The air weighed down on me as I made my way through that deserted parking lot; I have always thought it strange that in Autumn, a season of change, of transitions, the world can feel so stagnant. But on I went, trudging through crumpled leaves and fragments of thought and goose poop until I finally reached the workers’ doors of Lakeview Regional Medical Center. Of course, it made sense why everything was so empty- no one wanted to be at the hospital on Thanksgiving. Except for me, then.
A week previously I had concocted my daring, dastardly plan to avoid having to spend too ample an amount of time at my family’s holiday gathering listening to the screams of children and the personal inquiries from well-meaning but completely unfamiliar relatives who are family only in name. My place of work, the hospital kitchen, needed some poor soul to trade away his family time and pumpkin pie for a Thanksgiving shift, and I, ever generous (and newly grateful for the American work ethic), *dolefully* agreed to take on the burden; breaking free of the shackles of family commitment was even sweeter knowing I would be payed to not have to subject myself to the horrors of a house full of long term acquaintances, awkward conversations and dry turkey. So off to work I went.
My hospital is a wonderfully stereotypical medical care facility: there are some doctors, there are some patients, the fluorescent light bulbs lend to the surreal quality the off-color walls manufacture, and absolutely no one likes the food. Unsurprisingly, the fact that it is Thanksgiving does not do much to eradicate this apathy. I knew I had to get in and out of every room quickly if I did not want to be the target of some patient who realized he could have been at home enjoying succulent turkey with golden crisp skin and oven-hot rolls drenched in butter instead of being bedridden with a skimpy roast beef sandwich. I knew and I did, until room 412.
I knocked briskly on the door and listened to my own voice, hoarse but firm, as it called out “Dietary!” to the void of possibility that lay beyond the closed door. There was no reply, but that was not uncommon- people must sleep at some point. Falling back into my usual habits, I slipped into the room like a phantom, ready to deliver the tray with a practiced stealth as to not awaken the patient, but when I glanced her way, it was not a sleeping woman that I saw. I looked at her timidly at first, but soon I was transfixed by that mottled chest, and I stared waiting for it to rise. To fall. It was in vain.
I place the tray down quickly, and I exit the room. “I must be crazy,” I think. I try and rationalize: I’m not a doctor. No one stopped me from entering, she could not have been dead. I had to be wrong. She couldn’t be dead. I repeat it over and over again, but that does not erase the woman I saw with a body bag coming off the elevator. It does not replace the words I heard when the woman turned to a nurse and said, “It looks like someone isn’t having a good Thanksgiving.”
I have always hated those ‘so I’m thankful for’ essays that seem to only ever materialize around November, and with God as my witness, that's not what this is. I don't believe in seasonal gratitude, I don't think that 'Thanksgiving' itself should necessarily be celebrated and taught in schools the way I learned it when native peoples ended up dying hundreds-fold because settlers came, brought diseases and largely left gratitude by the wayside in regards to Native Americans. But still, something stuck with me that day; I don't know if there was a lesson in it, but there is at least a dark irony in a woman dying alone in a hospital bed that holiday with no way of ever seeing her family again only to be discovered by the hospital kitchen worker who ditched her family as soon as she could on Thanksgiving.
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