her shoulder, across her lap, and buckled her in.

  I closed her car door and opened the car’s trunk. I put our two suitcases and the walker into the trunk and then I got into our car too. I started the engine of our car up, but I was afraid to drive us away from the hospital. I was afraid that she might stop breathing again and that we would need other people to help us keep her alive again. But I was afraid to turn the engine off too. Our car had kept her alive before.

  I backed our car out of its parking spot in the hospital parking lot, put it in drive, and drove us back home. I opened her car door, the screen door, and the back door up. I left the engine of our car on until I got her back inside our house. I turned all the lights on inside our house and held all the doors open so that she had enough room to walk through them with her walker.

  I would have carried her inside if I could have lifted her up, but I was too old and too tired. We just wanted to go back to bed and back to sleep together so that we could wake up again and it would be morning at home again. But neither one of us could sleep much that night. Our bed seemed to be shaking again. We were both too afraid that one of us might not wake up.

  PART TWO

  Some of the People I Have Known Who Have Died

  There are a lot of people who I think of lying in a hospital bed, in their bed at home, in their bed at the nursing home, or inside their casket at a funeral home—my Uncle Johnny in a hospital bed with that cut down his chest, my Aunt Anita with her body so bloated in another hospital bed and then so thin in her bed at home, my father no longer able to get up out of his bed at home, my Aunt Billie in the small bedroom downstairs in my grandmother and grandfather’s house and then in that single bed in one nursing home and then in another single bed in another nursing home, my Grandfather Kimball inside his casket at that country funeral home, my Grandmother Kimball inside her casket at that same country funeral home, my Grandfather Oliver with his oxygen tank and oxygen mask
in that bed in another nursing home, and my Grandmother Oliver in her bed in her bedroom upstairs and then in the bed that they made for her in the living room downstairs after she couldn’t really walk anymore and then inside her casket at the front of that long room at the funeral home.

  I have visited so many hospitals and nursing homes and funeral homes. I have watched dying people sleep. I have watched them try to talk and try to eat. I have fed them food and read them books. I have gotten them water and given them their pills. I have listened to how hard it was for them to breathe. I have covered them up with blankets and turned their pillows over to the cool side. I have helped them into and out of their beds and into and out of bathrooms. I have gone to get the doctor or the nurse for them.

  All of it helped for a little while, but almost all of them died anyway. My Grandmother and Grandfather Oliver both died from something to do with the heart—either failure or disease—and I keep thinking about how she died before he did. She had broken her hip and her ankle, and then there was a pain inside her chest that stayed there and made it hard for her to breathe.

  I keep trying to imagine what my grandfather must have been thinking while my grandmother was in and out of the hospital. They both knew that she was going to die soon. They both knew that they had a finite amount of time left with each other after they had been together for so many years. I keep thinking about those last days that they had together, what they must have thought and felt and did, and how those days might have been different from all the other days that they had already lived together.

  I keep thinking about how after my grandmother died, that my grandfather started to die too, and that it was so hard for him to breathe in those last few months that he was alive without her. I keep thinking about my wife and how one day one of us is going to die and that the other one of us will still be alive too.

  Some of the People Who Came Home from the Hospital

  My Uncle Johnny, my Grandmother Kimball, my Grandfather Kimball, and my Grandfather Oliver—they all died inside a hospital. My Grandmother Oliver came home from the hospital for one last time and then died at home a few months after that. My Aunt Anita got out of the hospital and died in her canopy bed a few months after she came home for her last time too. My Aunt Billie got out of the hospital and lived at home for years, even though she never got any better or well. She got worse until none of us could take care of her anymore, and then she lived for so many more years in a nursing home and then another year more in another nursing home before she died in her single bed there.

  Nobody ever really got any better. Everybody died inside a hospital or came home from the hospital and died in their bed.

  But sometimes there was some kind of hope when people came home from the hospital, that even though they couldn’t lift anything up or walk around, that even though they couldn’t breathe without an oxygen tank and an oxygen mask or even feed themselves, that they might somehow get better and then stay alive for some long time after that.

  We believed that this could happen, but it never did, not for anybody in my family or anybody else that I ever knew. They were all going to get worse in their own bed and among their own things and their own family and somehow dying that way wasn’t supposed to be as bad as dying in the hospital in a bed that wasn’t theirs.

  But the dying always seemed just as bad or worse for them. We could do so much less for them than could be done for them inside a hospital. There didn’t seem to be any more comfort in particular sheets or pillows or certain blankets. There didn’t seem to be any reassurance in a familiar view through a bedroom window. So their coming home from the hospital must have been for us, the ones of us who weren’t dying yet. It must have made us not hurt so much to be able to do the few small things that we could do for them.

  But coming home from the hospital also makes me think of my wife after she came home from the hospital after a serious ear surgery. She wasn’t going to die, but we wouldn’t know if the surgery were successful and if she would hear again until weeks after she had come back home.

  There were so many things that could have gone wrong during that recovery period. A little bone inside her ear had been replaced with a tiny metal rod that could have been dislodged if there were any quick movement or any jarring of her head.

  The ear surgery also left her equilibrium off. She couldn’t sit down or sit up or stand up without me helping her. She could only lie down in bed or on the couch for those first two weeks of her recovery, and then she could sit up a little in a chair after that. She couldn’t move or even talk very fast. It hurt her ear for her to move her jaw. She could only eat oatmeal and jello and bananas and toast and she could only drink through a straw. She couldn’t talk on the telephone. She could only walk at a shuffle and only with me beside her or behind her and holding onto her and holding her head steady so that it wouldn’t begin to spin.

  I brought her food and things to drink and I changed her ear dressings for her. I pulled bloody cotton balls out of her ear and then used tweezers to pick off the little strands of cotton that had attached to her ear with dried blood. I dropped antibiotic drops into her ear canal and dabbed an antibiotic salve onto the cut below her ear. I pushed clean cotton balls back into her ear, but only far enough so that the blood wouldn’t run out of her ear when she was sitting up.

  She slept in our bed by herself and I stayed far enough away so that I would not bother her when she could sleep—even though she still couldn’t really hear—but near enough to her so that I could hear her if she woke up or needed anything or needed me.

  But we got to where she could take a bath by herself and then I would help her towel dry and get dressed. She wore clothes that she could pull up her legs or button up around her front so that she didn’t have to pull anything off over her head. She started to walk back and forth to the bathroom without me holding onto her. There were enough things for her to hold onto along the way there—walls, chairs, doorways, the edge of the bed.

  It was weeks later that we were able to sit down at the dinner table again and eat a slow dinner together. She cut her food with a slow knife and moved a slow fork up to her mouth. She opened her mouth and chewed slowly too. But eating that dinner was the first thing that we had done together again in the way that we had always done things together, even if I did have to help her back to bed after we were done.

  We knew that she wasn’t going to die from her ear surgery and that she was probably going to get her hearing back. She began to hear sounds that had a low pitch—the hum of the refrigerator, the tumble of the dryer, the cycles of the dishwasher, the bass line of a song that she had always liked but never fully heard before.

  But we also knew that she was going to die sometime, some years from then, or that I was going to, and that it might be something like all of that—one of us waiting in the waiting room while the other one of us was in the operating room, both of us in the hospital room with one of us waiting for the other one of us to wake up, one of us helping the other one into our car so that we could drive back home, one of us helping the other one sit up or stand up or walk, one of us helping the other one into and out of the bathroom, one of us changing the bandages on the other one and cleaning the blood up with a washcloth, both of us trying to slow that dying down.

  PART THREE

  Her First Morning Back at Home

  We woke up for her first morning back at home and we were both afraid. We looked at each other and looked around the room. We were still old, but neither one of us had died during the night yet. But neither one of us was too sure where we were either. We weren’t too used to our bed and our bedroom anymore. There weren’t any machines or IVs around our bed. There weren’t any doctors or any nurses going into and out of our bedroom. There wasn’t anybody else dying in another bed and there wasn’t anybody else to help us get up or get out of our bed either.

  I got out of our bed and went around to her side of it. She turned the bedcovers back off her legs and turned
her legs out so that they were hanging down over the side of the bed. I set her walker down in front of her legs. She pulled and pushed herself up with her arms so that she could stand up. She walked with her walker into the bathroom and I waited for her outside the bathroom door. I listened for the water in the toilet bowl and for the water in the bowl of the bathroom sink.

  She opened the bathroom door back up. I carried a chair from our bedroom into the bathroom and set it down in the bathtub. I turned both the hot water and the cold water on until the water got warm enough for us. She tried to lift her arms up so that I could help her lift her nightgown up off her body and over her head. I took my nightclothes off too.

  I held onto her arms for her so that she could step over the edge of the bathtub. I waited for her to sit down on the chair before I climbed into the bathtub after her and pulled the shower curtain along the length of the bathtub.

  She could make the bar of soap lather up in her hands, but she couldn’t wash most of her body with it. She couldn’t reach below her knees to her feet or around to her back. Her arms and her hands still felt too heavy for her to hold them up to her head so that she could wash her hair. I lathered the shampoo up in my hands and worked it into her thick gray hair. I rinsed the shampoo out of her hair and off the rest of her body.