Miriam Hansen—Room number 112

I spent most of my life telling people what they didn’t want to hear. When I registered for nursing school in 1948 I had no idea how much bad news I would have to bring to people’s lives. If I’d have known it, I might’ve become a teacher instead.

It isn’t easy telling a mother her child isn’t going to survive a bout with scarlet fever. Or informing a husband his wife’s MS is only going to get worse. Bringing bad news to the family of someone who had so much potential only a few days before will forever be the ugliest part of being a nurse.

Don’t get me wrong, my job was filled with lots of good things, too. I got to see babies being born, red-faced and full of promise. I got to see people with life-threatening injuries walk out of the hospital months later with nothing more than a Band-Aid on the inside of their elbow. I got to see beautiful young women with breast cancer leave the hospital in full remission. There was plenty of good, for sure. But, telling people about the bad things was always the part that haunted me the most.

It takes a special person to care for a stranger deeply enough to want to heal them. Compassion is a human trait that’s innate in nearly everyone, but there’s a particular level of empathy required to be constantly surrounded by sick people and still see each one of them as a person, rather than an illness. Doctors have it to some extent, but it’s different with them. They can separate themselves because their hands aren’t physically connected to sickness every single day. They aren’t catching the vomit, holding the needle, or washing the bedsores. That’s what nurses are for.

It used to keep me from sleeping, thinking about a particular patient and wondering if the second-shift nurse was caring for them as much as I did. At first, I thought I was the only one who worried about what happened to my patients after I walked out the hospital door at night. But it didn’t take me long to figure out I was far from alone. Every nurse I’ve ever known worries about their patients, some just show it more than others. For certain nurses, it’s easier to pretend to build an emotional wall between themselves and their patients. For whatever reason, they think it’ll make it easier on them if things go awry.

But it never does. It just makes them better at hiding how they feel.

I retired from nursing after working for forty-five years, but I stayed at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital as a volunteer until I was seventy-nine. Instead of doing the hard stuff, I got to bring people magazines and books. I got to sit at their bedside and talk with them. When I was a nurse, I always listened my patients, but it took becoming a volunteer to truly be able to hear them. Once I started volunteering, it didn’t take long for me to discover the difference between listening and hearing. Listening involves receiving a request and doing something to satisfy it. Hearing, however, isn’t quite so literal. It doesn’t require any action. Instead, it requires only time and attention. Hearing someone means letting them give you a piece of their soul through a story or a thought. It doesn’t mean you have to fix something, it just means you have to open your ears and your heart and try to understand who they are on the inside. I got real good at hearing people in the last twenty years of my life, and I learned a lot about the world as a result.

The sad truth is that most people are too busy to hear these days. They just go about their business, listening to the requests of their boss, their child, their spouse, their neighbor, and trying to fulfill those requests with some kind of action. But they don’t really hear anything in the process. They don’t have the chance to open their hearts to someone else’s life. There’s no time for it. Their own life is moving too fast. But what they fail to see is that it only takes a minute to open your heart wide enough to hear someone. It only takes a single question to spark a story that takes but a moment to be heard.

There’s so much to be learned from even the quickest glimpse into someone else’s life. This is especially true of children. Our children deserve to be heard more than anyone else. I wish parents wouldn’t just listen to their child’s requests and try to fulfill them with mindless immediacy. Instead, I wish they would stop and really hear their child. Hear the desires of their child’s heart, hear about her accomplishments, her struggles and fears, no matter how small or trivial they might seem to grown-up ears. Because to a child, these things are the world, and the only way you can learn what a child is like on the inside is to hear them talk about their world.

But most people can’t do it. They can’t hear because they’re too busy listening.

In all my days on this Earth, the only other person I found who understood how to hear people as well as me was K’acy McGee. From the moment they wheeled me into Pine Manor, I watched her hear people. She could take the smallest moment and fill it with a tiny slice of someone’s life by asking a simple question that would invoke a memory. She did it to me countless times, without me even realizing what she was doing. Later, I’d get to thinking about our conversation and realize what she’d done, and it would always make me smile. For the first time in my life, I was the one who felt heard.

That girl was special to me, and I like to think I was special to her, too. Not only did she hear about my life, but I heard about hers as well. She told me about her father and her sister and everything they’d been through. Sometimes, she’d come in on her days off and play her bass guitar for me, its deep notes echoing off the walls of my tiny room. When it got close to the end, she’d stay with me, long into the night. She’d read to me, or we’d watch TV together, or she’d share some special memory, usually about her momma’s cooking.

I knew about her and she knew about me. We heard each other in equal measure. I don’t know why God made her like he did, but I sure was glad to be a part of it.

The night I died, I told her how important she is and that the world is lucky to have her walking around on it. I asked her not to be sad about me dying, but to be happy for the chance to know the next person who’s going to sleep in my bed. I assured her they’ll have a different story to tell, and their story will somehow bring her all of the happiness she deserves.

I promised her the next person to fill my room will offer her the one thing she needs but doesn’t yet have: love.

I told her all this without a second’s hesitation because you never know when and how love will come into your life. And, sometimes, if someone tells you it’s coming, it’s easier for you to find.

I saw the displeasure in Sondra’s eyes that night as she stood behind K’acy only long enough to hear my promise. But it didn’t matter, because Sondra is one of those wall builders who never puts faith in her own emotions. She just tries to hide behind the wall and ignore how she feels. She offered me nothing but a small, disapproving shake of the head before turning her back on us and walking out of the room, no doubt to pretend she didn’t care.

An hour later, I was gone. K’acy ushered me out with all the compassion any human being could ever ask for. I saw it and I felt it. And I understood.