There are two main seasons in Phoenix: summer and winter. Our fall and spring are bypassed for long stretches of sameness. Maybe there’s a hint of spring in March, when a frail rain falls, casting a silver net over the neighborhood. Then the sky clears and the flowers smell like baby lotion until the aroma is suffocated in blazing heat. These are our seasons.
Nursing also has its own seasons. They follow no direct weather pattern and occur as suddenly as a hurricane or an earthquake, without much warning. There are brief periods of calm with little activity, just the daily comings and goings of patients—the ones who recover without much pain, without any scars.
Then the changes occur: trees with still branches begin their dance; the full moon wears an orange veil as winds throw blankets of dust like confetti up toward the sky. In daylight the air fades to sepia, like an old photograph. That’s when code bells chime and intensive care units fill to capacity with dying patients and grieving families. The scent of loss is everywhere, and one can’t escape the inevitable season of death.
It begins in the arteries, rushing words without words. Some agree: “It’s too soon for death.” Others welcome the freedom from pain. I want to climb into bed with patients and hold them. In preop, before they lose their legs or breasts, or after, tell them they are still whole.
The season of loss passes like a series of cold breaths, one after another.
The way I practice nursing might have been different if I hadn’t lost my mother in the spring of 1993. The time of year when the nights stay cool and days begin to warm. That’s when I began to bond with little old ladies wearing turquoise rings, silver earrings, and glittering beads. I’d hold their hands and laugh with them like old friends. I’d study their faces, searching for a connection: hair the color of freshly fallen snow, skin paper-thin, eyes shining like topaz, and a dimple on the left when they smiled.
My nursing care changed again in the spring of 1999, when my twenty-five-year old son, Sky, died in a motorcycle crash. All the young patients became a part of me—each one taking up a small space in my heart, trying to fill the emptiness. They brought about poems of music, stanzas without metaphor, making something out of nothing.
It all happened during the season that’s sometimes missed. During the season that hides; the one that smells like jasmine and sprouts tulips from the darkness of the earth. It’s a season that cools the evening sky with its sweet resinous wind while orange tree petals drift to the ground like snow. The season filled with colors; fairy dusters with pink puffs radiating from their centers and clusters of purple wisteria trailing their vines around budding trees. That was the season when my world caved in.
Those deaths affected my career in ways I never understood until now. They left a sickness in my heart that can’t be healed from medicine. No drug can take it away. No narcotic is strong enough to dull the pain.
My patients are the medicine I need: Elderly women with blue hair who want to hold my hand and call me “honey” because no one else is there with them. The old men with salt and pepper sprinkled on the few hairs they have left who tell me a joke because their children are too busy to listen. The young people who are having surgery because they were reckless, the ones I caution and catch myself preaching to—these are the patients who fill my void.
I prepared a young man for surgery last week. Behind the paisley curtains, he cursed as he shook his head from side to side and moaned, sounding more like a pop star singing a song of love and loss.
“Help me, someone! I can’t take this pain any longer!” he yelled.
I pulled a chair close to his bed, placed a cool wash cloth across his forehead, and injected morphine into his intravenous port. I asked him how the accident happened.
“I was riding my dirt bike out in the desert and got carried away performing some fancy stunts. I fractured my left leg.”
I looked at the external fixator attached to his leg, the swelling in his ankle and knee, and the metal pins that disappeared into his bone. I watched his temple pulsating and thought about life, about luck, about my son, and wondered why he had to die.
I took the young man’s calloused hand in mine and listened as he talked about the accident.
“I don’t know what happened. The bike just got away from me,” he said.
The connection between him and Sky went deeper than motorcycles: their bushy eyebrows, big brown eyes and olive complexion, a build referred to as “buff,” and flawless skin. I wanted to save this young man and his parents from a worse fate. I wanted his parents to be immune to the disease that afflicted me.
“You’re playing Russian roulette with your life,” I told him. I felt his hand squeeze mine. His forehead dripped with tiny beads of perspiration.
“My belief is we all die when our time is up. I’m not afraid of death,” he said. “We all have to die sometime.”
I wanted to put my arms around him and talk about a son who followed that belief. A son who thought he had nine lives and joked about his luck—a son who had two motorcycle crashes before the fatal one. A son who kissed me on the cheek two days before he died, for no particular reason. But I didn’t. Instead I just told him to be careful. I don’t want to burden others with my grief.
Twenty-four years have passed since Sky’s death, but the sense of loss lingers, like a potpourri scent that never quite goes away. I want to be reminded of him, the joys and the heartbreaks. I want to be around others with his interests, language, gestures that link them as one. And just like a child who grows up and leaves, so do the patients I connect with. They come and they go like the change of seasons—something to count on, like the first rainfall of the year, or the scent of an early bloom leaving us with a bouquet to remember. What remains at the heart of this is its humanity, its search for connections within the seasons of our lives.