I didn't know him well.

But I am so thankful I knew him at all.  He was in his late seventies and had recently been told he had to have dialysis for kidney failure.  He did go to dialysis for a short time but decided he couldn't live that way.  He wanted to leave the nursing home he was in and go home to die. 

And so he did.  I was there shortly after he got home that first day.  He was sitting in a wheelchair looking out his front window.  Outside the window was a wonderful lake view.  His home was steps from the shore.  It was a tiny home but with a view like that, no one noticed the house anyway.

I sat next to him and noticed that on the table in front of him was a drink he was sipping on.  It was a beer.  I thought then and there, this is why I love being a hospice nurse.  He was doing what he wanted and I couldn't have been happier for him.

The next day he was in bed.  It was a hospital bed in the living room so he could look out the windows all the time.  He never got out of that bed again.  Never had another beer.  Three weeks after he came home, he quietly died in the early morning hours.

Before he died, his sister in law told me that he wanted to be cremated.  Then he would be tossed in the lake.  He had put his wife's ashes in the lake a few years earlier.  It wasn't legal but what can you do, as his nurse I simply nod my head and secretly wish I have such a romantic ending in my life one day. 

He lived in a beautiful place.  I was honored to be there with him even though the time was short.  For some reason, I don't think I will forget him.  Looking out the window, drinking a beer.  It's a wonderful life.  Not a bad death either.

I forgot what I was doing....

Until today when I was driving around between patients.  It was then that I remembered the People of the Little Trees.  I meant to post about them a very long time ago.

It's the beginning of December and despite the short dark and dreary days, there is a noticeable light in the rooms in the nursing home. It starts slowly at the beginning of the month, though some start right after thanksgiving. First one and then another until nearly every single room has a lighted little Christmas tree.  It's usually placed on the nightstand, one of two or three pieces of furniture crammed in the crowded nursing home rooms.  There, piercing the dark long nights, shine the colorfully bright tiny lights of tiny trees.  It's quiet and dark in the hallways and the silence is usually punctuated only by the occasional dinging of a call light or the loud snore of one of the residents. 

Those are the nights that I loved working the most. The night time, the little trees, the tiny lights glowing in a world that in the dark, could be almost anything.  Not until the hall and room lights went on again in the morning would you see the harsh awful reality of the nursing home.  Only then would you know that the snores you heard that almost comforted you in their lulling regularity at night were coming from a man with severe dementia that doesn't know where he is.  At night in the world of the little trees, he was normal, a man snoring while fast asleep in the winter night.

The tiny little trees with their glowing lights stayed on constantly.  No one turned them off or on, they kept their comforting lights on until well after Christmas.  They stayed until the New Year or until a family member came to pick them up, put them in a box and take them away until the next holiday season came around.  Some family members didn't pick them up and the staff was left to put them somewhere out of the way so that the limited space in the room wasn't taken up by something so frivolous. 

During the month of December, the time of the little trees, people were different. Staff were different. They put up with the more limited space taken up by the little trees.  Patients were different. They were quieter at night.  Perhaps the staff and the patients were both comforted by the light, the glow emanating from the tiny trees.  Maybe it was the fact that Christmas brought both of  them lovely memories.  Whatever it was, the people of the tiny trees were different when they had the trees with them.  They were happier. Calmer. More patient and tolerant. Some snored louder.  And their nurse, at least one of them, was delighted each year to be in the land of the little trees, a time when there was comfort in a place that was so often unbearable.