Moment of Hilarity

In the unit’s conference room

two nurses and a CNA

retreat to discuss

how to handle

as in, to take in hand

the obvious enmity

between sisters

converging at an old man’s bed

the stress

of his impending death

having shorn

grown women of social niceties.

Only a quick intervention

on the part of a slight

young nurse

separated the siblings

after one sister

decked the other

in the hospice unit lounge—

 

now, concern

for both protocol

and personal feeling

has wrought the room into

a tight communion

disparate in body and status.

The nurse assistant suggests we

learn self-defense,

demonstrates break-

hold, head-crunch, and take-

down

on her younger supervisor

who lies on the floor

laughing and insisting

she’d almost peed her pants,

head nurse rolling

on the hospital carpet in her

sensible shoes, blue scrubs.

 

And I think of a late Updike poem

in which the frank,

humbling ignominy of dying

becomes for a few lines quite funny

realizing the distressed sisters

would not find this amusing though

we’re not laughing at them

but at death, whose head-crunch

and take-down we know

so intimately

it makes us pee our pants.

And because

there is no self-defense from death

we return to our work

renewed.

Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. She has been a hospice volunteer for 12 years. Her latest poetry collection is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, Ekphrasis Review, and many others. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog