Catherine
Large institutions easily become de-humanised. You can be made to feel like a FedEx package lost in a self-complicating global system. Checking your parcel’s progress leads back to the discovery you are lost and invisible; or, like an astronaut detached like an orphan from the mothership and whirling away from it into empty space.
When I checked in to the ward for my first three-day treatment the signs were not propitious. In fact it was a very human place but it had forgotten itself. It was late afternoon, shift-change approaching and dark. Most patients who could, had left for Christmas. But the nurses sitting before computers at their station ignored me, seemingly un-programmed yet for the real world. When we found the person responsible for admitting new patients, she looked up reluctantly and uttered her first words in a sad lament: ‘I haven’t had my lunch yet.’ I looked at my companion and we saw the funny side which began the change. Suddenly from off-stage, a thin, bouncy, hyper-energised Black orderly nurse manifested with a beaming smile and a loud sing song Louisiana accent. She introduced herself as Catherine and welcomed me as if the whole hospital had been waiting all day for this moment.
I could not speak with her without imitating her accent which delighted her. While she was clicking the links on her handheld computer, I learned she was a mother of nine with twenty-two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren and that she would be feeding them all for Christmas Day. I asked her what was going to be on the menu wondering if she would invite me. She reeled off a list of Cajun dishes including one that sounded different and which she told me was pigs’ testicles. Thankfully, it seemed as if no one really liked them. They were included to remind the family they were descendants of slaves and how their ancestors had been dehumanised through those cruel centuries. Fleetingly, I thought of the Na Mishtana, the four ritual questions of the Passover meal passing on the collective memory of their race. But Catherine said no, they didn’t do that, They wouldn’t talk about the days of slavery, she said, but they would celebrate their freedom in song and feasting. By then I was checked in.
She was filled with faith in humanity, delighting in herself and where was God not for her? Her brief epiphany ( I didnt see her again as angels tend to disappear once they have delivered their message) impacted me with the full feminine force of reality. Not the politic force but the deeper power of nature expressed in the Black Madonnas across cultures everywhere. Generative, caring, mightily resilient and unsentimental, a match to male trickery, combining intense compassion and full detachment, like creation and death. Like the dark matter of the universe that science cannot understand.
After my induction, I have been receiving good and kind care. Catherine reminded me of the force beyond efficiency that we also need to be blessed by in order to feel ourselves included in a true healing process. Along with the magical science of medicine, though less measurable, there is the rendezvous with the feminine aspect of God. It often appears when we are facing our weakness, dependency and uncertainty. Loving beyond bounds.
