I never told my mother I love her until my senior year,
and I have been scheduled lately to care for a dying woman,
struggling, gasping for dry misty air. Few weeks ago, I leaned
over a newborn to monitor his extrauterine adaptation, his cry for life.
I first learned from my psychiatric nursing class that recognition
is a form of therapy, an ephemeral touch to the soul, the kind that
gifts me little snacks as reward for small talks with a patient. I guess it is the
words that turn into charms. I once asked an irritable elderly woman
if she had eaten and she also asked me in return. I was liquified. My house
has never had picture frames hung up on the walls. Crumbles of loss,
torn wedding album, heartbreak in my larva years.
I feel so privileged to be saved by the sick or I may say, to view
nursing as a means of holding on to life.
Some time in my senior year, I encountered a woman, same age
as my mother, with brain aneurysm and every movement of
her head, limb, and torso hurt her. I assisted her to the bathroom,
then I introduced myself again.
This is a poem I wrote for the literary pages of the magazine to be released by the college of nursing. It is about how nursing changed my life, how I valued life more because of it.