Lily

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• May 14, 2017

It is unjust to blame my macabre mind on being an employee at a nursing home for four years.  Going in I was already a cynical, Poe-obssesed and pensive person.  Of course as I got older I’d grow more calloused, mistrusting, and realism would spill over into pessimism.  Of course with being distant I’d grow lonesome with the feeling that no one knows me at all.  Of course with this disposition, working in a nursing home where you’re subjected to the inevitable cold and meaningless ending to this existence, a grim soul would grow darker.  Of course.

There would come a day I would see another body bag rolled down the hallway and feel nothing at all.  Like it was nothing more than the formaldehyde pig fetus I dissected in college biology.  A science project.  A body and nothing more.  And that was one of many moments where I thought, “fuck, I gotta get a new fuckin’ job, because I do not want to become desensitized to the gravity of loss.”

But that’s just who a I am.  And that’s not the nursing home’s fault.

Death scared me not.  Not in the final sense, anyway.  It just became that being around those so close to their final hour made me realize how many people were totally asleep in their own lives.  Their “souls” dead long before their bodies.  I use the term “soul” here very loosely, as I don’t know what the fuck a soul is and therefore I cannot say I even believe it exists.  A persons essence.  Their sparkle.  It’s often extinguished before they are, and after working in that nursing home, I couldn’t help but see the walking dead among us.  Growing up I feared Romero’s flesh eating zombie, but as an adult, I learned there’s a worse kind of zombie, and becoming one was not only realistic but likely.

How could one work there and not get bogged down by the dismal truth of our stories end?  It would get under my skin.  All of it.  The patients.  The system.  The petty people who worked in the dietary department with me.  It was a problem for me.  Because I was nothing at all like Lily.

Lily also worked in the dietary department.  She was a baby faced woman in her forties, originally from the Dominican Republic, married, with two kids.

When you walked into the kitchen to start your shift, you looked at the board to see what your shift assignment or position was for the day.  Certain positions sucked more than others, but generally, our supervisor would rotate us.  But mostly, you’d see who else would be working the food line with you— because that, more than anything, determined how your day would go.  There were a few people I always looked forward to working with, and every one was thrilled if Lily was on the schedule.

During the break on my first day at the nursing home, I grabbed a tray and a sandwich in the employees cafeteria.  A shy, scrawny teenager, I scanned the cafeteria for a place to sit.  It was oddly segregated.  Black people at one table, spanish at another, older white women in one corner, younger white women over there, men with guts at one table, and a couple stragglers who sat alone and didn’t have any sense of love of living on their faces at all.  So I sat at an empty table.  I watched News 12 on TV screen (they played nothing but local News, which would repeat itself over and over and over again).  I remember wanting to run out of there— not an uncommon instinct for me.  I want to run out of anywhere and head home. And then someone placed a tray at my table.  Lily.  She was followed by two other Spanish women, and then a couple more people (of different ethnicities) joined, and it was real clear from the moment I met her Lily had this leadership quality people were drawn to.  I don’t remember saying much, just sitting there listening, and I wouldn’t think anything of this moment until Lily would die.

I wasn’t the only one who looked forward to having Lily on my shift.  All the dietary aids did, as much as our supervisor, the chefs, the dietitians, nurses, and residents.  Because she was one of the hardest working people I’d ever met.  She’d help anyone, it didn’t matter if it was her job or not to do so, or if she was even still on the clock.  She never complained or groveled about how shitty that job was like the rest of us.  She was patient and smart, and wholly compassionate.  Lily was religious yet still had a wicked sense of humor, and picked up on my subtle and sarcastic comments and I was thrilled to have her as an audience member in that hell hole.  Her happiness and warmth was contagious, and never damped by the maladies of the nursing home, making her one of those very rare and special people in the world.

This is not meant to be a cautionary tale, but might as well— Lily died of breast cancer.  Because she was overly hard working, she still worked during treatment, as her once boundless energy was becoming evidently as thinning as her hair.  She told me she noticed the lump months ago and ignored it.  I wanted to shake her.  She was too smart of a person to make that mistake.  Why Lily?  Goddamnit.  She was optimistic, still.  But sometimes hopes are just not enough.  And after a couple weeks of not seeing her, and not hearing good news, I knew the day would come where I’d walk in and someone would tell me she was dead, and I hated going to work even more than I already did.

That place was littered with selfish, dead on the inside, bitter mother fuckers.  God, I couldn’t understand why half the people there (employees or residents) didn’t just kill themselves.  They brought no sparkle to the world, and weren’t even capable of seeing it.  They were black holes, and I couldn’t help but wish they were dead instead.  Fuck!  I’d trade places with Lily.  She was a better person than myself, and I was a better person back then than I am now.  We didn’t deserve this life as much as she did.  Because she was never anything less than grateful.  She’d laugh and listen to your stories, offer fair and logical advice.  She didn’t gossip.  She always busted her ass.  She was not only immune to toxic bullshit, she seemed to cast it away just by being around.

Lily was purely good, happy, and peaceful.  She didn’t have to die to find peace like half of us will.  Lily was exceptional, and I remember, going to the wake, and realizing just how many people saw it too.  As it turns out, I’m not even remotely desensitized to loss. Grief is painful, but the depth of the wound can measure of the amount of joy felt before loss.  I guess I find solace in that.

I still worked there for a year or so after she died.  It really was never the same.  When I finally quit that job, I thought of her less and less.  Now, I hardly think about Lily, to be honest.  I never knew her outside of work, but I was happy to know her at all.  But at the mention of the flower, her face still pops up in my mind.  And I think of her family.  Her husband, her kids, brothers, sisters, whomever…. and I wonder if they carry with them the same light she had, and how that can ripple outward.  I don’t know them, so I simply have no evidence to back it up, but I believe they do, and in that way Lily shines on.  I believe that for no other reason than I think the idea is lovely, and I want to believe it.