Circling the Drain
by Avis Clendenen
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That's what they told me today:
"In short, she's circling the drain."
Dwindling
before my eyes.
I'm her daughter,
the middle child of her three.
The only one who lived to hear
"she's circling the drain."
That's the image the doctor used
on 6 June 2001.
Crass, but painfully apt.
I wasn't offended
because I felt myself
swirling with her
around some new edge.
She's dropping off
from the edge of life,
spiraling downward
(into God, I want to believe,
although her cries of pain
prompt a rush of doubt in me).
She got old fast
without my permission.
I look at her now
so fragile.
Hanging on
but not really.
"She's circling the drain."
So succinctly stated;
but they don't know her
her life beyond those four words.
Her diminishing body
holds the story of the young widow
left hanging on the edge in 1954
with three tiny ones.
The woman who "could do more
than fifteen-women-in-one-day,"
She would say to us three
As she wiped our butts
Washed the floor
Made our meals
Wiped our faces
Donned her nurses cap
And worked all night
To return home
To start our day
Of many more hours after the night before.
Did I say her own mother suffered
from depression and could never help
when her husband died
six years into the marriage?
We three
fatherless
with a mother striving to do more
than fifteen-women-in-any-one-day.
Did I mention that seven years
after burying her husband
her eight-year old baby died
in the "accident" of which
we never spoke?
She named him Jude
as she promised
the saint of hopeless cases
after a miscarriage
after me
threatened the large family
she hoped to bear.
She told me then
she would give me a
backbone of steel.
But whatever I have in me from her
will not stop my mother's
circling the drain right now.
The woman who did more than fifteen
lies on the fallow ground of life's journey
exposed
literally and figuratively
(so many "healthcare professionals" with
so many titles all miss the moment to
pull her gown above her breast
or cover her raw bottom from public view).
Why is that?
She's dwindling
before my eyes
Ebbing
Circling
Swirling
Caught in a current
Taking her away.
She's the mother at the foot of the cross
whose firstborn son
died from AIDS in 1993.
Get the picture, people,
she's lived a life beyond the pale
of many to imagine.
As this June of 2001 dawns
I ask myself
Why don't those who know
and tell me with assurance
that she is circling the drain
CARE?
What's the point of jumbling
all her fresh clothes together
so that everything smells of urine?
Hey, pay attention to me when I'm
standing at the nurses' station!
You seem to want to be called
a personal care assistant, a CNA,
or something important, so
what's the point of degrading
my mother
and soiling her dignity
by your tired indifference?
Don't you see who she really is:
A strong woman
who always smelled of tigress cologne
And deserves the small respect
of smelling nice
and simply hanging up her clothes neatly.
How could you people not tend
her raw butt
after she wiped and tended
so many in 34 years of nursing,
not even counting baby butts?
How dare you degrade
the profession you share
And she so loved?
By not bothering to read the chart
you miss that she missed having
a bowel movement in 6 days.
Oh, the bleeding
from her raw, worn butt.
When I call you at 1:30 A.M.
from yet another emergency room
you are dismissive, saying
"these things happen."
Yet you were so sure to taunt her
to move her neuropathetic feet
to your satisfaction.
Shame on you.
I watch her lie fallow
Sapped of all energy
Circling the goddamn drain
Because, at least it seems to me,
that day after day
shift after shift
caregivers (and I use this term loosely)
coming and going
fail to notice
bowel movements or lack thereof
because you are too busy
too tired
too
too
too
To care.
Did you know that the biblical Greek word
for compassion
literally means
to be moved at the level of one's bowels?
When Jesus looks with compassion
he is moved at the center of his being,
stirred within his bowels
with feeling
that leads to healing.
Because you fail to notice
To listen to her
To really see her
Margaret Ann Clendenen
You missed the graced opportunity
to tend one of God's beloved daughters.
Come to think of it
I think
that you are the ones with the bowel
obstruction.
It is your compassion that is impacted,
blocking the flow of healing
in the guise of health care.
It is you—the system
Who is so impacted
as to remain unmoved
Unmovable
Unable to see
that it is you who is circling the drain.
As we keep moving through your system
please don't hand me
another brochure
describing your team holistic approach to
caring
of which you must know you have so little
clue.
And if you are offended by this
judgment of mine,
if you even bother to read these words,
you just might feel moved inside your
bowels
to do something about the mindlessness
of your own circling the drain.
That's all folks.
No graceful
poetic closure.
No way out.
We're all circling the drain.
Postscript:
She didn't clog your system for too long.
She died on 17 June 2001.
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Second Opinion #10
Publisher: Park Ridge Center, Chicago
Date: April, 2002.
ISSN: 0890-1570
112 pages.
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