What Matters is That We Will Be Together

I am a pelvic floor physical therapist who works in Assisted Living Facilities in Florida. I used to treat men on an outpatient basis for prostate cancer. I loved that job, but something tugged at me to help people at another stage in life. I wanted to work with those who couldn't get to such a setting; I wanted to bring a unique perspective to those who might not be able to go out into the community as readily as their younger counterparts.

I treated a man today who is 95 years old. I looked in his medical chart and saw that he'd had his prostate removed due to cancer about five years ago. I entered his room and asked him what had brought him to the place where I was working. "I lost my darling two years ago," he told me. "My wife died and she was my everything." My heart dropped into my pelvis. My brother died several weeks ago, so I knew something about loss. But I still have my husband. 

I asked more of my patient. He had been leaking urine ever since his wife died. But he hadn't suffered full-on incontinence until now. This made me think. I walked with my patient to the bathroom and asked him to sit on the toilet. He needed help lowering his pull-ups and shorts. Yet as he sat there and we spoke of the long, dull and awful stuff of grief, I heard a stream of urine. It was a full stream, a stream which I believe released his bladder completely. 

When he was finished, and his shorts were up, we walked to the Dining Hall. This patient seemed different during our walk. This man stood taller, he spoke with more vigor, and we laughed and met other people along the way. 

I encouraged this man to sit with two other men who live at the Assisted Living Facility for lunch. One had been in Alcoholics Anonymous for 35 years. Another man I am treating for urinary incontinence due to bladder cancer. They embraced my new patient with the kind of masculine energy that makes me smile. 

I sat with these three men as they acclimated themselves to eachother. All of them are in their eighties or older. All of them have suffered loss of some kind. And yet they know the secret to survival that is lost to many people.

They know shame. They know the depravity of age. They know what it is to relinquish all that they once were as people. But they know the peace that accompanies all of such things. Cancer, age, and addiction is something that will find all of us. But the victory of sitting at lunch with fellow comrades? There is no way to gauge the price on that. 

I know this now. Because I have sat with these men. And they know the kind of strength that will stay with me until I am in an Assisted Living Facility and need some people to sit with. I am sure I will find my people because I have already met them. Forty years from now, if we have the great fortune to be alive, we will sit together. We might have trouble using a fork to bring meat to our mouths. We may leak urine. None of these small details will matter. What matters is that we will be together. 

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