The Hospital - Camilla Basham

I spent a majority of my childhood in hospitals, not as a patient, but as the sidekick of my mother as she made her martyred rounds visiting every patient in the Jennings American Legion Hospital. She would hold her rosary and kneel before them praying. I once took a bite of my cookie while she was praying only to have it slapped out of my hand and told, it was rude to eat while someone was speaking to God. I told her I was chewing quietly and was sure he could still hear her. I got evil eyes for that and had to say a dozen Hail Mary’s.

I grew up in a small southern town of just over one thousand people. My mom knew most, if not all of the inhabitants. I always thought growing up in a hospital was strange, but not as strange as when mom decided to bring the sick and elderly who were without family home with her to allow them to die, not alone in a hospital bed, but in the warmth of the house my grandfather built for my mom and dad when they got married.

My brothers, who were both carpenters, built on an addition to the back of our house. There my mom went to work installing handrails, ramps, special toilets, sit down showers, and began furnishing it with donated hospital beds and wheelchairs. She did none of this for profit but simply because, as she put it, "There but for the grace of God go I." I must have heard that phrase a dozen times a day.

A stream of the dying made their way through that room: grandparents, distant cousins, the local mail carrier's dying mother, the neighbor's aunt, you name it. I often set next to them reading my homework out loud because mom said that hearing was the last thing to go and it would be nice for them to hear the voice of a child if they still could.

If they were well enough my mom would wheel them to the dinner table, colostomy bags, IV's, oxygen tanks, whatever was attached to them came along and became as much a part of the table as the place settings. It wasn't all that odd for someone to keel over and die before desert. The first time it happened was a little shocking, but soon we all knew the drill: A moment of silence as mom called the coroner on the old rotary phone, then I would collect their belongings, dad would prop open the front door and clear a path for a stretcher, my brothers would carry the body back to the bed which they would roll near the front door while covering the face with a blanket and mom would call the next of kin if there were any.

The coroner, a big fat man with a red face and a blaze of messy white hair would walk in patting his belly and say with the deepest of southern drawls, "Well, I got to tell you, Dorothy Duhon, something smells mighty good." I had to assume he was talking about my mom's cooking and not dead old Mrs. Thibodeaux lying just a foot away from him. My mom in her gentile southern voice, with not an inkling of awkwardness at having dinner on the table, a dead body in the room and the coroner presumable inviting himself for dinner, would say, "You come sit down Cleveland and I'll fix ya a plate. I made plenty." He would scratch his head and say, "Oh, I'd love to but I guess I'd better go, you know, with the body and all." At this my mom would smile, pat him on the back and say, "You wait just one second, hon." She would run off to the kitchen and return with one of at least a hundred huge old margarine tins she had saved to reuse and hand it to him. "There's a little bit of everything in there for you, Cleve. Enjoy." With that he would thank her, bid us all farewell and leave with the body. Mom would return to the table, say a prayer for the deceased, reheat our food and in her southern drawl say, "Now let's get back to the business of dinner and no one gets up until they've eaten everything on their plate because..."

"I know mom, it's a sin to leave food on your plate."