I’m trying to make the dead fit on one page. A wheelchair handle is cropped. In the photo of Maude wearing a pink lei at a cookout, the mountainous background gets a buzzcut, a tight green fade. My mouse drags her arm up, and my attention wanders again to the text, the memorial I’m writing.
The woman who died, whose life I reduced to a paragraph and a photo, was not a person I knew well, but she was, importantly, a person.
In my jack-of-all-trades role at the home healthcare agency, I write the newsletters, which since March 2020 increasingly includes more memorials, and I fill in as a scheduler. The pandemic made life harder, and often shorter, for people with severe disabilities. It was difficult, even before the pandemic, to find support staff. Maude once called us up because her aide never showed. No one could cover the shift. Though I wished I could ease her discomfort myself, I wasn’t certified; it would’ve broken a law. A woman sat in waste all night. I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do.
“Maude was delighted to have her long chestnut-colored hair combed,” I write, “and her favorite food was fries.” I don’t write that these needed to be pureed. A focus on Maude’s struggle to swallow, an IQ under 70, a relative whisper of words in her vocabulary, decades in a state psychiatric institution, this has already kept too many from knowing Maude.
So, I write that Maude loved listening to Motown music and taking long walks while keeping an eye out for blue jays, her favorite birds. I write that she enjoyed telling stories and smelling new perfumes, that she didn’t like being rushed or woken early, and that she was loved.
Elyse Giaimo is a grant writer for non-profit organizations. As a member of The Montclair Write Group, she experiments with more creative forms of writing. She has been published in The Citron Review and Ellipsis Zine.
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