Maxine

I was twenty-two and had no idea what I was doing.

I was in nursing school, working as a CNA in San Diego, and I thought I understood something about loss because I had lived through my own. I didn’t. Not this kind. Not the kind where you are standing next to someone else while it’s happening to them.

Then I met Maxine.

She was forty years old. She had ALS and a daughter who still needed her. I helped care for her while the disease took her apart piece by piece. Her strength first. Then her voice. Then the small everyday things that most of us never think about. It didn’t happen fast. It just never stopped.

She had moved into the facility because caring for her at home had become too much. But her family came every single day. They showed up. Every day. They brought her whole life in with them every time they walked through the door.

Her daughter is the one I can’t stop thinking about.

She would stand next to her mom’s bed and do her hair. Slowly. Carefully. Like nothing else in the world was happening. Then she would put lipstick on her. That was it. That was the whole thing. And I would stand there watching and feel something happening inside my chest that I didn’t have words for yet.

It was hard to watch. It was also the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Not beautiful like it was okay. It was not okay. It was heartbreaking. But there was something in those moments that I couldn’t look away from. Love being shown in the smallest possible way, right in the middle of something that was enormous and terrible and unstoppable.

The room was heavy. You felt it the second you walked in. People spoke quietly. Nobody moved too fast. There was a gentleness in how everyone touched her, how they stayed close, how they never really left even when they had to go.

In her last days something changed in her family. I wouldn’t call it acceptance because that word makes it sound easier than it was. It was more like they stopped asking her to keep fighting and started letting her rest. There is a difference between those two things. I know that now. I was beginning to understand it then.

I was there in her final hours.

Her daughter stood at her bedside and did not leave. She adjusted blankets. She rested her hand on her mom’s shoulder. She held on however she could. They told Maxine they loved her. They told her it was okay to go. They made promises to each other out loud, right there in that room, so she could hear them.

I stood in the corner and tried to hold myself together.

I was so new to all of it. Nothing had prepared me for what it actually felt like to be inside a moment like that. I didn’t have the experience or the training or the emotional armor. I just stood there and took it in.

Something changed in me in that room. It wasn’t dramatic. It didn’t happen all at once. But it stayed with me in a way that I never really came back from.

I understood for the first time that being there was the whole job. Not fixing anything. Not changing what was coming. Just staying. Just being a witness while people loved each other through something none of them could stop.

I have thought about Maxine so many times over the years. About her daughter doing her hair. About the lipstick. About the way that room held so much grief and so much love at the exact same time, and how those two things were not fighting each other. They were the same thing.

Some people change you by what they survive. Maxine changed me by what she showed me.

What love looks like when there is nothing left to fix.