Passing

Today was a little sad. One of our patients died after being on one of our beds for years. She was a little tiny German woman who had been renting from my company for longer than I've been working there.

I deliver a lot of mattresses to hospice patients, and they die all the time - often within a week of the delivery date. (Sometimes before we can even arrive with the mattress.) And over all it doesn't bother me. My friend Kristin maintains that I'm dead inside. In my opinion death is a fact of life, and the fact that I delivered a bed to a person doesn't usually give me enough contact with them to form much of a relationship. Very often the patient in question will be unconscious the whole time I'm in the room.

This was not the case with the lady whose mattress I picked up today. She was a home care patient, which means she was reasonably healthy but couldn't move around much and needed a prescription mattress to keep her skin healthy. Unfortunately she'd grown accustomed to the sole product line we have which is more than 10 years old. And as a result her equipment would break down a lot.

On one such occasion she called us up to say that her mattress was trying to push her out of bed to the left. I was steadfast in my belief that our mattresses don't run around trying to roll little old ladies out of bed and I tried to blame the crooked bed frame. Well, the bed frame company came and fixed their frame, and the mattress persisted in slowly rolling her to the left. After a week or so of back and forth it turned out she was right. She happened to have some oddball one-off prototype mattress which was designed such that if it got a hole it would slope to the left.

I came by her house fairly regularly for a number of reasons: A noisy pump, a sloping mattress, a "boinging" noise, and our monthly status checkup. Each time I stopped by the process was the same:

1) Call to make an appointment. One of her various caregivers would invariably answer the phone and conduct the appointment making process in some indeterminate version of English.

2) I would show up for the appointment. If it was something which involved changing the mattress she'd always still be in bed. She was always hopeful that I could somehow fix a leak or switch out the mattress without her having to get up. As this isn't ever possible, she was often disappointed. She was always apologetic for having a problem in the first place, and also for making me come back later. I'd make a second appointment.

3) On my way out the door she always offered me a piece of hard candy from a solid and sticky mass in a crystal candy dish in the kitchen. I politely took some the first couple times, but it eventually became so hard to pry a piece loose that the caregiver and I would share a knowing glance and I could thank her without actually taking some. This clever rouse only worked because she couldn't see into the kitchen.

As near as I could tell she spent 95% of her time in bed in a little room in the back of her enormous, beautiful house in San Francisco. And while it's sad to see her go, it's nice to think she's finally made it out of that little room. According to her grandson she died the day before her birthday. I'm sure not anyone else thinks so, but to me it's kind of satisfying to die without a decimal point on your age. I didn't know her that well, but I can say that she lived her years to the fullest, at least chronologically speaking.