(It's September and weekly religious education has begun in my parish. The call has gone out for another kind of formation: training for those women and men willing and able to bring the Body of Christ to the hospitalized and homebound sick and suffering. My mother-in-law was a woman of strength and dignity. Her last years saw an erosion of her strength. Her innate dignity remained. So it was painful to be with her in the hospital after one of the several strokes she endured before her death. Busy medical professionals cared for her body and did their work well, but who cared for her spirit? Who saw the woman beyond the bed, the tubes, and the monitors? Who called her by name? It was a man whose name I don't remember, but whose kindness I cannot forget. He was a member of the Body of Christ carrying the Body of Christ to his sister in Christ. May many more men and women consider answering the call to follow in his footsteps and become Extraordinary Ministers of Holy Communion.)
I wear my mother-in-law’s charm bracelet. My favorite charm is the one she received in 1946, when she was a college chemistry/piano performance major. There was no science honor sorority at her small Catholic women’s’ college, so she was inducted into a national science honors fraternity. That gold triangle remembers me to the woman from whom illness and age have taken so much.
I spent a week in the hospital with my mother-in-law just after her last stroke. What I saw during that time was an awful working backwards of her baptism.
She was not named; her name was erased. The nurses and techs scanned her ID band before every procedure, just as the grocery clerk scans a bag of apples. The reason for the device is to ensure the patient receives the proper medications in the right doses and in the right order. I understand. But these devices also dictate movement and posture: eyes down, away from the patient’s face and towards the band. Then the eyes move to the LCD screen on the scanner and then to the rolling laptop on which the orders are recorded. Match? Good, and it is good, except that my mother-in-law, whose name is Elizabeth Marie, became a barcode.
In the race to care for the very ill patients on the neurology unit, the time to look into a face and learn a name lost out to the task of getting syringe A into hip A. Easier, then, to call her “dear” or “hon” or “sweetheart” or “grandma,” not one of them particular to Elizabeth herself.
“What name do you give this child?” the Church asks parents at baptism. During the week in the hospital I reflected on the word “this,” as I never had before.
Elizabeth was not bathed; she lay, instead, in her illness. Catheters, O2 cannula, IV’s, and adhesive pads attached to wires attached to beeping, sometimes wailing, monitors immobilize. Couple that with Elizabeth’s stroke-related injuries — bruises, skin tears, and swellings from her fall — and she was bed-bound, as helpless to move freely from one place to another as any infant brought to the baptismal font.
I reflected on the baptisms of my own infants: the gentle lowering into the water. The priest pouring water over their heads, careful to keep the water out of their eyes. Then the babies brought out of the water and swaddled in towels, dressed in clean white garments and anointed with sweet smelling oils.
No one bathed my mother-in-law. I was afraid of hurting her, of further tearing tissue paper skin. I was afraid of dislodging or destroying some piece of medical equipment. The nurses were too busy for baths. No one thought of asking the doctors to help in their brief, brisk rounds. Spilled food spotted her gown and the aromas of illness hung like a miasma around her bed. My sister-in-law and were able to get her clean gowns from time to time, and once, we got someone to help us change the sheets, but no bath, never a bath.
Elizabeth was not dressed; she was stripped. Hospital gowns are designed for the convenience of clinicians. But for a modest older woman, a woman who prizes her dignity, the gown was about humiliation and not health. One day, as we struggled to move Elizabeth up from the foot of the bed — where she regularly, uncomfortably, slid — to the head, the sheets became tangled and her gown rode up. A nurse named Marianne, alone of all the nurses we met that week, kept one arm supporting Elizabeth and used the other to quickly, quietly pull the sheet up and over my mother-in-law’s exposed legs and torso. She joined us, the family members who took turns around the bed, in doing what we knew Elizabeth would want, what we knew she had done for her children, her parents, her husband, what we knew she would do for us.
We dress the baptized who come up out of the water. We dress them in clean clothes, beautiful clothes. We dress them with joy. To be dressed in the clothes of the community is to be joined to the community, accorded the respect of the community.
The only people who consistently looked Elizabeth in the face and called her by name were the men and women, the ministers who came carrying the Body of Christ. They brought the Body into rooms where patients feel, and often are, so cut off the body, both Christ’s and their own.
I was with Elizabeth the morning she was first able to receive communion. There, in the Texas Panhandle, the lay minster was a dark-skinned man with a distinct Indian accent. It was a scene unthinkable in Elizabeth’s childhood, or my own. But this man, who had traversed such distances to settle on the high plains, traversed yet more, as he bent down to Elizabeth and asked, “Do you wish to receive the Body of Christ?”
I heard, “Do you wish to be re-membered to Christ’s community? Do you wish to be restored to your baptismal dignity?”
She nodded her head.
After he slipped the Host into her mouth, he laid his hand tenderly on her head.
Elizabeth wept. And so did I.
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