The Nurse Who Read to My Grandmother Every Night
She wasn't family. She just had a book and a voice.
My grandmother spent her last six months in a nursing home, and the thing I remember most is not the doctors or the medicine or the slow decline. It is the nurse who read to her every night.
Her name was Kavita, and she was not assigned to my grandmother. She was the night nurse, the one who came on at ten and left at six, and she had a paperback of poetry in her locker that she had owned since she was a student. She read to my grandmother because my grandmother could not sleep, and the poems were the thing that helped.
I stayed late one night and I heard her. I stood in the doorway and I watched her read a poem about the sea, and my grandmother, who had not spoken in days, was listening. Her eyes were closed but her hand was moving, slowly, the way it moved when she was reading to herself.
Kavita did not know I was there. She read for twenty minutes, and when she finished she closed the book and she sat with my grandmother for a while, and then she went to the next room and did it again for another patient who could not sleep.
I never thanked her properly. I wrote her a note and left it at the nurses' station, and she wrote back and said 'she liked the poems' and that was all. The note is in the box with my grandmother's things, and the book of poems is in the same box, the one Kavita left on the bedside table the night my grandmother died.
The poems were not the medicine. The voice was. The voice was the thing that said you are not alone, you are still a person, you are still worth reading to. That is the thing a poem does when it is read out loud to someone who cannot read it themselves.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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