maggots

People like to hear about the maggots. It’s a good story, and I’m a good storyteller. Their faces register horror and shock while they beg me to continue, asking, “What did you do?” I tell them, because even as they pretend to cover their ears and playfully say, “I’m going to be sick,” they want to hear the story. It’s gross. It’s shocking. And it’s just far enough outside of their reality that it doesn’t really scare them. So I tell them how I went to visit a patient and change the dressings on her legs, and when I took the dressings off, a swarm of maggots came crawling out of the wounds. I tell them how I sat there, stunned, for a whole minute before I did anything, and I tell them that my experience as a mom was a lot more helpful than my experience as a nurse because I had to just swallow my panic and not react. I tell them the woman was very old and I was kneeling on the floor and didn’t want her to get scared and kick me in the face, so I just kept saying calmly, “I’m almost done, I just have to clean it,” while I sprayed the maggots with saline spray and wiped them off with gauze. I tell them all of this and they say things like, “I don’t know how you do it,” and, “I could never do that,” and that comforts them because most likely, they won’t ever have to do that.

But they will have to eventually do some of the things I do, and that’s why they don’t like my other stories. Which is too bad, because the other stories are my favorite–they’re what I love most about my job, and why I love being a hospice nurse. The stories of family members crying quietly at the bedside as I place my hand on a dying person’s cool forehead and say, “God bless you on your journey.” The stories of siblings arguing over what underwear their mother should be wearing when she gets to heaven–one sister chose red and another sister thought their mother would hate that. The one where I sat by a man’s bed, holding his hand, whispering to him, “Your wife loves you so much. You lived such a good life. It’s time to rest now, and it’s ok.” The one where I nodded and gently told a man and his children that yes, she’s getting close, her vital signs are out of range and her breathing is irregular and it will be any time now. The one where I hugged a woman my own age caring for her mother and said, “You’re doing a great job,” and held her as she collapsed into sobs. 

Nobody wants to hear about how I love to wash a body after pronouncing it dead. I know because I’ve tried, and it’s clear they just want me to stop. I try to tell them how sacred it is. How intimate. How hard it can be to maneuver dead weight into a pair of khaki pants and cinch a belt around an emaciated waist because that’s what the daughter picked out so that’s what I was going to make sure her dad was wearing. How grateful a family is when I tell them I’m finished and they come back in the room and say, “Oh, she looks like Mom again. Thank you for putting the clips in her hair,” or “Thank you for shaving his face; he was always clean-shaven and we hated seeing the hair grow in,” or “I know it doesn’t matter but it’s so nice to see her in her favorite sweater.” 

These stories are quieter, more fragile, make the air feel cooler. They remind people that we are all going to die, that everyone we love will die, too, and that at some point, we will be tasked with caring for someone we love until it’s time to say goodbye. 

And people don’t want to think about that. As horrifying as it sounds to be face to face with a wound full of maggots, for most people a quiet moment with a silent body in its final hours is much, much scarier.

So I tell the story about the maggots. Like I said, it’s a good story. And it’s the kind of story you can go home and rest assured that you will never, ever have to deal with.

But when you do have to deal with death, when it comes, as it always does, I’ll be there to tell you what happens, to help you say goodbye, to care for the body in such a way that you’ll be able to tell people you got to see your mom or grandfather or niece or uncle or best friend look exactly the way you remembered them. And you’ll be grateful for that, and that’s a story I’ll keep close to me. 

Because that’s the kind of story I like best.