The Rest of the Story

While looking around online, I found that the newspaper I usually read doesn’t have obituaries from a nearby town. I went online to see where to find obituaries from that town, and in doing so, discovered someone I had met and liked had passed away. He was a bit of a character. His accent made me homesick for friends from Germany I had met along the way. He was discouraged by his health and by loneliness.

I only knew a little part of his story. I would have loved to know more. He came from Berlin to America, served in the military here. He loved and had a family. He played soccer. Who knew?

We, in our various jobs and activities in life, meet up with people who are at different points in their stories. Sometimes we get to know them well, but still have no idea at all who they are. Even our own parents’ stories are unfamiliar to us. The young girl who loved baseball. The boy whose father turned away from his family.

In the doctor’s office, time is so very limited to chief complaint and not much more. Vital signs are taken but no time is given for the vital questions. Hard to put into words, people tend to say to their doctors “I’m ok.” If they say “I am not ok” it is often followed with “what are YOU going to do about it? Fix me!” but it is ambiguous. Doctors aren’t really about gathering stories other than what the vital signs, labs, and physical examinations cover. There are psychiatrists, ministers, and such who are more adapt at it. If a person can be seen and heard by one or the other.

And who cares for the doctor? Who listens to their stories, holds them in their grief? Who laughs at their peculiarities?

I worked in a nursing home and had the care of some folks who were gone deep in to Alzheimers, or similar end of life prisons. So little was left of the vital and vivacious people they were. Little hints here and there: a mink in someone’s closet. A photograph.  A phrase. The fellow who had so enjoyed driving his little speedy car, the same car that robbed him of the ability to stand and walk after a bad accident over fifty years ago.

A lady there was not able to feed herself or digest food that hadn’t been processed into a paste. She was nonverbal. The food looked awful. Someone who was feeding her was playing “here comes the airplane” to get her to open her mouth.

She spat it out at him.

In her former life, she had been a cordon bleu chef.

I have met frightened, depressed people who once were alive and on fire with living. I have held the hands of folks who are getting on to the end of their story, the final page before “the end.” They are bewildered that all their life has led to this. Why this. Why like this?

Time is running rapidly and we just don’t have time to stop, remember, and listen. That is how people become things. A bother, a waste of time.  Inconvenient.  But we are human and they are human too. Would it kill us to find out a little more? To hear the rest of the story?                            

I am getting older and find I am forgetting parts of my own story! That is shocking, almost as shocking as seeing my face in the mirror and not seeing the “me” I think I am! And if I forget myself, what is there left?

So I am working on gathering stories.