Falling trees

I weep as I start down the stairs from the fifth-floor palliative care ward. In the privacy of the quiet stairwell, tears previously held back by my white coat now stream freely. Time is whittling away at my dear old ladies and this is the fourth patient I’m visiting like this in the past 6 months. With all of them well past 80, 2 older than 90, and 1 older than 100, I shouldn’t be surprised, and yet it feels like where once there was a forest of sturdy old oaks and pines, the landscape is now increasingly barren.

There is, despite the best of care, the suffering I could see in my patient’s face as she lay confined to her bed. This was a woman who never sat still if she could help it, who despite her years would bounce into my clinic room with the energy of a child pulling open the gate of a newly discovered playground. When I entered the room today, she gave me her usual warm smile, and yet I could see that fatigue had settled into the very essence of her body with the heaviness of a late spring snowfall.

There is my own personal grief as I acknowledge that another flower has been plucked from the colourful bouquet of personalities that has brightened my days in clinic. These were women who brought in their concerns, their stories, their life lessons, but also always their gratitude for the work I did even if at times it seemed it was so little. I will miss those breaths of fresh air on one of the particularly long days of patient complaints.

Most of all I mourn for our world. We are losing, one by one, a generation of women whose collective spirit and wisdom I want to gather up like a load of freshly washed laundry and hang out for all the world to see.

Helpers—these are the knitters, the quilters, the stitchers of blankets and baby hats for those less fortunate, the church breakfast volunteers, and the friendship circle organizers. One of the 80-year-olds would excitedly tell me about “helping out the seniors.” A firefly on a summer’s night, I could picture her bringing light into the darkness of many a lonely senior’s home. Another, her hands gnarled and twisted with arthritis, regaled me with tales of teaching others to carry on the crocheting that after 70 years she could no longer do.

Survivors—these women, all so different, were also cut from the same cloth. They grew up during the 1940s, were teenagers or young adults during the war. There was no Snapchat or shopping mall visits; instead, their formative years were filled with hardship, uncertainty, and loss. Still, I never heard complaints about this, just evidence from their stories of how they took delight in the small joys that daily life did bring to them.

Acceptors—a surprise maybe, given their long lives? Within all of them I have not seen the railing against the “injustice” of aging that seems to consume many from the generations that follow. It’s not a sign of weakness; I think, in fact, it is this very humbleness in accepting what we cannot control, this deep-seated wisdom perhaps born of tougher times, which has given them the resilience to bend and bow but not break during life’s stormy moments. While their calm acceptance of the inevitable has not made their final days, weeks, or months any less difficult, it does seem that by taking it in stride they remained focused on what was most important to them. I have watched how, despite the effort it took, even in their last days they continued to reach out with love and support to those around them.

Now, nearing the end of the stairs, my thoughts return to my patient on the fifth floor. I exit the shelter of the stairwell. As I turn to face the glare of the afternoon sun, I pull myself straight and wipe away my tears with a hand that can still feel the soft, gentle warmth of hers within it.

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