"Old Woman Sitting," RembrantThirty-six Roman Catholic patients received communion from Wanda whose tortoise skin hangs lose over a right mandible clearly misshapen. Cancer of the tongue spread to the jaw. Saving her life meant disfiguring her appearance and her speech. It has taken me years to train myself to understand her; even now, I smile and nod, not infrequently, through my miscomprehension. She keeps Jesus in her pocket (in a pyxis, of course), that smells faintly like mothballs and is light coated with cat hair. Wanda brings me cat toys for my cat and homemade pie and rabbit cakes at Easter, religious costume jewelry from old, dead nuns and worn prayer cards to dead saints I have never heard of. Wanda tells how she does not believe in gossiping and then proceeds to for far too long. And she tells me about what a bad patient her husband Joe is since his stroke; she herself has been a patient through enough surgery and chemo and radiation and rehabilitation to know a good patient when she sees one. Joe is not. But he is a man she says, he cannot help it. She loves him as he is. She loves me.
I try to make a point of sitting in the office when she volunteers to bring Roman Catholic communion the first three Fridays of every month so that I can listen as she talks to me. She seems to need someone to listen. On the forth, she drives to her childhood home parish, St. Boleslaw’s, or the like, bringing Jesus to the elderly homebound there who speak only Polish. I wonder if their ears, perhaps a bit more muted, but certainly more patient then mine can understand her better in her parent’s tongue. I imagine they do not care so much. They are grateful for her companionship, for the familiar guttural cadences of their youth, for presence, for the Jesus that she brings.
Lately, it seems as though Wanda’s walk is becoming misshapen too. Her gait lists to and fro; every step a seeming victory over pain. After serving thirty-six patients she seems exhausted. I invite her to sit in the other office chair used by my colleague for our talk. Always, the talk. There is her neighbor who she dose not care for but wants to help but who will not let her help… Joe has been particularly difficult not following doctor’s orders. We drift, for the first time, into stories of the other young men who wanted to marry her before she met Joe. There were two of them during World War II. One turned out to have a drinking problem and a violent streak. She left him at the first hint of danger. The other, even his mother thought would turn out to be no good. She told Wanda so and begged her not waste her life on him. She was smart, she did not. Then she met Joe. He was a keeper. “But,” she continued, “it turned out I couldn’t have any children, the fibroids,” whispering and pointing to locus of her shame.
Wanda really never wanted to get married, she confides. She was smart in school and wanted to be a doctor to heal people. She thought her mother secretly encouraged her. Her father, though, would hear nothing of it. To have a good life in this good new country of theirs his daughter needed a husband. “But I’m smart,” she told me, “I would have been a good doctor. I care about people. ”
My colleague has been waiting impatiently for his chair to do his charting. I want to listen further to her stories. She is growing older and frailer and more misshapen by the day. She knows what is coming. She is hard to understand. People have a hard time listening. She is smart. She has no children’s children to leave her stories with. I am honored. She loves me. Jesus is not in her pocket.
