108 has a full thicket of white hair, a healing hip, and sassiness to burn. She looks deceptively prim, but only because her breathing has deteriorated to the point that she must be sitting straight upright to maintain her oxygen levels. I apologize that my morning assessment interrupts her Batman marathon, but she is almost 90 years old and replies that she is used to the unexpected by now. While I draw labs she pats my hand -as if to comfort me while she struggles to inhale- and reminds me that smoking is the stupidest thing I could ever do, so dear lord, would I please spare myself? I agree, then chart her lung sounds as coarse.
She is not getting worse, but after 16 days she isn't getting better. She doesn't complain much, but I know she's miserable and her mind is always roving outside the walls. When I chart in the room she tells me about her garden, and what she likes to cook, and the places she's traveled. Her dream, she says, is just to go back home and sit by her flowers, and have her children come to visit so she can make them dinner. It is a simple dream, but as she plateaus her hope in it fades. She becomes quieter about what she will be doing in a month, and starts giving me her favorite recipes to try out on my own family. When I mention to her that it takes bravery to be sick, she smiles her slightly mischievous smile. It does, she says, but all of life takes bravery.
She closes her eyes then, takes a rattly breath, and surprises me. "I don't know what comes next for me or if there will be much at all, but I know what has come before, and it was good. I was given the future I dreamed of when I was your age. I don't have to worry about it anymore, because it's permanent for me. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever go home again, or sit in my garden, or make dinner for my children. But I can remember having done it before, and I know that even if it never happens again, I have been able to do it once, and it can never be undone. It is a gift, to have a past like mine."
Planning for the future is really the hope to create a past. It's beautiful the way she says it, but she brushes off my wonder by reminding me that she's had almost 90 years to come up with all her lines. On my break I come back to watch The Dark Knight with her, and she says the Joker is her favorite character, but Batman is her favorite person because "he knows what's up with how people really are." We laugh and disagree, and are glad that we happened to meet for just a tiny while. Lives overlap in time and space, and I do not think it is an accident. She agrees.
"'Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, although these are things which cannot inspire envy.' "
-Viktor Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning
DC comics and brave old souls