Last night I had dinner with the Death Doulas.
I haven’t talked about this before, it’s felt kind of private. I finished my training in November. As of November, I’m officially ready to go, ready to sit and be companionable to someone who is getting ready to, well, to die. It’s February. I haven’t had any takers. More to the point, I haven’t had any offers.
The head office (do I dare I call it the Death Star?) asked if I’d be interested in working at the palliative care unit of Mt. Sinai hospital, where there is always someone or someones in need of the thing I am now specially trained for.
Mt. Sinai? Inconvenient, sure, but I was born there (even though, rather disturbingly, Big Edie does not remember that fact. Allow me to point out that I am an only child), so I like the poetry of that. Of course, that’s the same reason I moved to Jackson Heights. This is where the folks lived when I was born. Needless to say, sometime soon I have to take a good long look at my thinking processes, but in any event, I said yes.
Last night was the annual Death Star Death Doulas Dinner. I sat opposite a woman named Judy, who, it turned out, grew up on the opposite side of the same town as I did. Our lives started in the same place, took very different paths and wound up in the exact same place at the exact same time. Not the first time something like that has happened to me. Levittown haunts me. I fear I will move to Italy and Levittown will continue to haunt me.
Today, in the rain, I started jumping through the hoops required to work at Mt. Sinai. The volunteer coordinator I’d met with last week at East 100th Street gave me lots of papers to fill out and an appointment for a free, but required, physical at…
…East 102nd Street, which consisted of more paperwork, having my blood pressure and pulse taken and that little TB skin pop and band-aid on my left arm. That nurse then sent me to…
…East 96th Street for a blood test to see if I am now, or have I ever been afflicted with measles, mumps or chicken pox. No amount of yes, I remember having it in grade school was going to convince them. I gave them the right arm and left shortly with a second band-aid and took the 5th Avenue bus downtown, passing the Mt. Sinai Children’s wing and sending a prayer up to where ever it is I send prayers up to, that I would not find myself sitting with a child in the palliative care unit.
It happens. Kids die.
I hope I can be who they need me to be if it comes up, but I also hope it doesn’t come up. For my sake, and for the sake of the kids.
On my right was the children’s playground in Central Park and I thought, How lovely. That’s much better.
Until a cab with an ad for Private Eyes drove by reminding me where I came from. I turned my head again, and watched the Guggenheim go by, where afternoons were spent trying to get cultured, hoping it would rub off by mere proximity as I spiraled first up the building and then down, stopping at every restroom to vomit because of the good brown dope I’d snorted in the cab on the way there.
A small boy pressed the button on the bus and I got off on…
…East 76th Street for the Quest Labs where I was asked to leave my purse and coat in the waiting room and pee in a cup. That sort of request used to send me into a blind panic. It also used to send me driving around town with old boyfriends trying to find someone with clean pee to pee in a cup for them on their way to check in with their probation officer. But those were other lifetimes and I digress. Now, you can take your cell phone and your wallet in with you, but do not wash your hands, do not flush until your pee has gotten the hairy eyeball once over from the Quest nurse.
Normally I don’t care about hand washing so much, because when I pee, I pee in the bowl, not on my hands. Except when I’m peeing in a cup. Then I always pee on my hands. Just a little, but it always happens. So I waited, with pee hands, until Nurse Ratchet was sure it was really my pee I was coming out of the single stall bathroom with and then I was allowed to wash my hands. By then, the pee had dried, so whatever damage pee does to your hands, was already done.
People think that this kind of service, working with the dying, is depressing. Or morbid. But I laughed my ass off last night with those people. They’re bright and funny and loving. They were each there for their own personal reasons.
My therapist, former therapist, from back when I had a job and the kind of medical insurance that covered most of his $275 hour so we could spend week after week after week talking about my relationship, or lack thereof, with my father. And how that effected my romantic life, or lack thereof, today. That therapist’s office is on East 76th Street. I’d walked right past it without even realizing it, until I recognized the florist at the end of the block.
Somehow, at least for this rainy day, I’ve come through the other side. Somehow? In a word, service.
