Just Say: So Long by Priscilla Hodgkins
My best friend dutifully goes to funerals, sends obituaries about someone we both knew in high school. I have no feeling of sadness for Roddy, who died last week. The newspaper clipping applauds his commitment to organizing teen sports for the underserved. Nice guy. I remember him. A sort of goofy nice guy. But I have no urge to mourn his death.
There’s a reason or multiple reasons: I was around a lot of death and dying for 14 years. I worked as a secretary for a group of neonatologists in an office across the hall from the Intensive Care Nursery and next to the parents’ waiting room in a pediatric hospital. I heard social workers and chaplains comforting parents and garbled wails of mourning for newborns and kids with lousy hearts, and chronic diseases like cystic fibrosis. I fell a little bit in love with some of the babies: sat and rocked a baby born with a malformed brain who the intern said was not able to respond to any stimuli though I was sure I felt the baby boy relax a bit, unclench his fists, breath deeper and more slowly when I stroked his cheeks. The intern, who I’d dated a few times a year before, tried to get me to understand, the reactions were random. There were other babies that needed rocking. Please, put the baby back; there’s nobody home.
I got used to things like that, escorted many parents into the neonatologist’s office for updates on their newborn’s labs and what happened when they tried to wean her off the respirator. It would be months in the intensive care nursery and years of special therapy as her lungs were not responding to care and her latest EEG was as bad as the previous ones.
When I started this job the docs would admit babies deemed viable at 32 weeks gestation, but not 30. Then they jumped to 28 weeks due to technology breakthroughs. They were starting to resuscitate and admit babies at 26 weeks when I left. Fetuses at this age have transparent skin and weigh less than 2 lbs. and late term abortions could be done at 24 weeks when the mother’s life was endangered. The gap between viable and unviable was down to two weeks. My inner outer limit.
I saw strong, resourceful families and fathers in denial and clinically depressed mothers. I saw infants suffering from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. I saw crack mothers take their fragile born-addicted infants home even though all their other children had been removed from the home due to neglect. It was the state law: regardless of mother’s history, she is given a chance to raise her baby.
I also celebrated the break-throughs in neonatology. The incidence of blindness caused by respirators nearly disappeared when they figured out how to safely oxygenate the blood at lower air pressures. Blood gases could be measured by gadgets taped to fingers rather that pricking the heel to draw a sample for testing. I brought tiny brightly colored helium balloons for babies going home after 4-5 months in the nursery. I saw many miracle babies who made it despite long odds. I registered one to three deaths a week in the records. And I saw very dedicated people doing their damndest to save all the babies.
We live. We die. Some early, some late. Roddy was fairly late, 75, though some would say too early.
At 77 I try to prepare for death. I’ve done the Swedish Death Clear-out for the sake of my friends and nieces. I have a living will with all the latest attachments and a when I die will about things. I do not want to go slowly as my mother and sister did, nor in a private world of Alzheimer’s like my brother. I want to go out quickly, like my dad. I want to be in charge and decide not to go to some long term care facility. It’s a tricky thing to pull off - knowing when to exit before it’s too late. Wait too long and you are stuck in a bed in diapers, babbling and warbling tunes from Hair and The White Album. Worst case - if I’m in that wet bed, I will stop eating, as my mother did. It took her about 5 weeks. I hope my addled brain will remember to keep my mouth shut.
Artist’s Statement
When it’s going well, writing is the best job I’ll ever have. As I am working on a story about a coked-out car salesman, a louse, and lonely fellow I see myself in him. I pull on the thread that links us - in this case, feeling lonely. I think it’s impossible to write a story without putting yourself in it because we write about what matters to us, what wakes us up at 3:12 a.m. and makes us miss the freeway exit to our homes. The best writers are the most curious; open to doubt and eager to tell their stories with great care and imagination. When I am gathering for a story I am engaged in a search for some meaning in a character’s life and mine. When I am writing essays, there are no characters to hide behind, but the process is similar but a lot scarier.
Priscilla Hodgkins took up writing in her 5th decade. She writes short stories, essays, and book reviews which have been published in Agni, Confrontation, Creative Nonfiction, Another Chicago Magazine, Fourth Genre, and the Milwaukee Sentinel. She was the Associate Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars from its inception in 1994 to 2006. Currently Priscilla is working on a novel/murder mystery.