The River of Love
I occasionally do some volunteer work for hospice. Now when you tell people this, invariably someone will say “Oh, that’s wonderful, but I don’t know how you do that.” And I appreciate what they’re trying to say, but really, once you’ve been involved in something like that, I don’t know how you can not do it. First of all, because we are all going to make that final walk one day, aren’t we? And the chance to walk it with another helps us to think about our own final journey. But also because, if you open your eyes, and your heart, you can learn so much that helps you to live your life today, too.
You witness pain, and fear, yes. But also courage, hope, and more than anything else, you find yourself part of the enduring story of love.
I was given a hospice assignment to stay with an elderly patient so that her daughter could go to the local VA office. I knew it was going to be an unusual visit when I called the daughter to confirm that I was coming.
"Oh great! Listen- where do you live? Can you stop and get me a Gatorade on your way?"
"Um… sure…"
"Oh! That would be wonderful. I’ll pay you for it."
"Ok…what flavor?"
"Blue. Or orange. Or whatever. I just need one."
She sounded like a bit of a Gatorade junkie, but I stopped at the
Pasting a smile on my face I held out my hospice ID badge. She eyed me suspiciously, and somewhat blearily.
I held up the bottle of Gatorade.
"Yes!" She opened the door and snatched the bottle from me. "Come in!"
Not totally sure now that I really wanted to, I nonetheless squared my shoulders and entered, the intrepid volunteer, ready for anything.
The front room of the townhouse was small and made smaller by the hospital bed taking up most of the space. On it lay a tiny, emaciated old woman with short grey hair and a vague regard that spoke of a pretty severe loss of sight. I had been told by the office that the patient, Mary, 96, had a diagnosis of "Failure to thrive." Does anyone actually thrive when they’re 96? I wondered. She certainly wasn’t eating much these days, to look at her. I set down my purse and walked over to say hello, as the daughter sank with a moan onto the sofa on the other side of the room.
"Oh my gosh- don’t know what I’m going to do !" she moaned. "I’ve been so sick all day!"
Within 5 minutes of my arrival she rushed to the bathroom and proved the truth of that statement. Which explained the Gatorade request.
It was clear that there was plenty for me to do with my time, even with the daughter staying home. Patty, Mary’s daughter, explained that she had begun throwing up the day before and figured it was from drinking too much orange juice to fight off a cold (?) but now it was back again.
"I have epilepsy- do you know what that is? And I get grand mal seizures." Hoo boy.
How tough must it be for her to care for her mother in her small home! I was impressed with the cleanliness of the patient (if not the apartment) and the wonderful condition of her skin- a difficult thing to maintain in a person so thin who is bedbound. For a while I just sat and chatted with Mary and distracted her and gave her daughter, obviously exhausted, a chance to rest on the sofa with a cold cloth over her eyes. Mary told me that she and Patty had been without power until just the night before from the huge windstorm that had swept the city.
"Oh, it was nice when the power came back, wasn’t it Patty?" she said. "We didn’t have any candles, but we do have one flashlight."
"You did just great, mother" Patty assured her from the sofa. "You were great!"
I patted Mary’s hand and contemplated 4 days with no power in a small, stifling apartment: an epileptic and a slightly querulous, incontinent, bed-bound elderly woman. I gained a whole new respect for the eccentric but clearly devoted Patty.
I was trying top decide how cognizant Mary was. She seemed fairly aware, if pleasantly vague, about most things and answered simple questions lucidly. But several times I heard her ask for Mommy. About the second or third time she complained that she hadn’t seen Mommy in a long time, Patty roused herself and came to the bedside.
"You saw Mommy just this morning" she assured her. I found that doubtful, but I sat and listened to see how this game would play out between them.
"Where is Mommy?" Mary asked in a petulant tone, and Patti sighed.
"I’ll go get her." she said, and walked out of the room.
I saw in the wall mirror that she walked just around the corner and stood for a moment, shoulders slumped. Then she straightened, threw her head back and walked back into the room with a spring in her step.
"Hey honey! Hey there my Mary, how’s my girl?" she sang out and sat on the edge of the bed.
Mary’s face lit up in joy and her thin hands stretched toward the sound of the voice.
"Mommy? Oh Mommy! I missed you!" she pulled her daughter to her and pressed her face into her shoulder. "Oh mommy, I’m so glad you’re here! I haven’t seen you in ever so long!"
Patty laughed and stroked her mother’s wild hair gently.
"Why punkin, I was just here this morning, remember?"
"Was you?"
"Yes, we talked for a while right after you had your breakfast."
"Oh, that’s right." Mary patted her arm and laughed. "Mommy, I’m so glad to see you! I miss you when you’re not here."
"Oh honey, I’m never away long, am I? I wouldn’t leave my precious Mary, now would I?" Mary laughed happily.
"No, you wouldn’t." she agreed.
I felt a lump in my throat as I watched the strange tableau before me. Mary, the mother, possibly grandmother and great-grandmother, was being given the opportunity to be someone she hadn’t been in over 80 years: a little girl in the arms of her Mommy. The role of mother seems a fairly natural one for a daughter who has taken on total care for her failing mother, but I have seen few adopt the role as completely as this. Tired and ill, Patty laughed and smiled, petted and praised her "little girl" for a while. And then Mary cocked her head.
"Where’s my Patty?" she asked. "Is she here? Where is she?"
"You sent her to get me, remember?"
"Oh, that’s right." Mary’s hands fluttered and fussed with her blanket in distress. " I worry about her. She works so hard, you know that? My girl works too hard." Patty straightened up and patted her mother’s shoulder.
"I’ll go get her" she said in a businesslike tone and got up. This time she took only a few steps away from the bed before turning and walking back.
"Hey mom! It’s Patty! How are you? Did you have a nice visit?"
"Oh Patty, Patty, there you are. You aren’t working too hard, are you? The girl " (referring to me) "said that you had an upset stomach. Are you feeling better?" Patty sat down.
"Oh no, I’m fine" she said, a statement belied by the paleness of her skin.
"Well you just sit here and let me take care of you" Mary said. I got up and gave Patty the bedside chair I had been using and went in the kitchen to wash a few dishes. When I stuck my head back in a few minutes later I saw that Patty had laid her head on her mother’s small, boney shoulder. Mary was stroking her daughter’s hair and fussed over her, and Patty closed her eyes and for just a moment, let her self be the little girl in her mother’s arms again.
I was moved by my chance that day to witness, in all its bizarre beauty, the fluid nature of love and relationships. When I went home I sought out my own lovely daughter and asked how her day went, and as she chatted about this and that, I contemplated a time when she might find herself having to mother me. And I found it didn’t concern me as much as it once might have.
It seems to me that love itself is like a large body of water that we all swim through, all our lives. On the top we humans like to string buoys and section off lanes for ourselves and others. We have the lane for love of a parent, another for love of a child, another for friend, etc. And each of us has our lane and we stay there in a specific, designated relationship with those in the lanes around us: our loved ones. You swim over there in the "friend" lane and by golly- you stay there! I love you "this way" but not "That way".
But underneath, you see, it’s all just one big ocean. It’s all the same water: love.
And sometimes a person slips underneath the lane markers that define their life and relationships, and 
swims in the wrong place. And often society doesn’t understand, or even disapproves.
Don’t get me wrong. Some of those behavioral boundaries we create in life are much needed. But the reasons we have those boundaries are physical, not emotional. There are boundaries we shouldn’t cross, but those boundaries are about surface things. Because of human nature, we need those compartments when we’re splashing around up here on the top. But when you dive down a little deeper, where the water is cool and clear, we see love in a different way.
At its core, love can’t be divided into sections. It is endlessly circulating, touching everyone, connecting everyone, flowing back and forth in invisible, often incomprehensible but undeniable patterns. When we look beneath the surface of love as we too often define it, we recognize the boundless love of human to human, when one frail, imperfect creature recognizes that perfect love which connects him to every other creature. And we can dive deeper and deeper and never reach the bottom. Because of course all love comes from the same place, doesn’t it? And in the end, it’s all just love.
But you know, while we are all immersed in the same water, because of who we are, we try to find all of those different kinds of love in our surface lives. To feel whole, each of us desires the love of parent, child, friend- and we are so hung up on the difference between them that we don’t see the similarity. People will suffer their whole lives for not having had a parent, or never having a child. And I’m not trying to say- from the position of someone lucky enough to have both- that these things don’t matter. But what we need to try to remember as we mourn what is missing in our lives is that parent, partner, child, friend- its’ all the same stuff: love
And if love is some great river or ocean then we all are born in water, and end our journey there. Love is the one part of us that never lets go, that we can never lose. I cannot tell you how many times, as a geriatric nurse, I witnessed this truth. I have cared for patients who had lost so much of themselves: they had lost the ability to dress themselves, to feed themselves, to speak or even to remember their own name. And it is cruel and heart-breaking when this happens. But I would remind you that all those things they’ve lost, as much as we prize them, as much as we feel they make us human- they don’t. What makes us human is love, and we never lose that. I have seen it- and hospice, if it does nothing else, helps me to remember that.
20 years ago, when I was a nurse, I had a patient- a very elderly woman, Belinda, who was confined to a wheelchair. She spoke mostly in meaningless babble now and spent her days, arms and legs contracted upon herself, rocking and muttering and gazing into the distance, seeming to comprehend nothing. One day her granddaughter came to visit. She didn’t appear to recognize her granddaughter at all. She didn’t even really look at her as she spoke. It was a typical visit with Belinda, frankly: one-sided. And then a remarkable thing happened.
“Look grandma” the young woman said . “Look who I brought to see you. Your granddaughter.” And she took a tiny baby, probably not more than a month old, from a carrier seat and held her out.
I don’t know- maybe she heard a sound that the baby made. Maybe she smelled that newborn smell which every human creature recognizes. Whatever it was, Belinda looked up, and her face just shone. I mean, light poured out of her face like a candle was lit inside her. She held out her thin, weak arms and she said the word “Baby!”. She breathed it, almost like a prayer. And the mother set that baby in her great grandmother’s arms, which I tell you, not many new mothers would do! But I guess she trusted in the love she saw there. And the old woman cradled that child to her chest, and cooed, and even though she didn’t speak another intelligible word, we all knew what she was saying. And all of us- nurses, aides, visitors- everyone who witnessed it- we knew we were witnessing the endless depth, and the eternal nature of love.
Too many of us go around “looking for love” like it’s an Easter egg hidden under a single tulip in a huge garden. Certainly it can feel that way sometimes, but again- that’s of the surface. At its depth, love isn’t something that we’re given. It’s who we are. It is how we were made.
Love isn’t something we give to each other- it is something we all were given by God, and we just pass it back and forth as we’re tugged by the eddies and currents. You may think you have love all figured out and you’re swimming in your little lane and you know where it is taking you, but one of these days you just might find yourself caught in a rip tide and sucked under, and headed in a whole different direction. And I think when that happens we just need to let go and float, you know? And let love take us where it will. It can be hard. But it can be beautiful.
The woman clutching the Gatorade bottle that afternoon gets it. The young mother who brought her baby to the nursing home that day got it. Sometimes you need to trust in the love that is always there. And sometimes you have to take down the barriers and just let a person paddle around in the water wherever they need to go. Watching Belinda clutching her great granddaughter that day, and again, seeing the tiny 96 year old woman clapping her hands in delight at the arrival of her mommy, I got it too.
It’s all the same thing. It’s all just love. So jump on in- the water’s fine!
All we Are
When I woke up this morning there was a mourning dove
Right outside my window, singing about love.
Oh, fly away you mourning dove, for now at last I see
How each and every love I’ve known makes up a part of me.
All we are in this short life is all the love we feel.
The giving and the taking are the only things that are real
and that’s the simple reason why I have got to let you know
Something that I should have said about a hundred years ago:
All we are in this world is love.
All we are, when we come to the end of our days
Is the people who love us, and the ones that we love.
All I’ll take when I go is love:
All I am in this world is love.
Now we can’t all climb mountains or sail across the sea
and I will never change the world or write a symphony
But it is love that built the mountains and it’s love that filled the sea
And it’s love that makes me who I am: mine for you, and yours for me.
So hush-a-bye you mourning dove, please fly away and find
all the special people that I’ve got on my mind.
I don’t care if I said it yesterday or half a lifetime has gone by-
I’ve got to say it one more time, and here’s the reason why:
All I am in this world is love.
I’m a patchwork of people who fill up my heart,
the people who love me and the ones that I love.
All I’ll leave when I go is love,
All I am in this world is love.
Tracy Meisky is a poet, writer, singer, songwriter and all-around boat rocker from way back. Feel free to look around, but if you break it, you bought it.