So often I have something really big to say. Then the small things come and I really don’t know how to wrap them properly for a blog. Do you give it a great big bow to tie it all together or do you just let it all become a stream of consciousness thing? Too often, the little ones get left because bows were very important come holiday time in our house. I’m tired of that. {Enter Kalanna the rebellious, a creature as yet undiscovered, uncatalogued and undeterminant in behaviour patterns.}

Today I told my instructor that I was leaving for Canada and not returning to the program and she said she’d miss my little diary entries that were supposed to be self-evaluations.

What is it about finals that makes one forget any semblance of regular routine and want to consume massive amounts of chocolate and pizza? Too bad we ran out of both pretty fast.

And then afterward the deed is done all you can do is sit on the sofa and stare at a movie you’ve already seen. How do you manage time when it’s all your own and not someone else’s?

I love diving into a book. Today I’m lapping through the Joyce Carol Oates. Stories set in modern day aren’t my typical fare. I prefer the romance of historical settings or fantastical plots, but this one is relevant. Raw in that its about losing a mother and yet oddly soothing in the absence of finals, evaluations and junk food.

p.s. I did find a cookie though. /grin

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Her last road
has become my daily bread.

Those are the first two lines of a poem I suppose I’ll never write. I’ve carried them in my heart back and forth to the hospital thrice each week since September. My desire has been to finish it, but the words, other than these, don’t come. Perhaps you won’t mind if I speak in simple ways of what they mean.

My mother suffered from schizophrenia — or a very close derivative of that disease — severe depression, the weight of having grown up under an alcoholic father and the consequential and crippling codependency in all of her family members that never allowed any of them to truly see, admit or take action about what was truly wrong. She committed suicide on May 12, 2007.

Her chosen place was the field adjacent to the farming shed that belonged to her boyfriend. She died outside in the nature that she loved so much, just off a road between my hometown and a nearby village. And it was this way that I was asked to drive to my hospital assignment this semester.

I simultaneously dreaded the drive and was comforted by it. To be seeing the last things on Earth that she did kept me strangely wrapped in solidarity with her, and I have needed to feel her close. But then the tears would come. All the different sorts too – of guilt, of loneliness, fear, sadness, rage. I would arrive at my post with this maelstrom in my heart and was so thankful for the work of my hands to forget the pain.

Countless times, I have asked God why he presented this challenge to me. I could have been assigned to any one of seven hospitals, but he chose this road.

The answer came one day when I drove past that village I mentioned — the hospital was a little further on. He asked me to come this way because he knew I needed to be close to her and because he knew I needed to be reminded that I am meant to go on. From my heart, I heard…

This is not your last road, Kalanna. You have much still ahead.

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“When God wishes to accomplish something in the world, he speaks to somebody, puts words of life into his or her heart, which continue to grow and become clearer. I think each of us has a Little Mandate, words that came to us in prayer, or through experience or through reading, which sort of form the foundation of our lives. These are the words we revert to in times of decision; these are the words which give our lives meaning and direction at the deepest level.”

~ Fr. Robert Wild, Journey to the Heart of Christ

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The patients I’ve worked at hospital this semester have been so sweet. I couldn’t have asked for a better or kinder or more understanding group of people as they were to me, the bumbling student nurse. And that includes the family members who have stood at the bedside watching me bumble. I’ve been blessed.

One small segment of them stood out, however. Several of my patients have elderly black men, and I really couldn’t help but notice that they were the gentlest, most cooperative and polite of the bunch. Perhaps I’m seeing this through glasses colored by my southern heritage, but each time one of those men bowed his head to me to allow my care — literally or figuratively — I wondered if their near passivity was a remnant of their own historical role in the south. The history of slaves.

Maybe I’m crazy. Their ancestors likely might never have been slaves in the antebellum south, but with my mind formed by Hollywood movies like Gone with the Wind, I wondered if I was seeing in the eyes of my patients’ that “Yes sir” that meant so much more than a polite reply. It meant ownership, and the voice that it came from kept his eyes on the ground. And maybe it was simply their personalities.

Wherever it came from, I was endured by their spirit. I tried to respect them in the littlest detail. That is my duty as a nurse regardless of sentiment or personal feeling. But this was something more. I wished so much that if I was seeing correctly that I could be part of the healing that my home state needs between its two distinctly different populations.

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It’s not that I don’t want to smile or anything. It was the weird incident in the grocery about a week ago now.

The whole family was out shopping for Thanksgiving when an old neighbor came up to say hello. I don’t know if I’d even seen him since I moved out of my parent’s place and got married. His house was over the fence of my parents’ last place. He hadn’t met my family, so it was nice coincindence to run into each other.

He mentioned, after quick introductions interrupted by the kids asking me if we could buy sausage biscuits, that my Mom had told him we were moving back. So, I’m thinking, she really was happy that we had come home. That made me happy… for a moment.

Then came the realization with its distinctive prickly feeling that he didn’t know my Mom is dead. Well, because usually people know and when people know, their first comment is some form of condolence rather than speaking of her in the present.

My dear husband quickly moved the kids along, so I could talk to him, but as soon as I told him the news, he seemed uncomfortable. I didn’t even get to say how she died. I can never decide whether to do so or not anyway. And the conversation ended quickly.

But before it did, I caught myself smiling and immediately started yelling at myself from the inside. Why am I smiling?! Hello, you are not happy about this. You are actually really really sad. Why am I smiling?!

Oddly enough, last night while studying for an upcoming test, I discovered these very poignant lines in my nursing book…

Dysfunctional grief is abnormal or distorted; it may be either unresolved or inhibited. In unresolved grief, a person may have trouble expressing feelings of loss or may deny them.

The eldest sibling may feel a need to “be strong” and therefore may not grieve openly.

Women may be judged as “cold” if they do not grieve publicly.

It’s really quite odd to read yourself in a *nursing* book. A novel is fine. The Bible is even better. But a nursing book…

And yet its published information. I didn’t know it, but I did live it. Reacted the only way I knew. That’s why I smile. Everything was always OK in my family. It’s just that it’s really really hard knowing that my aunts and uncles took everything my mother owned away from me because of those three lines.

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