Nonfiction by Pama Lee Bennett
I’m standing beside a gurney in the emergency room, a gurney on which my great-aunt, age 104, is lying. Some preliminary tests have been done. A doctor we haven’t seen before enters and stands opposite me across the gurney. He doesn’t address her but begins talking over her to me.
“She appears to have a kidney condition, but I’m not sure we can do much to help her at her age.”
I look down at her, and back to him.
“Doctor, I’d like you to do for her whatever you would do for me, or yourself, or your own mother.”
“Well, your aunt is very old. She is probably at the end of her life.”
I think to myself, wait for it, wait for it.
My aunt looks up at him sweetly and says, “Doctor, I would like to live. But if I die, it’s all right.”
The look on his face: priceless.
He mumbles that certain procedures might injure her delicate body, but he can order some medication. I say, “Ok, I can understand that, but let’s do what we can.”
He leaves the room.
He can’t know that she walked on her own and lived on her own until 100. That she loves to play Skip-Bo with family members every week. That she reads voraciously and still keeps in touch with former students from her days as a one-room school teacher. That she hushes me in conversation if Tiger Woods comes on the golf channel and she wants to watch him play.
I can’t know that nine months from now, she will die suddenly and quietly of natural causes one afternoon, just short of 105.
I can’t know that. But neither can the doctor.
Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech-language pathologist living in Sioux City, IA. She has taught English at summer language camps in Poland and at a school there in 2019. Her work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evening Street Review, The Bluebird Word, The Penwood Review, and others.
