On Monday if you had asked me how I feel about cell phones I would have come up with a terse reply. I hate to listen to the drone of banal conversation coming from the person next to me on the elliptical machine or the treadmill at the gym. I don’t care about trouble with the HOA. I don’t care about a son who can’t decide on a career as a director or an actor. I work out to nurture my inner peace, to smooth out the kinks in my soul from a job that requires me to navigate a relationship with life and death.
From a nurse’s point of view, thanks to cell phones I predict an orthopedic crisis of “Question Mark Spinal Curvature” caused by incessant curling over a cell phone to text or read a message. I foresee a Darwinian evolution where all our children enter the world prepared to text.
Today ask me how I feel about cell phones.
I had a patient die yesterday. It was not an easy death for her. It was even harder for the family. The woman’s adult children researched and found hope in treatments not available in a small town. They urged their mother to seek help even though it meant leaving home, leaving the things that made her special. You know the things: a work room filled with boxes of first drafts, a classic cookie press that has been in the family for years, a Singer sewing machine so old its parts are all still metal.
For love of her children she travelled several hours and agreed to a procedure with a potpourri of risks and benefits. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
After several days of watching their mother deteriorate, the children needed to go home and attend to their own health and home maintenance responsibilities. The day before their mother died I suggested they wait until a stable twenty-four hours had passed. She had been improving.
I started my next shift at 7 a.m. In less than ten minutes, I knew I needed to call them back to the hospital. I dialed their cell phone and found they had gone all the way home, not to the motel where they, like their mother, suffered their own sort of displacement.
I knew their mother would die sometime that day. The thought of such a loss, handled long distance, tormented me with a sense of inadequacy. Images of my mother’s last foray into the hospital, the fear of her suffering some catastrophe with none of her children present, haunted me. I had gotten to Mom in time to hold her hand, wipe her forehead, and take her home, frail, but alive.
Several phone calls took place between me and the children, the children and the doctors, then back to me. While we talked and planned, rationalized and apologized, the patient declared herself. Her kidneys failed. Her blood pressure required more potent pharmacological support. She stopped responding to me when I called her name. The most extreme efforts to maintain life began to fail. The children requested only one thing. They wanted to say “good-bye.” I had told them some research supported the belief that the last sense to leave a dying person was hearing.
This time I called upon the cell phone, the villain in a world filled with too much information, too much noise, and not enough human interface. We set a time for the children to speak to their mother.
I have big hands and find a cell phone so small and thin. To me it’s like holding a playing card. I have to concentrate to dial. I use mine so rarely it often loses its charge before I make one call. Mine is a scantily functioned Tracphone for the person with 911 calls in mind. My supervisor’s phone facilitated the last good-bye.
I called the children and put the phone on speaker. “We’re holding the phone to your mother’s ear.” Picture a frail octogenarian, skin gray, loose, with patchy bruising along her forearms. She seems asleep thanks to a continuous infusion of a sedative. All the facial features that make her someone’s mother are defiled by tubes and tape and devices. I realize the children left because they could no longer grieve for a stranger.
The words stuttered from a bad connection. But to me they conveyed a simple, beautiful tribute to a woman who created the art of two children’s lives just by being their mother.
“Thank-you for being such a wonderful mother. Thank-you for being there and teaching us how to be good people, to live good lives. Thank-you for loving us so. I know you have just moved on and will be waiting for us in a place where we will all be together soon. I love you mom.”
I heard words I knew I might someday say to my mother. I sucked in a breath meant to hold back the tears struggling to break free. The tears won. I hoped the children didn’t hear and feel any burden from my sorrow.
“Here’s brother.”
From the phone came sounds of shifting the hand-held device that had become the connection to one of the most important times in the life of a family. A male voice announced “I love you, Mom.” Then it crumbled into sobs.
I have witnessed more deaths than I can remember. I held hands with a family in a circle around the bed of a dying patient. I stood by when families prayed. I caught a woman who collapsed when I told her that her husband died.
What passed between mother and children through a light-weight piece of black plastic felt no less real, no less painful, no less final. I felt the ultimate privilege of having shared such a moment with a unique family. I cried as if they were in the room, quietly so as not to diminish the enormity of their pain.
If you ask me today about cell phones, I will tell you a story about the power of a final connection, a eulogy echoing through space in hopes of finding one woman’s soul. The cell phone, a sacred tool in a mobile world. I never imagined it.