60 The Meadow Ferrier Matthew Baker —with a line adapted from Spencer Reece’s “ICU” So many trips with your cart down the throat of the white hall with the faded carpet and chipped paint— then back. Like a gondolier ferrying parcels and pills to the dying. You knew you would find them. You knew you would lose them, but not in the ways you sometimes did. You said this was your way to repay a debt accrued over years. When your own mother was dying—her atrophying lungs, the tracheotomy hole working less and less—you could not be anywhere but your own job. How you had little to lean on. So much to do. At each room you linger long enough to remember whose scratch-scarred skin you should slather with lotion, whose dresser is dotted with photos of dead husbands and living children. “I can’t think about that”— the fact they’ll never leave alive. Each window hosts a film of grime. This facility underfunded to the point not even regular cleaning occurs. “Recently, it has been rough,” you offer. One of your patients, who gave you recipes and shopping tips for years, has declined— dementia. She will not let you touch even the bed of her roommate whom she imagines you will maim. You with your cart of catheters and creams. You with your stethoscope, who will lean down slowly and place your hand gently on each patients’ chest— as if to reassure them the passage will not be rocky. The waves not choppy but smooth as marble and reflective enough to watch the passing of their best years in the mirage of their faces morphing back into more youthful curves, un-creased from the deep, wrinkled wells of their present foreheads and cheeks. O you who want only to help
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