By Michael Ortiz Hill
There is a modest power to the random act of kindness that greatly outweighs the smallness of the gesture — an unexpected reminder that beauty exists when the world itself seems to be fading into the distance. Beauty is a salve for a fragmented world, a gift to the giver as well as the receiver.
Being surprised by beauty is also a gift, especially in the hospital, where patients are often severely ill or distraught. An orchid, green-veined, left at the nurses station by a patient’s husband. The fragrance of a bearded iris on a bedside table. Packing an old man’s bedsore with saline gauze while an elephant is birthed on the tv screen. Cupping a yellow and black spider in my hand to deliver outside to the flowers. Or just the light that rises in anyone’s face when they feel recognized and connected with. Beauty is an oasis. In it is found replenishment.
Smuggling beauty to vulnerable patients often requires small conspiracies.
The only way to learn Romanian is in bed,” said Sylvia, my Romanian nurse’s aide.
“For God’s sake, Sylvia, I don’t want to learn Romanian. I just want you to translate a few lines. And please don’t make them too sexy. It’s a quote from the Koran. And besides, the patient is eighty-five years old. And demented. Like you.”
“Pot calling the kettle black,” she sniffed. “Okay. What is it?”
“If I had but three loaves of bread, I’d sell one and buy hyacinths, for they would feed my soul.”
“What? That’s not sexy? And why do you want to give the Koran to an old Romanian? Is she a Muslim? There are no Muslims in Romania, I can tell you that.”
“No, she’s Catholic. And out of her mind and lonely. She could use a little beauty.”
“Hyacinths?”
“Almost.”
Sylvia translated the Koran and I transcribed it onto a styrofoam cup. I’d pilfered some flowers from the chapel and went to Mrs. Codrescu’s room on the fifth floor. I’d admitted Mrs. Codrescu the previous night. Intractable nausea and change of consciousness. Her daughter nervously left mom behind, nervous because mom was so confused and didn’t speak a word of English. I wanted to leave the flowers for her daughter as much as for Mrs. Codrescu so she knew someone had an eye on her mother.
When I arrived in her room with my little bouquet — feeling, I confess, like a paramour — I was surprised to find her gone.
I went to the nurse’s station and asked the secretary, “What happened to the Romanian woman in 545?”
“Romanian?” replied Donna. “I don’t know nothing about no Romanian.”
I paused and regrouped. “Do you have any lonely, really screwed up patients who might like a flower?” I decided it best not to mention the Romanian Koran.
“Lots. Lots and lots. What kind you’d like? There’s a Mexican woman in 516. She’s completely nuts.”
“Thanks.”
As I approached 516 I was hoping the patient was asleep. My Spanish is not good enough to explain why a strange guy with a stethoscope felt compelled at 5 a.m. to bring a flower in a cup inscribed in a language which he did not know. The woman could simply wake up to the mystery of it. And the beauty. The message in Romanian wouldn’t matter, flowers have a beauty everyone recognizes.
Sometimes serendipity just happens. The Mexican woman in 516 turned out, in fact, to be Mrs. Codrescu — alert, not the least agitated, looking as if she’d been expecting me. Raising my finger to my lips and handing her my gift, I pointed at the Koranic verses and nodded my head as she read them. My role was simple: The village idiot had arrived. Her smile was simplicity itself.
From The Craft of Compassion at the Bedside of the Ill. Stories by Michael Ortiz Hill, who delivered a Braille origami crane, a few flowers and an Arabic poem (translated) at the bedside of patients most in need of a little beauty — the dying, mad, demented or without hope.
Michael Ortiz Hill is an RN and an initiated medicine man among Shona and Zulu tribal people in central Africa. He teaches the craft of compassion to individuals and groups.
Photo courtesy Mike Baird
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