The patient who wanted to hear the rain
Details changed, as always, for someone who can't speak for himself anymore.
A few weeks ago I cared for a retired fisherman in his last days. He wasn't talking much by then. Mostly he slept, and when he woke he'd look toward the window. His daughter told me he'd spent his whole life listening to weather, reading it from the deck, and now the room was sealed and quiet and climate controlled.
So we opened the window. Just a crack. It was raining, the soft kind that barely makes a sound, and the sound filled the room anyway. His breathing changed. His hand, which had been clenched on the blanket for two days, opened.
I've been a hospice nurse for nine years and a Zen student for longer, and I still catch myself wanting to fix things. Adjust the pillow, check the line, find one more task. That afternoon there was nothing to fix. There was only rain, an old man, his daughter and me, sitting together while the weather did what it had always done.
He died that night, with the window still open.
Dogen says to study the self is to forget the self. I think I understood it a little better in that room than in years on the cushion. Nobody needed me to be anything. I just needed to be there, and to let the rain in.
What I chant when someone asks
As a hospice nurse I don't bring my practice into patients' rooms. That's a firm line for me. Their faith, their dying, their way.
But last week a woman I'll call June asked me, around two in the morning, whether I prayed. She'd been raised Methodist, hadn't been inside a church in fifty years, and didn't want the chaplain because 'he'll want me to say things.' She wanted something with no strings attached.
So I asked if I could offer her the words I say for myself every morning, and she said yes. I sat down, rested my hand near hers on the blanket (not on it; she didn't like to be touched), and said the metta phrases very slowly:
May you be filled with loving-kindness.
May you be safe from inner and outer dangers.
May you be well in body and mind.
May you be at ease and happy.
She closed her eyes. After the third round she said, 'Do it for my son,' and gave me his name. Then her sister. Then the night nurse who'd been 'a bit sharp' with her. Then, quietly, 'And for you.'
We went around like that for maybe twenty minutes, adding people. I have sat thousands of hours on a cushion and I'm not sure I've ever practiced so well.
She died two days later, on a Thursday afternoon, with her son beside her. I wasn't on shift. When I heard, I washed the mugs in the break room slowly, the way my teacher taught me, and said the phrases one more time with her name at the front of the line.