The walls are covered in wood panels, dark yet not as brown as mahogany. The room where I sit is small, but brightly lit by open windows. I can hear the birds chirping outside, and it draws me back. The whirring of the O2 machine in the next room drowns out the ringing in my ear, but faintly. The hospital bed is right beside me. I can hear the mattress filling up with air and releasing it into different chambers. It keeps her skin intact. This is good.

The rattle started a couple days ago I guess. Pneumonia seems to have set in but the nurse hasn’t arrived yet to give direction. I’ve done this a hundred times before so I don’t need answers really. Keep her propped up, keep her comfortable and moving from side to side. It’s just as much the same as it is always different. Our comings and goings in and out of this world are as individual as we are. Sometimes silent, sometimes with screaming and thrashing and flailing. Sometimes the same. Sometimes different. Always difficult.

It smells like fresh linen and lemon. This isn’t a hospital room, no bleach scent permeating the air. This is her home, her rooms and her windows. Her paintings and stuffed puppy. Mothers day cards on the dresser. She is somebody’s mother. Someone’s wife. A sister. These are the important details.

The house sits directly on the bay, gorgeous view and scenery. Boats and empty moorings speckle the water below, and I trace the planks on the dock with my eyes. Wood faded grey buy sturdy, hand made Adirondack chairs on the shoreline as the sun shines above. I tear my gaze from the window and once again take my seat beside the bed. This room is just as much the same as the last one as it is different. Smaller space and the wood paneling. But the love here remains.

It wasn’t always like this. I mean, we come in as faculties start failing, yes. When things become too heavy to lift, bathing seems inpossible and cooking becomes too difficult. I’m like an extra set of hands, to assist with the tasks that have become too hard to maintain alone. I never judge, never get angry. Always am cheerful and joking and smiling. This is what I’m here for. To help.

But these days the work has changed, morphed into absolute end of life care. The hard part, where everyone is scared and the unfamiliar looms. The sad part. When smiles turn to cries and desperation furrows brows with fear of the unknown. The part where we all stop and ask ourselves what happens next; apprehension at the unknown.

…”Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Now I’m in another room, another place, another face. I sit next to a hospital bed, in front of large open windows, on an island. She is breathing gently next to me, my one and only Nonna. She is breathing. This is good.

These walls are large, high ceiling with yellow paint, Jamaican flags and tropical paradises adorning all sides of this place. These walls, so full of love shout out all the bright beautiful things in this world. They speak of tenderness, loss and remembering. Photos are everywhere, on tables and dressers, telling the beautiful story of this family. The love. So much the same and ever so different.

In this place I hear no whirring of machines, only the calls of birds and the soft sway of leaves in the breeze. Sometimes the silence is peaceful. Sometimes the silence is terrifying. Right now, it’s neither.

My stomach is knotted and I’m anxious. I had a dream about Nonna this morning and I’ve felt edgy all day. Tingly with anticipation for something unknown. One of the dogs sleeps on a chair to my right, always guarding and keeping watch. Her movements catch my eye and draw my gaze towards the window.

I look out and can see the newly hung owl house in the large tree outside. I watched Nonna’s son hang it last week, cutting down huge vines with a chainsaw so it would sit perfectly, at just the right height to be seen from a hospital bed inside a bright yellow room. He knows the owls have already mated and made their nests, but he still talks about it with his Mom, listening to her hope for a clutch. This is what love is. The unspoken parts of love. It’s dinners made by hand, daughter in law busy in the kitchen after a hard day of work. It’s singing. It’s music and dance. It’s stories and memories and love. Always love.

I have so much more to say about all this. I do. But for now I stand, coffee in hand, staring at an owl house on a tree, across from a window in a yellow room with a hospital bed, listening to the birds. And her breathing.

Her breathing.