The Nurse Behind The New Wing

The Buick With Two Hundred Thousand Miles

My name is Kathleen, and for eleven years I have driven the same Buick out to farmhouses and single-wide trailers and rented duplexes across three counties in southern Minnesota, carrying a black bag and a blood pressure cuff and a stack of paperwork that never quite thins out. I am a home health and hospice nurse. I sit at kitchen tables with people who are dying, and I hold their hands, and I try not to let them see me cry when they finally let go of something they have been holding onto too long, whether that is a grudge or a farm or their own life.

That is real work. Anyone who has done it will tell you so. It is also, for most of my adult life, the only version of my work that my family ever saw.

We live in Byhaven, the county seat of Vester County, a town of just under six thousand people built around a grain elevator, a courthouse square, and a hospital that has served this county since before my grandfather farmed here. Byhaven is the kind of place where everyone knows what everyone else drives, what church they sit in, and roughly how much trouble they got into in high school. It is also the kind of place where a certain version of success gets celebrated loudly, and another version gets folded up small and put away, and I had spent most of my life being the second kind.

I did not mind that, or at least I had convinced myself I did not mind it. I liked my work. I liked the quiet of those kitchen tables, the smell of coffee percolating on somebody’s stove at six in the morning, the particular kind of trust it takes for a stranger to let you into the last months of their life. What I minded, if I am honest, was smaller and pettier than any of that. I minded being introduced at Christmas as “and this is Kathleen, she does the home visit thing,” in the same breath that my brother Scott got introduced as though he had personally invented the internal combustion engine.