I’m back at translating for the hospice. My main translation project, of their website, has been put on hold because my original contact for that project has left the hospice and the new people in charge of the website say they have an entirely different concept in mind for its design. One can only hope that its merely a graphic resdesign. If they start rewriting all their text, everything I translated earlier this year and late last year will have been for nothing.
However, Claudia, one of the nurses there, gives occasional tours of the facilities in English and had asked me last year if I would go over her notes to tidy up the language. I agreed and then never heard from her again. But, while I was dropping the kids off for their summer program last week, I ran into her and we exchanged email addresses and, just like that, I have a new project.
From a translating perspective, it’s not so tough. It’s only four pages, her English is good and, since this is going to be spoken, it’s not as if every comma has to be in the precisely right spot. There are a few medical terms I have to figure out how to say (I can’t believe we say “artificial feeding” in English) and there’s a spot or two where I have no idea what she’s trying to say. Otherwise, it’s all easy.
The tough part is the memories. She’s telling how the patients’ rooms are outfitted (they says ‘guests,’ not ‘patients’), and I’m thrown back into the room with him. She describes the mourning ceremony and I’m right back there last September, laying a candle in a paper flower on the pond. She talks about the rooms for parents and I remember waking up in that bed every morning at 5 a.m., thanks to the combination of an awful mattress, the roar of the first flights of the day coming in overhead to Tegel, and the knowledge that I had to get upstairs to him so he had one of his parents with him for those first few hours of consciousness. He almost never slept past 5/5:30.
Christina and I talked about pictures of him recently and how and when we look at them. I still avoid them, although there’s no escaping him. We all agreed to put up pictures around the house, so he’s there, in just about every room downstairs. But I don’t look through the albums and the photo files on the laptops like Christina and the kids do. It’s a lot to take in.
And maybe I don’t feel the need to do it, because I’m still so wrapped up in the memories of that hospice. I think the killer is that it’s so hard to remember the good times with him. The first memory I usually snap back to is a day in the summer of 2018. I just wanted to read a comic book and had the kids set up in front of the TV so I could. And Colin came over to me to play and all I could think was “Can’t you watch TV so I can read.” Not a great memory. The second one that pops back is him in the hospice, on the last day I remember him opening his eyes. I’m sure I’d spent the bulk of the day with him, reading stories and watching Curious George. After dinner, it was usually my job to get the other two settled down and make sure they weren’t watching CSI Miami or something. Christina would get him ready for sleep during this time. And then we’d meet up in our room afterwards and prepare for the next day of hell.
Except this night, Christina didn’t come down. And I remember getting annoyed, because I just wanted to have five minutes of conversation with my wife and get to sleep before the next round began. And I was convinced she was fussing over him and not letting him drift off, when the text came that he was asking for me. So, I went up and said hi, but I was grouchy about it. And eventually he went to sleep and Christina came down and then I went to bed … and I don’t remember him ever opening his eyes again. And I wish that last memory was happier or at least put me in a better light, but that’s the memory that keeps popping up. Doubly so when I translate what his room was like in the hospice.
It’s hard to get to the hospice on the best of days and that much more so with lockdowns. I missed the men’s group meetings the last two months, so we’ll see how August goes. I am so grateful to everyone there for what they did for us. I just wish I had better go-to memories when I try to think of him. I wish we didn’t live in a world where there’s a virus that could, theoretically, mean one of us lands in a hospice-like situation again (and I know that’s not terribly likely) and all I can remember is the hell it was trying to comfort a kindergartener through all of those medical procedures. Pretty much every day of virus news makes me think about how hellish it was in the hospital and hospice. So maybe I shouldn’t be forcing myself to confront the hospice on such a regular basis. Then again, it helps to think maybe I’m making their jobs a tiny bit easier. That is also something.
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