Tips for Brightening Your Life
by Kathleen Everett

Mr. Cummings would arrive at the hospital every day at noon when visiting hours started. His wife Maggie was a patient in the oncology unit. She had been our patient on and off for a couple of years of chemotherapy, the goal of which was to keep the tumors from growing and enable her to eat. This time Maggie was admitted because she’d decided to stop the chemo. Our focus now was on keeping her comfortable, and we all understood that she would probably not go home again.

He arrived every day with a project for them to do together if Maggie was feeling well enough. Sometimes it was the checkbook, other times organizing photo albums or the New York Times crossword. He always brought flowers from the garden and half of his dinner from the night before to offer to her. The women from Maggie’s bridge club were sending food over to the house on a schedule, as they knew that left to his own devices Russ Cummings would subsist on ginger ale and mixed nuts. He stopped at the desk every night on his way home to make sure we still had his phone number. We dialed it the night Maggie’s breathing started to change. He came in and sat with her while the breaths became less and less frequent. Her struggle ended early the next morning.

Two weeks after Maggie died I was working an evening shift and was about to go home when the phone rang in the nurses’ station. It was Mr. Cummings. He was very apologetic, said that he didn’t know who else he could call at this late hour. After I convinced him he was not bothering us, he told me that he was in a predicament and was too embarrassed to call one of the bridge ladies. When Maggie was first diagnosed he had hired a cleaning woman to come into the house weekly to help with the housekeeping. Anna the cleaning woman had returned to her family in Poland a few days before Maggie died. And now it was 11:30 at night, Mr. Cummings was meeting with his lawyer in the morning, and he had no clean clothes. Having never operated a washing machine, he was daunted by the dials and the shelf full of boxes and bottles. Would I mind terribly talking him through it?

I have accompanied hundreds of patients and families through the process of dying. Some are peaceful, others rough. Some feel natural, as the ending of a long rich life should be, while others, especially when the patient is too young, are unjust and gut-wrenching. Being present and trying to help is what nurses do. I remain somewhat detached, unemotional, by necessity. This enables me to stay focused on my role in their story, which is to pay attention and anticipate patient and family needs.

But here I was, brought to tears by a sweet widower grappling with the mysteries of a washing machine. Maybe it’s because I didn’t see it coming, having taken off my protective shield for the night, the armor that enables us to do this work every day and not give in to despair.

“I don’t know why I didn’t ask Maggie about this before,” he said, “I looked all over for the instructions but she mustn’t have kept them.” My guess would be that he never asked her because he’d spent every minute of the past 52 years loving and protecting her, and probably had more important things to do than pore over major appliance owner’s manuals. He told me he’d just sent away for a how-to booklet he’d read about on the back of a detergent box. But he needed clean clothes now. We talked about darks and lights, hot and cold. About liquid and powder detergent and that you would use one or the other, not both in the same load. He took notes. He described for me the knobs on the front of the machine. I confessed that I really didn’t know the difference between regular and permanent press, so I always aimed for an option in the middle and it seemed to work out just fine.

He assured me that I was a great help. Then he asked, “How would I know which things are delicate?”

I put him on hold to confer with a co-worker. “Hey, Sylvia, do you think a man would have any delicates?”

I had assumed she had been sitting there all along hearing our conversation. Wrong. “Who are you talking to? What are you talking about? If you ask any guy, I am sure he would tell you that men certainly do have delicates.”

I was very relieved that he could not hear this. “I’m talking about clothes, Syl! Mr. Cummings is on the phone with laundry questions. Help me out here—I’m trying to sound a little intelligent and you know I can’t do that alone.”

The only delicate manly clothing we could think of was sweaters. I took the phone off hold and told him not to put any sweaters in the machine. I suggested he put in a load of wash and that I would call him when I got home in an hour and we could talk about the dryer, assuring him that that process would be far less complicated.

I called him back later; the dryer tutorial was indeed simpler once we got past the lint trap cleaning. After we finished the business part of the call we talked about Maggie. How funny and sweet and stubborn she could be. He told me how they met, about their wedding and the honey-moon trip to Niagara Falls. I didn’t know that they had a son, Michael, who joined the Marine Corps and went to Vietnam in 1969. His name is carved on the memorial wall in Washington, DC. Mr Cummings said that he found comfort in knowing that Maggie could finally see their boy again. Hanging up at 1:00 a.m. I wished him luck with the laundry and told him not to hesitate calling the nurses if he found himself in a situation like that again.

A few weeks later I came in to work and found a big envelope with my name on it. Mr. Cummings had dropped it off. The envelope contained a booklet from a detergent company titled, “Tips for Brightening Your Life.” A note was attached: Kathleen, You can keep this. I ordered another copy for myself. Please don’t be offended. You are a very knowledgeable young lady. I just thought that if you have a husband one day he might find it handy. With gratitude, Russ Cummings.

That book is still hanging on the wall over my washing machine. I’m grateful to Mr Cummings for calling me with his laundry dilemma. I taught him how to operate his Maytag. In return he taught me to aim for a life bright enough that I never get around to figuring out the difference between regular and permanent press.

I figure that makes us even.

Kathleen Everett’s book, Heart Knocks, will be published by Simple Truths in early 2010.