VNA – Hospice training

Memories from 35 years ago:
I was floating in a dark void. My senses shut down. My awareness of my surrounding disconnected… Then someone used ammonia smelling salts that triggered a reflex to breathe deeply, in and out, even in an unconscious state. I started hearing voices. Jim are you okay. Did you hit your head on the floor. Jim, talk to us. My now open eyes were trying to focus on the faces and sounds that surrounded me. And I suddenly realized what had happened. It was the last day of my Hospice training, and the final assignment was a visit to a funeral home where the students were asked to pick out a casket for themselves and then visit the embalming room in the basement. My casket was grand indeed. Copper with a lining of silk like material that invited one to lie down and nap… for a very long time.

I looked over my shoulder and watched the other students that were more than twice my age, and all females. I thought to myself and wondered how this was affecting them. I promised myself that I would stay vigilant and if anyone appeared to be struggling with this reality event, I would be there for them. Little did I know that it was my fellow students that would pull through for me in the minutes ahead.

We stayed together as a team and made our way to the shadowed depths of the funeral home. A place where time had etched its signature, the embalming room. As we made our way to the basement the air stuck to my skin. Heavy with the weight of memories and whispered secrets. As I stepped across the threshold, the scent of antiseptic and aged wood filled my nostrils and enveloped me. The embalming table stood at the room’s center; its surface polished to a dull gleam.

The drain in the floor, encrusted with rust, seemed to whisper of countless bodies that had lain there, lifeless vessels awaiting their final transformation. And there stood the embalming machine. Its brass fittings gleamed dully, and the rubber hoses coiled like serpents. And in my imagination, it pumped the preservative elixir through veins, sealing the fragile vessels against decay with a rhythmic hum.

The basement’s chill seeped through the floor, numbing my toes as I imagined the embalmer at work. His movements deliberate, respectful, as he prepared the departed for their final journey. The room held echoes of whispered prayers, tear-streaked faces, and the quiet acceptance of mortality. And when the embalming was complete, the room would exhale, a sigh of release or perhaps relief. Its walls absorbed the stories, the grief, and the unspoken farewells. For in that dim, subterranean chamber, life and death danced their eternal waltz, and the past clung like cobwebs to the rafters.